When you have psychological scars, the slightest provocation can make you angry or cause you to feel extremely depressed. It feels as if unpleasant experiences from the past are happening now, and you fight with them in your mind.
You suffer from anxiety that people don’t understand, and you suffer from physical pain such as heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, and sweating. And when you walk down the street or drive a car, you are sure to encounter someone who makes you uncomfortable and you fight with that person in your mind. Somehow, even though you know that this is happening because of psychological scars, you can’t seem to get rid of these symptoms.
That is because psychological scars are chronic latent inflammation.
The inflammation is left behind all the time because it is an autoimmune system. An autoimmune disease is a disease caused by the immune system working on itself.
When you have a psychological scar and you blame your parents or get angry at the abuser, you are doing this to suppress the autoimmune system and reduce inflammation by releasing stress hormones through anger.
But the immune system has worked on the psychological scar, which is chronic latent inflammation, and it provokes an excessive response and attacks.
The immune system, which is essentially responsible for eliminating foreign substances such as bacteria and viruses, overreacts and attacks even normal cells, making the inflammation worse, and the person suffers from palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, and other unpleasant physical symptoms that no one understands.
Psychological scars become chronic inflammation because we blame and punish ourselves.
Another way to describe overreacting and attacking the normal cells and tissues of the self is that you blame and attack yourself for the event that led to the psychological scar.
I believe that people with psychological scars are aware that they are punishing themselves by blaming themselves. They always feel sorry for what they did, regret it, and wonder, “Why did I do that?” and can’t stop blaming themselves, are properly aware of the symptoms.
When a victim of violence is told by the therapist, “It’s not your fault,” the victim says, “I know that,” but in their mind they think to the therapist, “You can’t possibly understand how I feel. The reason they think, “You can’t understand my feelings,” is because they think that the therapist can’t understand how much they are blaming themselves and how much they are suffering.
When the therapist tells them again, “It’s not your fault,” they lose their temper and say, “I know that.” Because they know that even if they are told that, they cannot stop blaming themselves. And when the therapist repeats, “It’s not your fault,” they say, “I’ve told you many times that I know that! You are persistent!” He gets angry. They feel the pain of blaming and attacking themselves, saying, “It’s my fault.
Only when they feel the pain do they become aware that they are really blaming and hurting themselves. Then, when the therapist says to them again, “It’s not your fault,” they realize, “Oh, I was really blaming and hurting myself!”
What is happening is that you know that you are blaming yourself and hurting yourself because of the psychological scar, and you know that. But when peripheral immune cells become active due to chronic latent inflammation, cognitive function is impaired and apraxia is occurring, so you can’t properly recognize that you are blaming yourself.
In addition, the cognitive decline also causes memory impairment, so the cause of the self-blame is lost.
Therefore, even if they think they are blaming themselves, they do not know that they are blaming the part of their psychological scar, chronic latent inflammation, and they are unable to recognize the pain, so they cannot stop blaming themselves.
The reason they think, “I know I’m blaming myself,” is not because they don’t want to admit their psychological scars, but because their cognitive functions are impaired and they are unable to properly recognize it.
You just need to realize that you are not aware that you are blaming yourself because your cognitive function is impaired due to autoimmunity.
You just need to realize that this is happening because your autoimmunity is attacking your psychological scars.
When you realize that it is your autoimmunity that is causing you to blame yourself for not being able to control various symptoms such as anger, while saying, “I know that,” your autoimmunity will subside.
When you realize that it is also because of your autoimmunity that you blame yourself for not being aware of your psychological scars, you stop blaming yourself and your autoimmunity becomes quieter.
Just by noticing, the autoimmunity becomes calmed down and the inflammation is cured.