Listen instead:
There’s a lot to say about healing, disease, and Chinese medicine in particular. They’re big concepts with lots of nuance.
Despite the depth and breadth, sometimes we, the Huwes, find ourselves saying the same things over and over again. That’s one of the reasons for these essays — to have a place to point current clients, or to remind ourselves how we said it that one time in the way we liked.
Anyway, one such repeated sentence follows: Disease is the spilling over of all our unmet needs.
We can think of this in literal physical terms — the coronary arteries need more space, the brain needs more serotonin, the gut needs more acidophilus — and we can think of it in literal emotional terms — the heart needs more love, the brain needs more stimulation, the gut needs more trust.
Chinese medicine isn’t going to quibble over what’s physical and what’s emotional, chiefly because it’s not often an incredibly meaningful distinction. People waste a lot of time there, trying to separate interdependent factors into isolation, reallocating our energy into blame and categorization. Why bother?
If you’re still with me, let’s shift this to another angle. What we’ve noticed is that these unmet needs are — usually for a pretty long time — absorbed, managed, and accommodated by the body/mind. And I’d like to just pause here and say, Well done, adaptive and fabulous bodies/minds! After a while, though, these accommodations can cave. The proverbial soil can absorb no longer, and accommodation spills over into disease.
When we heal, we seek to meet those underlying unmet needs where we find them, and — hopefully — to resolve the imbalance that led to their existence in the first place. With that comes many things, two of which — fear and shame — we’re going to normalize today.
If you feel some fear and shame when you’re healing from something, don’t worry! Fear and shame can be normal parts of healing. That might sound terrible and not at all encouraging, but knowing what to expect can help these undesirable feelings do what they need to do, and move along.
Fear and Shame (and Probably Loathing) in Healing
Here in the US — and in lots of other places on planet Earth, besides — we have an addiction to productivity at the cost of… well… everything? We’re currently sacrificing our children, ourselves, each other, and piddly incidental things like soil, air, and water on the altar of productivity. And we’re calling it freedom. In the words of Wordsworth, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. If we think this doesn’t affect our physiology and psychology, we’re probably not reading this essay.
It will likely not shock you to know that US anxiety levels are through the roof. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 2022 that global incidences of anxiety and depression have increased by 25%. And that’s simply COVID-specific.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) cite a 10-year study of anxiety trends in US young adults, describing the increase as “rapid.” This rapidly increasing anxiety was from 2008–2018, so… need I say, before COVID. Meaning that anxiety levels were already on the rise, and then COVID increased them worldwide by 25%.
Also, US access to healthcare, including mental health services, remains woefully inadequate, though more accessible thanks to the Health Insurance Marketplace. But there seems to be a tacit national ethos that illness should be repressed, suppressed, and powered through so we can get back to work.
So, the situation is impossible. It makes us sick, and then we feel like failures for getting sick. It’s hard enough to admit that we have needs; to admit that we have unmet needs that have made us sick can feel tantamount to unconstitutional.
I’m going to call it: It’s weird. But it makes perfect sense.
There’s so much societal shame around illness, disability, mental torment, physical imperfection, cellulite, physiology in general, and stomach flus that it boggles the mind. We’re collectively sleep-deprived, lacking vital nutrition, and overworked. No wonder we don’t feel good. And on top of it, we feel bad that we feel bad. We should1 be able to power through. We should be able to blah blah blah. It’s a whole lot of burden and noise, and guzzling energy drinks or booze or vitamin water doesn’t make it stop.
Healing means meeting our unmet needs. Meeting our unmet needs means facing ourselves, our disappointments, and our limitations. That can be, in a word, fuh-reaky.
Facing Fear
I’m going to paint a picture here, and I request that you hold it loosely. Let’s say healing is like filling holes. To adequately fill the hole, you can’t just throw any old item or trash in there. It needs to fit. If you have type 2 diabetes, it’s inadequate to fill yourself with oatmeal creme pies, tasty though they may be. You get the idea.
So it’s kind of like what Nietzsche said about looking into the abyss. You look in there, and you’ll answer yourself back. And sometimes, that’s great. But this essay isn’t about those times. This essay is about the times you freak yourself out.
In those times, you’ll think very intelligent, cogent, horrifying thoughts about the very particular ways in which whatever is going badly could get worse. And other times, your holey self will feel like a sinkhole, and you’ll resume the shame spiral that’s so trained into you that you mistake it for your double-helixed DNA. It’s not! It’s not DNA. It’s bologna.
What is this fear about? Is it nonsense? Should it be shut down? Shouldn’t you just get back to work?
We have a working theory. There is something primordial and survival-based going on during healing. I don’t know if it has a name, or if it is yet to be “discovered,” but it’s a certain state of survival that can feel scary. This happens even when we don’t have a strong emotional charge connected to the thing we’re healing from.
It’s the act of healing that I’m talking about. It can be as major as a brain injury or as minor and non-life-threatening as an infected splinter. It doesn’t mean you’re a disaster; it doesn’t mean you should shut this down because you’re no good at it. It doesn’t mean it will never get better. It means you’re figuring out new ways to live. And that feels weird.
Shushing Survivor Shame
It’s important to short-circuit the shame spiral whenever it threatens your healing. This is not the same as berating yourself or denying the shame. It just means learning to recognize that shame thing for what it is, regardless of how it shows up. It means trusting that no matter how many fake mustaches it puts on, it’s still bologna.
There’s another aspect to this shame piece that I want to touch on. It’s a type of survivor’s guilt that says, Nope. You don’t get to escape this suffering. You don’t get to heal. You don’t get to blah blah blah. Or, put another way, Who am I to be happy when there is so much suffering in the world? How can I possibly heal this aspect of my life and leave my fill-in-the-blank?
I’m not the first to talk about this, and it takes many forms. For more information I refer you to the inimitable Mary Oliver, and encourage you “to save the only life that you could save.” But you can also drop ladders and keys wherever you go.
by Mary Beth Huwe
These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
- If, somehow, no one has ever told you to stop shoulding all over yourself, allow me. Stop shoulding all over yourself. ↩︎