Gabor Maté is one of the most inspiring and wise professionals for me when it’s about trauma and its effects on cultural and individual health/condition. His wisdom and knowledge were a light shining through the darkness of my subconscious while processing and releasing childhood and epigenetic trauma. In the video below he refers especially to autoimmune disease (multiple sclerosis) and breast cancer.
My own life led me temporarily through the experience of autoimmune condition, severe neurological disorders, culminating in significant disability, which was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis (MS) in late 2017. When it suddenly started in 2015 I was not expecting it to be MS, but Guillain-Barré-Syndrome or something akin as there had never been even the slightest signs of MS all of the years before, and I thought I was already too old for developing MS. It all began after I woke up one morning from a dream, heavily sobbing. I met myself in there as a 14yo girl; she sat with her back to me, in a dark cave facing the wall.
When I was 14 I just wanted to be dead, escaping from a life that felt just like a heavy dark paralyzing hell. While I lived through my childhood in an often dissociated state of trauma/freeze response, in my teenage years the flight impulse kicked in. I ran away from home, became drawn to alcohol and all kinds of drugs, between sensation seeking and suicidal tendencies.
That morning when I woke up from that dream, feeling a numbness creeping up my legs and stopping near my navel, I knew that something was emerging from the abyss of the subconscious that I would no longer be able to escape. Actually, from that moment on, I had trouble walking and was no longer able to run. It felt as if all the numbing I had experienced in my life was now becoming present in my body. The previous paradigm ceased to function or rather, I ceased to function in the former paradigm.
After googling what it could be I just found some creepy neurological diseases which were all pretty mysterious and supposed to be incurable but not lethal. I read a lot about the odyssey of fear people went through with such conditions, trying to find possible diagnosis and prognosis, control amidst the fear of the unknown, all not very encouraging. So I intuitively decided not to follow the “path of fear” but to be with whatever is, awake and present, and explore and face whatever it might reveal to me. “Let’s get a new experience.”
My first intuition was that it is trauma-related, that the imprints of my childhood and even epigenetics have started to somatize and surface, to be seen, acknowledged, understood, and transformed. As most of my childhood trauma was connected to attachment/bonding/relationship (I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family, full of past WW2 trauma) I felt that there will be needed someone to activate all these imprints, that I would not be able to transcend them on my own. They asked to be felt, to be experienced, to be seen, to be understood, to be illuminated, the end of avoidance.
Since my childhood I became easily dissociated from my body, I often wasn’t able to feel pain or joy and I became a sensation seeker, while my senses paradoxically easily became overwhelmed by sensation. I intoxicated myself to get a handle on social anxiety and all kinds of anxiety issues, and this numbness was the foundation upon which many emotional dramas and obsessions grew that made me feel alive. I early realized that it was a false aliveness, it was mainly survival, and my feelings were often not genuine but manipulative especially when I was in the maelstrom of anxiety. However, in my younger years of intoxication, this awareness couldn’t stand against the dark, tremendous forces of the subconscious.
And then the time seemed to have come to face the dark depth of the very basement and reveal and illuminate the conditioning that created a survival mechanism, a personality. So I found myself in a relationship as intense as it was toxic and obsessive, and during that time my physical condition deteriorated rapidly. I was in a continuous state of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), feeling the terror of abandonment, which was not easy for the other person to bear, being severely traumatized himself. During that time, I experienced violent episodes of the condition that was later diagnosed as MS. My right eye was temporarily blind, I temporarily had a paralyzed left arm that was completely useless, and my ability to walk steadily decreased. These flare-ups were always associated with severe PTSD episodes. After a debilitating period of separation, I was finally severely disabled and unable to leave my apartment for several months. During this time, everything that I was collapsed. All the memorized stories from the past that I believed to be true, All the memorized stories from the past that I believed to be true, all the constructed self-images, all the illusionary dreams. They just imploded like a supernova. What came then cannot be fathomed by words, it was a profound awakening that opened the gates to incredible bliss and understanding, beyond the merely intellectual, mundane and personal. What I was became detached and disidentified from the tory, from experience. There was a peace arising from „within“ that was independent of any external sensation and appearance, independent from attachments, be they things, events, people, and even the body.
In this state of satori, after being in a kind of shut down for months due to serious physical disability, I finally went to a doctor to rule out that I had some fatal disease like a brain tumor, as my appearance must have been quite scary.
The MRI scans revealed many inflammation lesions in the CNS, along the spinal cord and in the brain. My central nervous system was a battlefield, burn spots (conflicts) everywhere. The diagnosis was a fairly impersonal experience. I was already pretty familiar with the condition during the 2.5 years before, I had already reached ground zero, there wasn’t much below that. And in a very strange way, I had no doubt that as I worked on resolving the traumatic imprints, my physical condition would come back into balance. I refused long-term conventional “therapy” that did not address the roots and had no prospect of healing, but was full of possible side effects. I worked on the past and epigenetic trauma, which was/is a really intense exploration. I was learning to walk from scratch again, without significant help. Solitude was the state where I found reconnection, grounding and centering. I had to find a unique balance, a unique pace, disconnected from the agenda-driven world chasing success. In solitude, I found trust in the process, trust in my body. Overcoming the notion that something in me – in this case, my immune system – had turned into an enemy, but was instead a messenger for something I couldn’t see. Embracing the unknown, letting go of the idea of an already unpredictable future but instead having the confidence that the present moment holds all the aliveness to unfold. Surrender. To give up the fight for survival. This vibrancy is in all that is, it cannot be touched by judgment, by concepts, by thoughts, by fear, by control, by decay, it is profoundly intangible. Even in dying there is vividness. Vibrancy knows no boundaries. It is all it.
Now, almost three years later, it seems that I have overcome the process of (chronic) inflammation named MS. Currently, I walk up to three kilometers a day, and still in remission, and the damage done to the nervous system is still in recovery. There is a benevolent life force that drives me now, that has illuminated the subconscious forces, and reaches far beyond limited personal willpower.
Perhaps there is no cure for these so-called “incurable” diseases, because there is no cure by external methods, in the world of separation and illusion. The external is likely more of symbolic nature. Healing may lie “within”, in the transcendence of separation, in taking back and integrating what the subconscious has revealed through the somatizing process in the body. Integration is cure, reconciliation is cure, peace is cure, understanding (love) is cure.