Your Back Went Out Because Your Boss Is a Dick
Additional twist if you're self-employed
How to evolve humanity into a species that isn’t destructive to itself and the planet? Person by person. Gain perspective, clarity, and hope in this community of 6,500+.
The body keeps the score, let’s take that as read. The book (and its author) are both problematic, but the underlying message of the phrase is sound and distils what we’ve known since the mid 1980s. And you need not have experienced some ‘big-T’ trauma for this to be true. Most of us now live lives pushing Sisyphean boulders of stress from one day to the next: overworked, underresourced, and addicted to bleating harbingers of extinction-level doom in — I was going to say our pockets, but they rarely leave our hands. Many of us sit still for hours every day, eyes on tight focus, shoulders locked in tension. By the time you’re in midlife, there’s a good chance your body will be protesting at your lifestyle.
But are you listening? I spent many years abusing and then ignoring my body: it was just there, it was useful, I didn’t think about it. It was, to my mind, the less interesting part of me. I was all intellect and emotion, and the meatsuit was, you know, nice to have, a pleasure-engine; I got it serviced now and then but mostly took its functions for granted. Then it started hurting, and oh, hello? You’ve got something to say? Body? What’s up?
I didn’t know the language. I got hold of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, Duolingo for the torso, and ran through the pages, identifying (in simplistic, one-sentence terms) what my thyroid, sprained ankle and occasional eczema were trying to say. But the problem is deeper than those one-sentence summaries reveal. Our bodies are very specific with their messaging. They have their own dialects, rooted in our individual histories. Sometimes the ‘general wisdom’ can be wrong for us.
I discovered this early on. My first experience of EFT tapping was successful pain relief, eliminating a headache that began as I was reading the manual. I chatted about this on a podcast released last week, if you fancy a listen:
Not long after that, I’d come back from a day researching The Marlowe Papers (visiting Scadbury Manor in Kent) and was cooking bolognese for the family tea when I felt a familiar bladder-drag: the early warning of impending cystitis. Hell no, I thought, I don’t need this: days of pain, hours sitting in the bath, drinking gallons of water and gagging on bicarb. So I turned off the hob and went to the bedroom to tap. General Louise Hay-level wisdom regarding bladder issues translates the underlying cause as you’re being “pissed off”. The body is ridiculously literal with your thoughts and words, as discussed here; it takes our habits of speech as instructions.
I didn’t feel pissed off (except about the impending cystitis), but I tried that as a starting point, because I didn’t have another. But I could feel nothing was shifting; if anything the pain was getting worse. But the way tapping works is that before too long the actual cause will surface from your subconscious. And soon I could feel it with certainty. Guilt. My overwhelming thought was I feel so guilty. Guilty that Paul had put himself out for me, and was now taking physical consequences. There was much more walking involved than we knew (the car park being easily a mile from the ruins) and he was in a bad place, then, with his CFS/ME. Because of my insistence he join me for their once-a-year open day (“a nice day out”), he was going to be flat on his back for a week.
And then I realised: I’d started getting recurrent cystitis with Paul because he put himself out for me, and part of me felt that I didn’t deserve it. The first time this had happened, we were barely dating, and he’d driven me to Wimbledon at 5 am and taken charge of getting my three boys to school so I could queue for ‘People’s Monday’ tickets and see my beloved Goran Ivanisevic in the Grand Slam final. A legendary final utterly ruined by a dose of cystitis. My previous few years of recurrent UTIs had been with the only other boyfriend who put himself out for me. So I tapped on this big well of guilt, and not feeling worthy of other people’s kindness, and the dragging ache in my bladder subsided. And get this. No more cystitis. I stopped getting UTIs.
They tell you cystitis is an infection; they treat it with antibiotics. But the fact is, we are swimming in microorganisms. Here’s my working theory: we get vulnerable to developing an infection (picking up one of these ever-present viruses and bacteria) when an emotional injury provides them with an open wound.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
This Hamlet quote is my touchstone for a reason. The world is a lot weirder than we generally think. Our frameworks for understanding it are limited, and should be marked ‘Under construction.’
Plenty of pain is structural. You break your leg, it’s going to hurt. However, there is always an emotional component to pain, which heightens with any negative story you tell about it: you fear what it means, you’re afraid of the pain itself, or you’re angry with yourself for not looking after yourself.
And some pain has a purely emotional cause: stress (emotions) leading to tense muscles in your back and neck will eventually lead to chronic pain in those areas. Yes, this can include structural issues like slipped disks.
But what’s interesting is that structural problems, visible on X-rays and MRI scans, don’t have to cause pain. Beyond the age of 60, around a quarter of the population show tears in their rotator cuff muscles on MRI scans, but two-thirds will be asymptomatic.1 Studies show around 50% of people with no back pain whatsoever have herniated/bulging discs visible on MRI.2 (And this is where we have to mention the work of John Sarno).
Pain is an electrical signal, and we can reduce it. We just need to find a way to have the conversation with our body. (If you want to try EFT for pain relief, you can register for this month’s session for paid subscribers here.)
Other signs we don’t have a full grasp of how our mind and emotions interact with our physical body: spontaneous remissions and people who defy their doctors’ catastrophising predictions. I met the drummer of Paper Lace once, who’d become a roofer after the band broke up. He’d fallen off a roof and broken his spine. He was told he’d never walk again, but he was driving a lorry when he picked me up, hitch-hiking on the M4. He told me what he’d done every day was just visualised wiggling his toes. They said his spine was severed and it wasn’t possible but he decided he would prove them wrong and as he put it, ‘had nothing else to do.’ So in his imagination, again and again, he wiggled his toes. And one day his toes actually wiggled. And good going, honestly. It’s impressive to hold your beliefs against the pronouncements of authority figures. The nocebo effect is real (and potentially fatal).
They scanned him and saw that his spinal cord had ‘grown back’. Now, it has recently been recognised that zebra fish can do this, but no one thinks it’s possible in humans. When someone makes a ‘miraculous’ recovery of this kind, doctors file it under ‘weird’ and move on. Not understanding the mechanism makes it a fluke, not a model. Plus, they’re working within a paradigm where the body-mind connection is irrelevant: there’s no pharmaceutical profit there; and medical research is sponsored in pursuit of chemical solutions. Thus, our beliefs don’t get challenged, our paradigms don’t shift.
Human beings are evolving. What look like super-human abilities are our natural abilities, unleashed. The limits we accept are largely inherited, not innate — and they shift when we reframe our beliefs. The question then becomes, what do you want to believe? That decline is inevitable; that ageing means racking up aches and pains and losing function?
What if every old-age ache is just baggage we've carried too long and didn't have a way to put down? That score the body’s keeping? I’ve seen it erased like chalk from a chalkboard.
There was a time when nobody believed that a human could run a mile in under 4 minutes. It was thought physically impossible. But once a single person ran a sub-4 minute mile and the news spread, suddenly that barrier was broken all over the place. The way sheer belief makes physical ‘impossible’ things possible gives an inkling of just how powerful the human mind can be, when we don’t let ‘common knowledge’ hamper us.
Are you up to date with the serialised novel? From the viewing figures, I have a feeling free subscribers might not have received their Tuesday chapter; something went wrong with my automated posting, I think. You can find it here:
We’re not too far in, and you can catch up on previous chapters at the Contents Page.
Writing is my sole means of support. If you love what I do, but can’t take out a paid subscription right now, you can support me with a like, a comment or a share: all of them tell the algorithm to increase my reach, which makes a big difference. You can also:
Want to read more? Read double-award-winning novel The Marlowe Papers, Encore Award shortlistee Devotion, or the poetry collections How Things Are on Thursday and Material.
Over to you:
What’s bugging you in your body right now?
Have you discovered the root cause yet?
Ever had a “miraculous” recovery or spontaneous remission / do you know anyone who has?
If you liked this, you might like:
Tempelhof S, Rupp S, Seil R. ‘Age-related prevalence of rotator cuff tears in asymptomatic shoulders.’ J Shoulder Elbow Surg. 1999 Jul-Aug;8(4):296-9. doi: 10.1016/s1058-2746(99)90148-9. PMID: 10471998. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10471998/
Maureen C Jensen, Michael N. Brant-Zawadzki, Nancy Obuchowski, Michael T. Modic, Dennis Malkasian, and Jeffrey S. Ross, ‘Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Lumbar Spine in People without Back Pain’, N Engl J Med 1994;331:69-73 DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199407143310201, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199407143310201
I had recurrent UTI and tonsillitis with my first boyfriend (an older predator) I think my body was
rejecting him and trying to show me how bad he was for me.
Hi Ros, I want you to know that I really love your articles. They make me think about the world in a new way (which I suppose is the goal for every substack writer out there) and I wanted to say thank you.