I have little idea what the mechanical root cause is in your case. But when something shows up sharply and widespread like this and it’s whack-a-mole confusion from the medical system, the problem IME is very often stored trauma.
…by which I basically mean some subroutine in your brain is keeping some part(s) of your body in an awkward and not-very-great state as an adaptation to a threat that used to be in your life but doesn’t apply anymore.
This can cascade into a bazillion other places as that subroutine keeps vying for resources and disrupting things in its efforts to keep you safe.
The way out is analogous to mirror box therapy, only it’s usually more complicated. You update the subroutine to show it that the threat is gone and it can chill out. But the “language” of such systems is usually through the body, not words or thoughts. Hence somatic processing.
The medical system hasn’t yet acknowledged that this trauma-induced health cascade happens. They’re just barely starting to take seriously that maybe thoughts can affect the body enough that psychological interventions can fix physical problems. So any time the root problem is trauma, and any time that traumatic response is highly adaptive (like yours seems to be), the medical system gets flummoxed. Interventions don’t work, or they work only a little bit and then a new problem shows up, etc.
The problem, in short, is that there’s basically an intelligent sub-agent who’s trying to solve what it thinks is a life-or-death problem. Attempts to just flat-out block its efforts won’t go well to the extent that it can figure out ways to get around those blockades. You end up in an arms race with an internal agent.
I find Irene Lyon’s explanations very clear and I think totally woo-free (although I’ve purged myself of woo allergy, so I might have missed something). You can peruse the ocean of resources she has on her YouTube channel. She also has a great 3-video overview that I heartily recommend; the cost is merely your soul your email address.
Luis Mojica is also quite effective. Many people find just listening to him to be grounding and to help learn this stuff. His podcast, “Holistic Life Navigation”, has lots of really great and practical guidance. He leans a little more hippy/woo than some LWers might like… but his stuff works.
There’s also Peter Levine (“Waking the Tiger”) and Gabor Maté. They’re classics in this area. Their models aren’t up to LW standards, but they seem to be pretty effective people.
Good luck. I hope you find an answer that works for you.
My psychiatrist has said recently that he thinks I may be having some kind of trauma response and recommended a trauma-focused therapy (that he doesn’t specifically do, he’s more for med checks and emergencies).
You interest me when you talk about woo allergies… In my model there’s something like three camps. The first being people who adhere to POVs like those on sciencebasedmedicine.org and dismissive of anything that smells alternative, my guess is that their model is overfit and they have a lot of false positives when it comes to treatment. The second being ACX/LW types that are a bit more open-minded but evidence-aware. The third being like woo-heavy ways of reasoning that I try to avoid.
Do you see the camps similarly? I try to assign various woos reasonable probabilities and not dismiss them unnecessarily. But I also cautious not to get trapped in vortexes of woo.
Well… not by default. Your taxonomy makes sense to me at first pass though.
My experience is that the middle one you name isn’t really a natural cluster. If I had to round LW to either sciencebasedmedicine.org or woo-heavy, there’s no challenge. It’s not even a little hard.
Part of the problem is that “woo” isn’t actually a natural cluster either. It’s a derogatory reference to models and methods that fall outside a certain paradigm.
But I do think that woo allergy is a coherent pattern. And yeah, LW isn’t as bad with it as some circles — but it’s severe enough here that it seems worth speaking to. It’s hard to have a conversation in a context full of memetic allergic reactions, so offering a mild memetic antihistamine tends to go better.
Somatic processing.
I have little idea what the mechanical root cause is in your case. But when something shows up sharply and widespread like this and it’s whack-a-mole confusion from the medical system, the problem IME is very often stored trauma.
…by which I basically mean some subroutine in your brain is keeping some part(s) of your body in an awkward and not-very-great state as an adaptation to a threat that used to be in your life but doesn’t apply anymore.
This can cascade into a bazillion other places as that subroutine keeps vying for resources and disrupting things in its efforts to keep you safe.
The way out is analogous to mirror box therapy, only it’s usually more complicated. You update the subroutine to show it that the threat is gone and it can chill out. But the “language” of such systems is usually through the body, not words or thoughts. Hence somatic processing.
The medical system hasn’t yet acknowledged that this trauma-induced health cascade happens. They’re just barely starting to take seriously that maybe thoughts can affect the body enough that psychological interventions can fix physical problems. So any time the root problem is trauma, and any time that traumatic response is highly adaptive (like yours seems to be), the medical system gets flummoxed. Interventions don’t work, or they work only a little bit and then a new problem shows up, etc.
The problem, in short, is that there’s basically an intelligent sub-agent who’s trying to solve what it thinks is a life-or-death problem. Attempts to just flat-out block its efforts won’t go well to the extent that it can figure out ways to get around those blockades. You end up in an arms race with an internal agent.
I find Irene Lyon’s explanations very clear and I think totally woo-free (although I’ve purged myself of woo allergy, so I might have missed something). You can peruse the ocean of resources she has on her YouTube channel. She also has a great 3-video overview that I heartily recommend; the cost is merely
your soulyour email address.Luis Mojica is also quite effective. Many people find just listening to him to be grounding and to help learn this stuff. His podcast, “Holistic Life Navigation”, has lots of really great and practical guidance. He leans a little more hippy/woo than some LWers might like… but his stuff works.
There’s also Peter Levine (“Waking the Tiger”) and Gabor Maté. They’re classics in this area. Their models aren’t up to LW standards, but they seem to be pretty effective people.
Good luck. I hope you find an answer that works for you.
This sounds similar to John Sarno—are you familiar with it and do you know whether the approaches are substantially different?
Sorry, no, I have no familiarity with John Sarno. This is the first time I’ve heard of him.
My psychiatrist has said recently that he thinks I may be having some kind of trauma response and recommended a trauma-focused therapy (that he doesn’t specifically do, he’s more for med checks and emergencies).
You interest me when you talk about woo allergies… In my model there’s something like three camps. The first being people who adhere to POVs like those on sciencebasedmedicine.org and dismissive of anything that smells alternative, my guess is that their model is overfit and they have a lot of false positives when it comes to treatment. The second being ACX/LW types that are a bit more open-minded but evidence-aware. The third being like woo-heavy ways of reasoning that I try to avoid.
Do you see the camps similarly? I try to assign various woos reasonable probabilities and not dismiss them unnecessarily. But I also cautious not to get trapped in vortexes of woo.
Will check out the trauma resources.
Well… not by default. Your taxonomy makes sense to me at first pass though.
My experience is that the middle one you name isn’t really a natural cluster. If I had to round LW to either sciencebasedmedicine.org or woo-heavy, there’s no challenge. It’s not even a little hard.
Part of the problem is that “woo” isn’t actually a natural cluster either. It’s a derogatory reference to models and methods that fall outside a certain paradigm.
But I do think that woo allergy is a coherent pattern. And yeah, LW isn’t as bad with it as some circles — but it’s severe enough here that it seems worth speaking to. It’s hard to have a conversation in a context full of memetic allergic reactions, so offering a mild memetic antihistamine tends to go better.