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Chronic Symptoms are a Gift

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Chronic Symptoms Are a Gift

If you have chronic symptoms and want help in letting them lead you to the deeper work of addressing your deeper issues, Coach Kyle is accepting new clients. Click below to book your free discovery session.




Transcript:

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Esoteric Wellness Blog. I'm your host, Coach Kyle, and I've been on a bit of a short hiatus from this for a couple of weeks. We took a trip out of state to visit some family and that was really nice, so I took some time away from everything that I do. That was a nice little break and then just time spent getting caught back up on everything. So back at it now, should be on a more regular release schedule after this.


So, let's jump back into it. Today I wanted to talk about chronic symptoms, you know, and most of the coaching work I do now is centered around some kind of chronic symptom, helping people through the magic of neuroplasticity, which is not magic, it's science, but it's amazingly powerful through just rewiring our brain, getting rid of chronic symptoms. And it's not just neuroplasticity, it's also a lot of which we'll talk more about today but working through the issues in our lives that are ultimately at the root of our chronic symptoms.

So chronic symptoms. We look at these kinds of symptoms in the wrong way in the modern world today, especially within the medical paradigm. I like to say, and I don't remember who said this or where I heard it, so I can't give credit. I did not come up with it, but looking at symptoms as if they're a gift. Symptoms are a gift. And I can guarantee a lot of you listening to this heard me say symptoms are a gift and you had some form of negative reaction. "What? This guy's nuts. You're crazy. That's not true at all. They're a horrible, horrible thing that no one wants to experience." But symptoms are a gift in the sense that they're trying to tell us something, and it's really what the purpose of a symptom is. It's there to let us know something isn't working, something's gone awry, something's out of balance, and we need to do something to correct it. And when we do, the symptom goes away.


But that's not the perspective we have for the most part. Except for maybe a few rare exceptions. We tend to look at symptoms today as a problem, as this annoying thing that we need to fix, and we need to make go away. We don't see it as a messenger. We don't see it as a sign of some deeper issue. We see the symptom itself as the issue, and we need to fix it. But as you can imagine, if you look at symptoms as a sign of a deeper issue and we just strive to fix the symptom, we never get to that deeper issue. The root cause is never addressed and that, very often, I see it on a daily basis. It just leads to other symptoms, new symptoms.


So, what's the problem with the way we currently look at symptoms? If you look at the rates of chronic disease, chronic symptoms, they're through the roof right now and they're continuing to escalate. And it's really because our modern healthcare system, as amazing as it is, is not prepared to deal with these kinds of things. The average face time you get one-on-one with your primary care doctor is less than 10 minutes per appointment. That is not enough time to get to that deeper issue. That's often not apparent. It's not obvious what that issue is. So, you get prescribed a drug or a treatment to manage or cover up or fix that symptom. But again, that root issue, that deeper issue is still there. So, either that original symptom just continues to progress and get worse, or your body and brain find some other way to alert you to let you know that there's something wrong and you go through the same process again. All the while there's this deeper issue or issues that aren't even being looked at, aren't being addressed and the cycle just carries on.


So, what kinds of symptoms am I talking about here? Well, the sky is the limit really. It's amazing to me how many symptoms fit this description, and I would argue maybe the science isn't fully there yet to demonstrate definitively that all these kinds of symptoms are possibly the same thing we're talking about. But at this point, I'm assuming everything is, or at least can be exacerbated or made worse by what we're talking about, by these deeper issues.


So chronic disease is something that's getting a lot of attention right now, a lot of focus, but in the wrong way, I would argue, because we're not talking about the deeper issues for the most part. I'm talking about some of them. But to use a really common one right now, diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic condition, OK. It's made up of a set of symptoms or multiple symptoms, what we would call diabetes, but that main deeper issue with diabetes is diet and lifestyle. And we know if you address those deeper issues, diabetes is reversible. It'll go away. We can fix that. So that set of symptoms we've given a diagnosis to is a gift. It's letting you know that what you're doing isn't working. It's causing problems.


Now, medicine is starting to learn if we really do address diet and lifestyle with diabetes, we can fix it, we can cure it. But there for a long time and still in a big way, the focus is just management of the symptoms with drugs and other things. But again, we're not addressing those deeper issues of helping people address their diet, address their lifestyle to something that's healthier and it's more conducive to managing their body well. And when you do that, you don't have symptoms like that.


Other things like chronic pain, which I work around a lot, you know where diabetic symptoms are more seemingly physical in the body. It's a result of damage being caused by things not working right, things out of balance. Pain is a little different in that pain is a sensation created by the brain. There are physical changes that occur with chronic pain in the body, the nervous system, and the brain, but it's a little more elusive because it's not a result of some kind of damage. It's just more of a message, if you will. This is a symptom that is strictly a message. Pain is a message, a protective message. It can be other things like, you know, really any of these chronic diseases and diabetes too. Like, I'll go back to that for a second. It's been shown pretty definitively that other factors affect your diabetic symptoms to a great deal, like your mental health, for example, how well you're managing emotions and anxiety and things like that can make those symptoms worse and make that damage worse and make things farther out of balance.


Now, to kind of demonstrate what I'm talking about, getting to these deeper issues, I don't just want to rant about the problems of healthcare. I think it's a problem that healthcare is not set up to solve. I think we need other systems, other support systems outside of healthcare, like health coaches, like working with people that can help people get to these deeper issues and not just identify them, but also work on them, work to improve them. And that takes a lot of different skill set and a lot more time face to face. When I work with a client and identifying what these deeper issues are and then working on them, that's hours upon hours of time in session together to get there. You're not going to have any of that happen in less than 10 minutes with a doctor. It's just not possible. So, we need to rethink how we're doing that. And I think it could be done within the healthcare environment, yeah, probably. But I think a lot of drastic changes would need to happen. I think it might be a faster option to just kind of set this stuff outside of healthcare, but that's a whole other issue.


Anyway, so some examples of what I'm talking about. I'll use real-world, real-life examples I've seen in actual clients I've worked with. Sometimes, like I said, it's obvious, it's maybe so symbolic, it's so obvious that the deeper issue is that maybe it's a healthy dose of willful ignorance as well, just not wanting to acknowledge it or deal with it. I had a client who originally came to me with chronic pain in their neck, base of the head and into their shoulders. It was there every day, all day long. They'd been to the doctor. They ruled out any structural issue. There's nothing wrong in the body for the pain to be there. There was just this persistent pain. And, you know, I kind of spotted it in our first session. It came up, but the coaching process is not really my job to point everything out to someone, but to help them arrive at the understanding on their own. But it became clear that they were having a lot of marital issues in their marriage with their husband, and they weren't really addressing that. It was kind of this big looming problem in their life that they weren't taking any steps to work through. So, I saw that again right away, but after maybe a month or two of discussion, working on practices and tools she can use to address the neuroplasticity element, we always arrive at that deeper issue, right? And she was describing the state of things in her marriage. And she said it just feels like I have this immense weight on my shoulders.


All the time with this big problem, my nose there, I can't get away from, but I'm just terrified to do anything about it. And as she was saying that the light bulb came on like, oh, it feels like there's an immense weight on my shoulders. The pain is in my shoulders and neck and that right there, it clicked. It's like, oh, that's what it's trying to tell me.


So again, in this example, it's kind of more symbolic, it's more obvious, it's more connected directly to the symptom itself. And I'll go through another example where it's not so obvious. But anyway, this client, she took steps to start addressing that problem. Her and her husband separated and she was taking steps to work through that. We stopped working together before. I don't know how it eventually resolved, but she was doing something about it was the important thing. And very interestingly and kind of humorously, as soon as she did that, within a week of taking those first steps, her neck and shoulder pain disappeared, went away just like that. But the humorous part is that she then developed a pain in the buttocks area and very lower back, and she made the joke herself. I was thinking it but wasn't going to say it. But she's like, it's gone from this immense weight on my shoulders. I took steps to deal with it. Now it's just a pain in my ass quite literally. And I'm sure as she continued to address it, that pain went away as well.


But the important thing here is that once you come to that level of understanding, like this symptom is here because of this deeper issue that I need to work through, the symptom itself becomes less scary. I'm not afraid of that symptom. The symptom isn't something else that's broken, it's a message telling me I need to do something. And it removes so much of the unknown, the fear, the uncertainty. And it's like, all right, I know what I need to do. It's not easy. I may not have all the answers, but I know the direction I need to go. And sometimes that's all it takes to eliminate a symptom. Sometimes there's more work to do with neuroplasticity when, if you have a symptom for a long time, the brain can kind of get stuck in that and we have to use some of the neuroplasticity work to get that unstuck, but the deeper issue is always a big part of this.


The other example that comes to mind that's far less symbolic and obvious. Let's see. I had a client come to me. She had severe IBS, constipation, pelvic pain, just a lot of pain down there, right? And she'd been to the doctor, seen every specialist she could find. Nobody could find a real problem or a direct cause for all these symptoms. The IBS constipation was causing some problems in the intestines, it was causing some other symptoms. But as far as what is setting all this in motion, there was no obvious answer.


So, after spending many hours with this individual, I helped her come to the realization. So, this person had been through a lot of trauma in their past, even back into childhood. They were very lonely. They didn't have a support system in their lives. They didn't have any friends, any real family to rely on. They were extremely lonely and much of their past traumatic experiences were inflicted on her by close family and close trusted friends. So, she had kind of this internal conflict going on where the one thing she so desperately craved and needed, social connection, her protective brain was terrified of because social connection meant danger in the past, and it was this internal conflict that she was unable to work through that was really the deeper issue driving her symptoms.


So, once she came to that understanding, again, a lot of that fear on the symptoms themselves goes away. They're still not comfortable. They still hurt, but they're no longer some mysterious thing. We don't know why it's there. Is my body falling apart? Am I crazy? No, it's directly tied to this deeper issue I'm facing. So, without, you know, she could then start to incorporate some social connection in her life in a gentle, slow-paced, controlled way. So that she could teach her brain that once again, social connection wasn't a big threat to be afraid of. And through many months of effort and work, symptoms greatly subsided. There were still flare-ups here and there, but she had more social connection in her life. She had made some friends; she was developing a support system around her.


There's still a lot of work to do there, obviously, but the point I'm making here is that until we listen, we pay attention to our symptoms in this way and get to those deeper issues that it's trying to tell us, it's trying to make us aware of. This is how we resolve these chronic symptoms. This is how we improve our lives. This is how we improve ourselves. The road signs are there, the guideposts are there. They're very loud sometimes, very painful sometimes, impossible to ignore sometimes, but you have to look at it for what it is as a signal that something isn't working. You need to make a change, maybe many changes.

Also, I want to mention that it doesn't usually start off with these very severe symptoms. Like that last example I had, you know, this probably started with something much more mild, like maybe just anxiety, maybe just a little bit of loneliness. But as we continue to ignore these, they progress, and this is usually a long, years-long, decades-long, a lifetime-long progress, process of progression to escalation of these symptoms over time. But if we had a culture, we had a society where we looked at symptoms in this way, I'd be willing to bet many of these more severe cases would never develop because we would have already, if I'm having some anxiety, I'm digging into that rather than running away from it. And I'm working through what I need to work through rather than continuing to avoid it, avoid it, avoid it. And it just escalates into something else and then into something else. And each step in that process is more severe, more irritating, more uncomfortable, more painful.


So, my message to you listening to this today: What are your symptoms trying to tell you? What are they trying to signal to you of a deeper issue? Maybe you know what the deeper issue is and you're just avoiding it. Sometimes we have deeper issues that we're not in full control of, and maybe we're not in a place where we can deal with it yet. And that does happen. And that's unfortunate, but just acknowledging that our symptoms are from something like that can help.


So, my challenge to you is to, again, what are your symptoms telling you, what is that deeper work trying to call you to? And that deeper work is never easy. It's never fun. But the rewards of doing so far outweigh the discomfort and the effort involved, in my opinion.

So that's our episode today. Stay tuned for more. I have in the works a full-length podcast episode where we're going to go into more detail on these other kinds of symptoms. The last several episodes have been about chronic pain. We're going to expand that out into chronic symptoms as a whole. So, if you found this conversation interesting, stay tuned to the podcast. We'll have a much more in-depth conversation around this as well, as well as some personal stories of my own. And yeah, thanks for listening and with much love, take care till next time.






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ADAPT Certified Funcional Health Coach (A-CFHC)

Disclaimer:

I am not a licensed medical physician. As a coach I am not providing health care, medical, or therapy services or attempting to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any physical, mental, or emotional issue. 

The information provided on this website is for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek advice from your physician or other qualified healthcare provider before undertaking a new health regimen.

Do not disregard medical advice or delay seeking medical advice because of information you read on this website. Do not start or stop any medications without speaking to your medical or mental health provider.

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