On my Mind & my Body

How can two radically different things be connected, or even more so - how can they work in harmony?

Recently, I was asked which system I listen to the most - what my brain tells me, or what my body tells me. And I got stuck. I could feel words caught in my throat but I also knew the answer that was about to come out of my mouth didn’t feel like the right one.

My mind. For as long as I can remember, I’ve trusted my mind, and the stories it’s pre-played out to lead me in the right direction. The big questions here is I wonder if that still serves me in protection and independence.

I listen to my brain, because I believe it. Because I have scientific evidence that it has in fact experienced as much as my body, but with an overview perspective, and identifying and articulating my thoughts is significantly easier for me than identifying and articulating where physical symptoms may be manifesting from if they aren’t directly related to the chronic and autoimmune diseases I live with.

Why did this feel like the wrong answer?

Because I was sitting in a small room, in the dark, across from my ketamine psychotherapist, who has over time tried to help me bridge the gap between my mind and my body, my brain and my gut. A gap that at first felt to me like I had no desire to fill, and now one that more often than not feels confusing and scary.

The truth is the only version of intuition I trust is when it it makes its way to my brain first to be evaluated, thought through, and then expressed in a palatable way.

What it does not, and has not ever looked like is something like significant pain in my gut followed by several trips to the bathroom, and then some blatantly obvious sign or foreshadowing of anxiety or emotional discomfort to identify the incorrect and vastly uncomfortable shift in my body’s physical homeostasis. How do I justify those symptoms? How do I control them? How do I make piece with them? How do I go about my day in and out of the restroom, in and out of my mind, trying desperately to put a square peg into a round hole when it comes to this communication between my systems? Do I take the medication I have for as needed situations? It’ll only work if the symptoms originate from a physical cause. Do I journal to try to find the emotional cause, and fall short, leaving the sometimes unbearable symptoms to run rampant?

Yesterday, I messaged a friend and said:

“My body is doing a lot of things outside of my control. How am I supposed to rectify or find acceptance with that?”

And much like the profoundly deep conversations I’ve been having since I started my journey with Ketamine for Major Depressive Disorder, her response was another thing that stopped me in my tracks.

“What does control mean to you?” she asked. “Let me rephrase that - what does having strict control over a body, specifically yours, mean to you?”

oooofffff.

My first response was “I don’t know how to answer this. This is a really intense question that’s never been posted to me before. I have to think on it. I have to write through it.”

So, hi, good morning. That’s where this is going today.

My very first though goes back to the smallest version of me, the one with the perpetually “nervous stomach” who was always blamed for being late and teased for having to run to the bathroom. Had that small child had more autonomy over her body, had she felt a sense of understanding or control over what was happening to her digestive system, she could’ve presented as “well” more of the time. She would’ve not stood out so much, she wouldn’t have needed extra attention or time or resources from adults that already seemed to want only to see her but not to hear her, and overall, she would’ve felt like much less of a nuisance. Having control over her body would’ve made the littlest version of herself have more of an opportunity to temper her responses, she would’ve needed less and perhaps, just maybe, would’ve survived a little less unscathed than the actual little version of me was able to.

In treatment, I’ve learned that to me, a lack of choice (including choice about what my body does without clearing it with or signaling to my brain first, or sneaking symptoms upon me at any time it pleases) equates to a lack of control, and a lack of control leads to feeling unsafe. I already felt unsafe nearly all of the time in my environment - but I also very quickly learned that I was also unsafe in my own body.

*Sidenote - this has been, since I got sick 15 years ago, one of the hardest things I’ve ever been forced to deal with - the unpredictability and devastation of living in a body that I can’t trust but also I can’t leave.

In thinking about this, I know that today, 38 year old Amanda wonders just how different she would’ve ended up if her body had been a safe place, even if the environment hadn’t changed in the slightest.

I wish that mattered now - I guess, maybe it does. I still, today, feel unsafe in my body. Yesterday morning for instance I woke up while it was still dark out, raced to the bathroom, and found that my period came early and with a vengeance. It wasn’t just the dark colored blood soaking through everything in it’s pathway, but it was also the debilitating abdominal cramps, the pain searing through my stomach, and a migraine unlike anything I’ve had since overcoming months of bacterial meningitis.

In the middle of the night, in my exhaustion and stupor, I chose to not think and just to act. I took all of the as needed medications I had at my disposal, and climbed back into bed, begging my body for relief.

Now - it might be as simple as this is how a rush of hormones effects me, especially when it comes earlier than expected and is the same week as my Remicade infusion, extra steroids, Ketamine, and intense therapy - but what if it isn’t.

And what would controlling it look like?

I think feeling like I had control would’ve been a heads up to my brain (and I can identify this on multiple occasions that my body has done something my brain has not known about or been given a chance to prepare for) and it might not have felt so debilitating when it occurred.

Controlling a body like mine means more ability for independence and for the important things, like work and marriage and parenting. Because when any number of physical symptoms pop up, I’m immediately rendered frustrated and angry. They come without warning. They come without instruction. They come and I never know how they’ll stay or how much I’ll have to bow out of while they’re present.

Before starting Ketamine therapy, I’d asked my long term therapist if it was possible to stay disassociated, to keep my brain and my body on separate networks if you will, and operate as if there’s no connection between the two. Unfortunately, her answer was no. She said that while this might feel right in the moment, it will perpetuate this dangerous cycle I’ve spent the last decade and a half stuck inside.

Now, there are two separate systems not working in tandem or harmony, not even really communicating to be honest, and I have no idea how to bridge a gap that I actually don’t want bridge if I’m being honest.

In what feels like a thousand ways, my body has hurt and betrayed me for as long as I can remember. It feels nearly impossible to shift the logic on that, to believe that all this time it was my body internalizing my feelings, my environment, my fears, my shame, my trauma - and even if I could believe it, how on earth do I activate it?

I’ve come to understand that when it comes to emotions, my brain checks with my body. It warns that we have entered a series of intense moments, big feelings, grief, loss, change, etc. and then in return, it expects my body to act out - often times in many of the ways listed above. But in the same way I freak out when I learn something about myself that comes out of my mouth before it has been censored by my brain, my brain freaks out when my body does something that it hasn’t warned me about.

One of the things that led me to Ketamine treatment in the first place was feeling continuously that I could not spend one more minute living in my body, it was just too physically painful and unpredictable. But that option, the option to leave my body, it can’t exist. I can’t allow it to.

So where does that leave me?

I only wish I knew.