Hi dear ones,
As I am writing those words, I am sitting in Berlin airport to go back home…?
I hesitate writing “home”because I am not sure what home is or what it feels like. Berlin in many ways feels like home and in many ways will never.
I will write a long letter about this another time.
For now, I wanted to share with you common psychosomatic pains and the emotional wounds they point toward. The reason is, I’m in physical pain now. I suffer from lower back pain and hip pain and have been since I’m 13. I could tell you a lot about why, but what I find most fascinating about this is that my mother has the exact same pain. Every time I am in deep pain, my body takes on her exact shape. It’s the weirdest thing.
Until now, my mother and I haven’t found any resolution to this pain. I want to be clear that this letter is not here to persuade you that everything is emotional. I have and will continue to see doctors to ease my pain. But I have a feeling that this physical pain has become the best way for my emotional distress to express itself, because sometimes the body speaks most loudly when something in us has not yet found another language.
I don’t believe the pain is imaginary because it might have an emotional dimension. I don’t believe understanding its emotional life makes its physical reality any less real. I am simply curious about why this pain, why this part of my body, and why now. What might my body be carrying, bracing against, or trying to metabolise that I have not yet been able to fully feel elsewhere?
In other words, the question of this letter isn’t: is this physical or emotional? I think the question is more so: what if my body and my emotional life were never as separate as I was taught to believe?
There is no separation in the body. Everything is mushy in a body. Grief touches muscle. Fear changes breath. Stress reorganises posture. Pain changes mood, and mood changes how we experience pain. The categories we use to make sense of ourselves — physical, emotional, psychological, relational — are useful, but the body does not necessarily experience itself through those borders. It is all happening in the same place. It is all touching everything else.
So, here are the common emotional pains I have witnessed in my clients and communities I am serving and what I have seen they often point toward, emotionally, as well as the wound they carry:
Let’s start with our lower back!