Psychological or emotional?

I follow a couple of Substacks dedicated to long covid because I want to stay somewhat up-to-date on potential treatments for long covid, even/especially if those treatments are different from my own recovery. However, lately one of them has been pushing a series of posts that attacks the idea of recovering from illnesses like long covid by using mind-body techniques.

There’s a lot I could try to unpack in these posts, but mostly it comes down to the idea that to suggest illnesses like long covid require mind-body treatments is to suggest that it’s all in our heads. Essentially, these posts are arguing that chronic illness is not psychological.

As someone who recovered from long covid and a host of other chronic conditions, I also get irritated by the suggestion that the illness was all in my head. Plus, questioning my illness/recovery because I used mind-body techniques to recover is also a form of gaslighting. I assure you, my illnesses and my recovery were real.

Moreover, I would also argue that none of the illnesses I had were psychological.

Yet I recovered using the so-called “mind-body” techniques, and I’m the first to admit that this phrasing seems to suggest that illnesses are either psychological or physical. It finally clicked today that the problem here is one of terminology.

My healing revolved around my emotions: my repressed emotions, especially fear, were what made me sick, and to get healthy, I had to access, process and address the emotions.

This might still seem like I’m suggesting the problem is psychological though, so let me share some definitions that I pulled from Wikipedia:

Psychology: “the scientific study of mind and behavior.”

Emotions: “From a mechanistic perspective, emotions can be defined as "a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity”.[4]”

Emotions are physiological responses1. They’re part of our biology. They’re physical. Emotions are the result of a cascade of chemical responses that occur in the body, and they trigger a physical response.

Laughing is physical. Crying is physical. Anger is physical. All of these emotions are things that people around us can see. Other people, no matter how close they are to us, cannot see our thoughts or what’s happening in our minds, but they can see our emotional responses. Even if we repress the emotions, it still requires a physical suppression and tensing of the body or certain parts of the body to keep the chemical and physiological reactions of our emotions contained.

None of this is to say that our minds and our behaviors don’t also play a role in either our emotional responses or in the conscious and subconscious repression of certain emotions. They absolutely do, and it’s all very complex. The mind and body are so “interconnected” that I suspect it’s incorrect to even suggest that they’re separate.

However, if we think of our thoughts and our physical bodies as being on opposite sides of a spectrum, then I suspect it’s reasonable to place emotions much closer to the body-side of the spectrum.

This is why the “mind-body” treatments that work are so often the treatments that focus more on the physical body. Yes, I worked with therapists, but they were somatic therapists who helped me feel into my body and access the emotions. Yes, I did meditations, but they were somatic meditations that helped me feel into my body and access the emotions. Yes, I did JournalSpeak and Parts Work, which may be considered psychological treatments, but I did them because they were effective at helping me feel into my body and access my emotions.

Admittedly, practices like brain retraining for physical symptoms can be helpful, and they can be much more of a mental, mind-based treatment. However, I think that’s just further proof that our minds and bodies are not really separate. Plus, even with brain retraining, we’re still “rewiring” neurological patterns in our brains and bodies.

Imagine for a moment that you broke your leg. If you went to a doctor, you could get it set, get pain killers to help with treatment, and get guidance for proper rest and recovery. And then your body would do its thing to heal the bone itself. What if, instead, everyone around you told you to just grin and bear the injury? What if they told you to just keep walking with the broken leg and not let others know how much pain you were in? Eventually, your leg would likely “heal,” but it would probably mean that you couldn’t walk normally, and it might cause recurring issues for you later on.

I hypothesize that emotions are the same way. We suffer an emotional wound, which, again, is a physical process in our bodies, and then we don’t get the support we need for our bodies do their thing to heal the emotional wound (e.g. crying a lot or getting angry). So it makes sense that this just keeps compounding and getting worse as we try to navigate through a social world and suffer more emotional wounding. Then, when something over-activates our physiological response systems—like Covid or another virus triggering a massive immune response—our already over-worked systems can’t take it.

Since emotions are physiological, it seems logical to expect that any resulting illnesses would also be physical. It’s just that the cause of the chronic illness may not be what we think it is, and therefore, the treatment may be different from what we expect.