The mere thought of having to go to work with an unpleasant person at work can cause stomach aches and nausea. Mental stress causes physical symptoms. And the more you worry about those physical symptoms, the worse they can get and the more you can’t go to work. For some people, stress can make their back hurt so much that they can’t move.
Some medical school professors have written in their books that back pain is anger (Dr. John E. Sarno’s TMS (tension myositis syndrome) theory). In short, stress causes your autoimmunity to go haywire and attack normal cells as the enemy, resulting in stomach aches and back pain. And the more you worry about the pain, the more your autoimmunity will continue to attack that area as an enemy, making the inflammation worse.
In the counseling world, we sometimes view this as anger being converted into physical symptoms. If you suppress your anger and try not to let it out, the suppressed anger becomes pain in the stomach, back, etc. Then, when we acknowledge the feelings we are suppressing and learn to express them appropriately, the pain that was there before may disappear.
Interestingly, when an adult is experiencing physical symptoms, the relationship between stress and physical symptoms is immediately connected, saying, “Stomach pain is caused by inflammation from stress at work. However, when a child has physical symptoms, people suspect that the child is lying, saying that the child is faking physical symptoms because he/she does not want to go to school.
Certainly children can get headaches or stomachaches when they don’t want to go to school. That is happening because of school stress, just like adults, but if a child complains about it, fraud is suspected first. If the physical symptoms are caused by school stress, the child has difficulty explaining what is causing the stress in a way that adults can understand. When you explain it to them, they will interpret it as “being spoiled” or “trying to make an easy choice by turning away from reality.
When a child is subjected to the emotional trauma of being a “lying child” because of the selfish interpretations of the adults around them, it becomes a latent inflammation. Normally, animals have an automatic choice to fight or flee when they are stressed. But if latent inflammation occurs as a result of psychological trauma, peripheral immune cells become active when stressed and attack normal cells as if they were the enemy. Because they attack normal cells that feel stress as an enemy, they mistake the stress they feel as a lie or falsehood that they created (as written in the narrative).
The inability to properly cope with stress then becomes a physical symptom. Because peripheral immune cells become active and attack normal cells with latent inflammation, which is a psychological wound of “lying child” against the stress of physical symptoms, “this symptom may also be a lie that I am creating” and without properly coping with stress, the autoimmune system becomes increasingly active with “false symptoms” and normal cells are seen as the enemy and attacked. The symptoms become more and more severe due to inflammation.
This psychological trauma can be created in situations where the child is unable to communicate with his or her caregivers. If the child is more intelligent than the caregiver, there is a higher probability that the caregiver will make the judgment that the child is telling a lie in response to what the child is telling (a narrative). This is because the caregiver will make a short-cut judgment that what the caregiver does not understand is a lie.
Then when the child enters group life, peripheral immune cells are activated from the latent inflammation of being a “lying child,” and stress becomes a physical symptom because the child is unable to feel stress appropriately. But it is also considered a lie by those around them, and more and more autoimmunity runs amok, attacking normal cells that feel stress as the enemy. When they cannot feel stress properly, they cannot avoid stressful situations, and a vicious cycle occurs in which stress becomes more and more a physical symptom.
Incidentally, even in group life, the more intelligent you are, the more you are treated as a liar due to the difference in intelligence between you and those around you, and in some cases this also becomes a psychological trauma. If you suffer from physical symptoms, the autoimmune outburst can be calmed down if you realize that the autoimmune system is attacking normal cells as enemies. Simply realizing that you have blamed yourself for the “lying child” inflammation and attacked the areas of your body that are properly stressed will calm your autoimmunity and allow you to respond appropriately to stress.
When you have this “lying child” inflammation, you may not be able to understand what the other person is saying or doing at all because of inconsistencies or little lies in their words or actions. It is because of this “lying child” inflammation that a slight contradiction in the other person’s speech makes it impossible to understand even the simplest things at all. Furthermore, when we become extremely angry and want to lash out at the other person for contradicting us or for lying to us, it is because our self-immunity has gone out of control and we consider even those who are not our enemies to be enemies.
When you realize that your autoimmunity is out of control due to the inflammation of the “lying child” when you feel such anger, your autoimmunity stops running out of control, you can feel stress appropriately, and your true sense of self will return.