6 Subtle Ways Your Body Shows You Didn't Get The Love You Needed From Your Parents
There may be more to your illness than you think.
Kelly Sikkema | Unsplash Can't figure out why you're always sick? Child abuse and neglect both contribute to childhood trauma, but what if the effects of these follow you to adulthood in the form of a physical illness?
There is a scientific link between illness and childhood abuse and neglect — whether it's physical, emotional, or intimate. The effects of victimization are far-reaching — especially when it begins before the age of seven.
Current science shows the emotional damage to a person who lived their childhood in fight, flight, or freeze mode and how the trauma of emotional neglect affects them right down to the physical body.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) is the largest public health study ever done at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, California. It has been ongoing since the mid-1990s. It has conclusively linked childhood abuse and family dysfunction with chronic illness, substance abuse, and suicidality later in life.
At the bottom of difficult stories of abuse and neglect are the emotions that we feel as a result of these experiences. But what role do traumatized emotions play in illnesses?
We all know that emotions can make us sick through things we commonly say like, "I’m worried sick about..." or "That person makes me sick to my stomach." It turns out these emotions when experienced daily will wear away at the physical body over time.
It does this through the secretion of the hormones cortisol and adrenaline. When these hormones flood your body daily, they become toxic to your biological system over time and the immune system breaks down.
In the work of scientist Dr. Candace Pert, who wrote the best-seller Molecules of Emotion, she shares that when you experience an emotion, every single cell in your body feels it too. She said that your brain cells aren’t just in your brain — they’re in every cell of your body.
Here are the subtle ways your body shows you didn't get the love you needed from your parents:
1. You've been told that the pain in your body is all in your head
This experience is one of the most frustrating things you can ever go through. When a doctor tells you that nothing has come up in their tests and you’re in horrific pain, you feel dismissed and not cared for. Even worse, you feel like they’re telling you that you’re crazy.
Unexplained symptoms could be the way your body is communicating to you that you need a different kind of help. Not showing up on a medical test could be the way to confirm this.
2. You've tried everything to get well but you’re still sick
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You’ve followed all your doctor’s orders and you’re not getting better. You have tried diets, psychotherapy, prescription drugs, and many other things but you’re only getting worse.
Your body has a mind of its own and holds the experiences of your life in it. It remembers things in an entirely different way than your mind does. If you address this from a holistic approach, you might just get well.
While the concept of your body telling you about unmet emotional needs is a complex one, psychology research suggests a strong link between childhood experiences, particularly lack of love and support, and later health outcomes, including chronic illness, but it's not a simple one-to-one correlation. A 2019 study found that it's more about the cumulative impact of stress and lack of healthy coping mechanisms rather than a direct signal from your body.
3. You have stress-related illnesses like migraines or ulcers and nothing helps
Common stress-related illnesses and symptoms (particularly digestive disturbances) can make daily living a nightmare. Your antacids rarely work anymore and you’re tired of feeling flat-lined from your anti-depressant medication.
You think that your difficult childhood might be the culprit, but you don’t want to spend years in therapy talking about your story over and over again — or maybe you already have and you’re all talked out.
4. You have physical pains or symptoms that have no explanation
You have sudden stabbing pains that shoot through your head, your legs, your hands, your stomach, your back, or any and everywhere. Your doctor can’t find a source.
Your body holds onto experiences in an entirely different way than your mind does. Unexplained pains could be your body crying out for help.
These cries for assistance could lead you to the emotions, beliefs, and thoughts that linger in your unconscious "body-mind" — that part of you that has its own story. Your chronic shooting pains could be from emotional wounds and the way your body is recalling them.
While some research suggests a connection between emotional distress and physical pain, there's no scientific consensus that unexplained physical pain is solely a body's response to unmet emotional needs, particularly related to parental love. According to a 2019 study, the body's stress response can lead to various physical symptoms, including pain, fatigue, and digestive issues.
5. You have overwhelming anxiety, fear, and panic that you can’t seem to find the cause of
You get triggered so often that you feel like you’re a ticking timebomb. These emotions overwhelm you with no warning. Often you cannot pinpoint what happened and other times it’s very clear. Either way, you feel ruled by them.
You’ve been told that all you can do are breathing exercises to calm down or take medications to suppress symptoms. You may or may not know that these emotions are wearing away at your biological system and potentially contributing to illness.
6. You have excess weight that you just cannot lose
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You’ve tried every diet, exercise, and hormone-balancing program you can find, and still, the weight won’t budge. The ACE Study began with an obesity clinic. Morbidly obese patients would lose as many as 100 pounds and then abruptly stop the program.
Upon investigation, Dr. Vincent Felitti (who ran the clinic and founded the ACE Study), discovered that high numbers of these patients were sexually abused as children and often had dysfunctional families marked by neglect, divorce, mental illness of a parent, substance abuse, physically violent and abusive parents, or an incarcerated parent.
After decades of research, it has been scientifically linked that childhood abuse can lead to weight gain and the inability to lose it. In my practice, I have seen clients rapidly lose what I call "emotional weight" after releasing the deep unconscious thoughts, feelings, and beliefs connected to their traumatic past and why they were padding themselves with extra weight.
You see, your body has its wisdom— it believes things that you have no idea about. If you have ever seen the image of an iceberg as a metaphor for what you’re consciously aware of used to demonstrate how much of our minds are above the surface in terms of awareness, you know that up to 90 percent of our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are deep down under the water.
It is in that 90 percent of these emotions live with their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings keeping you underwater until you let them out. Your emotions aren’t just these negative forces that are here to mess up your life.
These so-called negative emotions are there to teach you something about who you are. I have come to see them as teaching emotions. All they want is the very same thing that you do; to be seen, heard, understood, and loved. It’s quite simple. Begin to think of these emotions as teaching emotions. They just want to help you and often believe they are protecting you.
You don’t have to be a slave to mystery symptoms or to the illnesses you have. You can add transpersonal and mind-body medicine processes to the protocols you are already using.
Healing isn’t one size fits all. You have a unique way of storing the memories of your experiences. There is a unique way to set them free. You can set yourself free from the abuse and illness connection with simple techniques and expert help.
If you feel strongly that your illness and mystery symptoms are connected to your history of abuse, releasing the emotional root causes can help you heal and live the productive life you’ve always dreamed of.
If you feel as though you may be in danger, there is support available 24/7/365 through the National Domestic Violence Hotline by calling 1-800-799-7233. If you’re unable to speak safely, text LOVEIS to 1-866-331-9474, or log onto thehotline.org.
Dr. Meg Haworth is a seasoned doctor who offers holistic wellness solutions. She uses the power of the mind to help abuse survivors heal from chronic illness.