Does The Body Keep Score?

Might some of your physical aliments be connected to your past or present emotions?

An angry red rash

A woman I know who lost her husband several years ago to a heart attack was finally ready to date again.

She met a man she really liked.

Everything went swimmingly, she thought, until her new companion confessed that he wanted to be with someone younger.

The same week they had that “Dear Jane” conversation, she broke out into an angry red rash all over her face.

Her doctor diagnosed her with “contact dermatitis” and prescribed a topical steroid.

Cervical cancer

My colleague’s patient was diagnosed with cervical cancer, as I describe in this post.

A young woman in a serious relationship, she desperately wanted to have children.

But the doctors said she would have to have a complete hysterectomy to keep the cervical cancer from spreading.

A stalled labor

A friend of mine was having her first baby. She’d decided to have a home birth.

She was laboring for hours, with the help of her husband and two experienced, loving, and competent midwives.

But her labor, after more than 20 hours of intense contractions, stalled.

She just wasn’t dilating.

Allopathic (conventional) medicine versus alternative healing

Conventional medicine assumes that when a human has a disease or a health aliment, it can and should be treated with a medication, a medical device like a pacemaker, or a different modern intervention (like knee surgery).

In many cases, in my experience anyway, this assumption is true.

Hip replacement surgery for the win

For example, my friend Marilynn’s life improved exponentially when she had a hip replacement. She had been afraid to have the surgery.

When I saw her walking without a cane, briskly, Marilynn told me her only regret was not having done the hip surgery sooner.

But modern allopathic medicine also fails us, often and spectacularly.

It’s very hard to get accurate information about the necessity, efficacy, and safety of many allopathic practices.

From episiotomies (which I wrote about several years ago for The New York Times) to Miralax, to say nothing of pain medicine, childhood vaccinations, or mRNA technology, we are often duped into thinking the allopathic way is the best or only option when it is clearly not.

Time and time again.

Exaggerated efficacy

As Chris Wark points out in his book, Chris Beat Cancer, the pharmaceutical industry and the allopathic doctors who are their minions exaggerate or even manipulate success rates to make cancer treatments like chemotherapy and life expectancy outcomes look much more effective than they are.

Most people don’t realize that many “life-saving” medications that doctors prescribe can actually prolong an illness that the body would have cleared by itself, if given the rest and nutrients needed to do so.

Present company excluded because you’re here reading this post, but most of us also don’t know that there are often herbal remedies that work as well as—or even better than—synthetic pharmaceutic drugs.

White willow bark tea for headaches, for instance.

Or grapefruit seed extract for intractable yeast infections.

Or goldenseal for bacterial infections like infectious diarrhea.

The body-mind connection

Then there’s the body-mind connection, another key element to human health that’s often overlooked or even completely dismissed by conventional doctors.

Sure, most conventional health care providers pay lip service to the “placebo effect.”

As this team of medical researchers explained in a 2023 article: “The placebo effect is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs when a sham medical intervention causes improvement in a patient's condition because of the factors associated with the patient's perception of the intervention. Examples of placebo interventions include sugar pills, saline injections, and therapeutic rituals.”

Many studies have shown that the placebo effect can be as powerful as the conventional medical treatment. Which is why I find myself wondering which modality is actually the “sham…”

The rash disappeared on its own

Since the topical steroid wasn’t working, the widow whose lover told her he wanted someone younger decided to try something different.

She went to a therapist who does energy work and biodecoding.

This healer talked to her about how the face is the first thing another person sees when they look at you, which led her to share how insecure she felt about dating again after losing her husband, and how painful being rejected was.

Two days after their session, the rash that had been plaguing her for weeks was gone.

No need for a hysterectomy

The young woman with cervical cancer went to a naturopathic physician. He proposed they talk through what was going on in her life.

She shared that she had a boyfriend who didn’t want children. He used his penis like a battering ram to pound away at her vagina during sexual intercourse, an activity that was neither satisfying nor pleasurable for her. And she felt completely stuck in her relationship with him and her life.

The naturopath realized that her boyfriend had been battering the place in her body where the cancerous cells had started to grow, and told her so.

This was a revelation to her.

She broke up with that boyfriend. And the cancer that had been growing in her cervix? It shrunk and disappeared without treatment. She did not need a hysterectomy.

(She did have a baby, though, a few years later.)

Talking to herself and the baby

And my friend whose labor stalled after twenty hours? There was nothing physically wrong with her and her baby was tolerating the contractions just fine.

So the homebirth midwife suggested she spend some time alone, in quiet meditation, talking to herself and to the baby.

Thinking about it later, my friend realized that psychologically she wasn’t quite ready to give birth.

She spent the better part of an hour alone, and got deeply centered.

She reminded herself how much she wanted this baby. She told herself she would be a good mother. She also connected—in her mind—with her mother and her mother’s mother and all the women in her family who came before her.

She talked to the baby. She told the baby she couldn’t wait to meet her, that she could come out now, that all was well and the world was safe, and that she, her mother, would be there to protect and nurture her.

That time in quiet meditation, during which she moaned and breathed through contractions on her own, did the trick.

When Shelli came back into the living room, the midwife was delighted to find that she was fully dilated.

Her baby was born after just a few pushes: a healthy baby boy.

If she’d been birthing in the hospital, in an allopathic system of “care,” my friend’s birth would likely have ended with a vacuum extraction, a forceps delivery, or a C-section.

She didn’t need any of these.

She just needed to acknowledge her fears about becoming a mother and reassure herself and the baby that she could feel the fear—they both could—and do it anyway.

I am not sure I fully understand how but I do think the body keeps score. Our body stores our suppressed emotions and experiences and then expresses them back to us in a language that our conscious selves doesn’t understand.

A talk about biodecoding on Sunday, November 3, 2024

If these ideas intrigue you (or infuriate you) and you want to learn more and talk about them, please join us for a talk with an internationally known practitioner of biodecoding this Sunday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Register for Boaz Zafrir’s talk ==» here «==. Once you click on that page, scroll down for the deets.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Love,
Jennifer