What happens to our understanding of suffering once we put the label of psychosomatic on it?
“Psychosomatic” can be clinically useful. It can describe very real physical symptoms that are influenced or generated by psychological processes. But in conversation, it can become almost a dismissal disguised as an explanation.
As though we may locate the problem somewhere less real: not the body, therefore not quite real. But, the psyche isn't somehow outside the body.
Fear changes heart rate.
Chronic stress changes sleep, digestion, immune function and muscle tension.
Grief can alter appetite and energy.
Hyper-vigilance changes how we perceive pain.
Trauma can leave patterns of activation in the nervous system.
Persistent physical symptoms can profoundly alter mood, cognition and behaviour.
There isn't really a clean border between psychological and physiological. There is a living organism.
How much do we put our bodies through? Not only dramatic things like trauma or illness.
We sit for ten hours because there is work to finish.
We don't sleep because something is more important.
We override hunger.
We ignore exhaustion.
We clench our jaw through meetings.
We live in environments where our nervous system is perpetually anticipating something.
We remain in relationships or workplaces that make us contract.
We tell ourselves I'm fine while our body is producing an increasingly elaborate vocabulary of no, you're not.
And then, when the body finally speaks loudly enough, we sometimes call it psychosomatic.
The question shouldn't be: “Is this symptom physical or psychological?” but: “What has this body been asked to carry?”
Our bodies aren't inventing symptoms when the mind cannot cope. They are recording experiences.
The body indeed embodies the cumulative effects of how we live, what we suppress, what we endure, what we fear, what we repeatedly override.
Psychosomatic should never become the new version of “it's all in your head.” The fact that something is influenced by the mind does not make it imaginary.
The body doesn't need our permission to tell the truth about how we live.
And sometimes what we call a symptom is the first thing in our lives that has stopped cooperating with the fiction that we are okay.
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