Physical manifestations of emotional pain
You’ll be surprised once you get to know the kind of control your mind has got over your body. One of the most confounding and mysterious phenomenon under the topic ‘mind-body connection’, is ‘somatization’. It’s a term used when your mind takes your emotional pain, and manifests it into the physical kind.
Most common of the examples would be, the headaches when you are stressed. The fatigue when you’ve had an emotionally tiring day. The reason why most patients with mood disorders complain of tiredness, headaches, back pain, body aches and palpitations, is this. The emotional pain reflects itself through physical symptoms. There have been numerous cases of people showing up to OPD’s for physical symptoms only to find everything biologically stable and no confirmatory diagnosis. I’m sure many reading this would have witnessed such cases in their lives too.
-Somatization
When psychological distress is converted into physical symptoms, we call it somatization. For example, throwing up due to anxiety, fatigue due to constant stress. It is not a diagnosis itself, but a symptom, diagnosis would be however, ‘Somatic Symptom Disorder’ or ‘Conversion Disorder’ in most cases. Patients can bring up complaints of persistent diarrhea, hearing loss, painful headaches, vision loss, even sudden blindness, heart palpitations, paralysis, shortness of breath, and most common, physical pains.
Somatization Story- Conversion Disorder
Intermountain Healthcare shares one such case of a 13 year old, Jessie who was paralyzed hip down. She was in school when she tripped a stair and hurt her back. Her parents took her to healthcare facility after she complained of pain in her back, where after carrying out some scans and tests, everything appeared alright. The next day, the pain got more intense, worse. One more trip to the clinic, after a prescribed MRI, nothing appeared to be of concern. The doctor prescribed some pain meds and she was sent home.
The next day, she could move or feel any sensation on her legs. They were recommended to a hospital, where the diagnosis turned out to be the Conversion Disorder. After that, the treatment was planned at Regional Pediatric Rehab and so the conditions improved.
Your body can react to stress and emotional pain in the most puzzling ways and it would be ignorant to consider that such a portrayal of mental suffering is not real. The studies of ‘mind body connection’ are sure underfunded currently but it’s taking up the leaps. Somatization can happen when there’s trauma, when there’s consistent and persistent repressing of emotional anguish, when your brain tries to communicate that there’s something going on and you need to address it.
