I was around seven years old when my suppressed negative emotions first began to be reflected in my bodily functions and I began to have an inflammatory condition in my lower bowel, medically known as "Irritable Bowel Syndrome," or IBS. The symptoms varied from being an uncomfortable feeling of tenderness in my lower abdomen to that of excruciating pain, accompanied with Diarrhea, lots of mucus and a fever.
According to the Mayo Clinic Diet Book, the exact physical cause of IBS has not been determined, but it does say that stress can definitely aggravate the symptoms of IBS an make them worse. Quote: "If you're like most people with IBS, you probably find that your signs and symptoms are worse or more frequent during stressful events, such as a change in your daily routine."
My father had died four years earlier, and at that time my mother was barely managing to earn enough money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, so there was no money to pay for professional medical care or diagnosis. Without a doctor to advise her, she simply treated my condition with bed rest and a liquid diet, and in a week or so I would recover. Several of my paternal aunts and uncles also had IBS during their lifetime and were known by other family members as having a volatile temper, which they also tried to suppress because of religious and socially negative consequences. So, based on that knowledge of my own genetic background, plus my personal history of suppressing my rage to try and keep peace in my family, I concluded that my suppressed negative emotions greatly influenced, or possibly even created the IBS condition in my colon--not only as a child but also as an adult.
After bearing the vindictive consequences of being physically beaten and verbally degraded by my mother for my rebellious resistance to her during my toddler years and early childhood, by the time I was seven I had begun to make a concentrated effort to swallow my anger and to try and be more submissive to her in order to prevent even more harsh consequences for my continued rebellion. It was then that the IBS problems first began to manifest in my digestive system. Then, after the tragic drowning of my brother when I was nine, I felt extremely guilty, thinking that my anger and resentment towards his bullying efforts to put and keep me beneath him had possibly caused his untimely death. The guilt for that was particularly stressful for me and I fought it emotionally as I had physically fought those who bullied me. I did it by "beating up on myself" with self-condemnation and defamation, and so the IBS malady came again, with increasing pain and colon distress.
Because I hated myself for being such an angry, resentful person, I began to doubt and lose confidence in myself and to feel inferior relative to other people, particularly those like my mother who bullied and degraded me. My pride then rushed to rescue me from going into a deep well of depression and self-destruction by motivating me to be more cooperative and submissive to my mother and the other authorities in my life. I surmised that if I served and pleased people instead of rebelling and fighting against them, that they would no longer have any reason to punish or degrade me and I would no longer have a reason to resent them and to feel guilty for it.
Although I thought that the people-pleasing service that I gave my mother, and later to my husband (who soon became a replica of my bullying, fault-finding mother), would cause both of them to see me in a more favorable light and eliminate any further fault-finding defamation, I was shocked to find that the more I served either of them for that result, the more they required of me to give and do in order to have it. If I dared to protest or put up any resistance, they would then withhold their seeming love, and the same old bullying degradation would begin all over again to bring me into submission to them.
So, even though I was doing my best to not be angry or resentful towards anyone, the continued mistreatment of my mother and husband kept me emotionally upset and afraid that I would lose control, vent my rage towards them and then have to cope with the consequential guilt for doing it. However, because my submissiveness enabled them and others to continue to bully and mistreat me, there was a lot of continuing rage for me to suppress, so the IBS became chronic and I was under a doctor's care for several years--with a persistent low-grade temperature, constant soreness in my lower abdomen and my digestive system vacillating between constipation one day and diarrhea the next. The doctor who treated me at that time diagnosed the condition as not only being IBS, but also Ulcerative Colitis, aggravated into that intensity by the suppressed resentment I felt towards both my husband and mother (who by then were competing with each other over who would possess and control me.)
To cope with the condition, the doctor prescribed nerve and emotion depressants, as well as Antacid and bowel soothing preparations, and by faithfully taking them, carefully monitoring my diet and becoming more emotionally passive and people-pleasing, there was a notable lessening in the re-occurring of the IBS and Colitis condition; again adding creditability to my theory that suppressed emotions greatly affected (if not actually created) those maladies in my physical body.
Because of my submissive character in my teens and throughout my adult years, there was one other significant physical malady that developed in me, which had even more subtle emotional undertones to it than that of the IBS and Colitis. Because I had been so emotionally weak in allowing other people to dominate and cause me to suppress my individuality in order to serve them, my self-condemnation for failing to "stand my ground" in that regard began to be reflected in another area of my body. Late in my life, some unknown factor began to impair the nerves in my legs and feet so that I am now, at eighty-five, so unbalanced and unsteady on my feet that I cannot stand alone nor walk without the balancing support of a sturdy walker.
Although this particular impairment is often created by a Diabetic condition in the patient, my blood glucose tests consistently remain in the normal range, and even though a few years ago I spent three days at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, being tested for Diabetes and having pins stuck in my legs to test the nerve/muscle interaction, the doctors still ruled out Diabetes as being the cause for me to lose the mobility in my legs.
Because of this lack of concrete information as to the creation of my malady, I again concluded that because I resented myself for being such a bad, inferior creation I, unknowingly, also resented and judged God. Therefore, my soul or individuality was separated from his grace, which then allowed a negative spirit to come into my consciousness, It then usurped God's role as the directing, motivating spirit within me and directed my Immune System to function as a negative, destructive factor in my body, rather than to protect my body from viral and bacterial infections, or to cope with them once they had invaded my body. In that negative capacity my Immune System then began to attack and impair the nerves that provide the electrical impulses to the muscles in my legs so that they contract or expand to meet the demand being placed on them.
Due to the impairment of the nerves in my legs. the muscles no longer function properly. So, I then see my physical malady of not being able to stand my ground as being the "effect" of a spiritual cause, which was the self-hatred I had for being such a weak, inferior person that I failed to "stand my ground," character-wise and as a spiritual "Child of God." That hatred was then transferred to my body and was replicated in my legs and feet, so that I now cannot "stand my ground" physically.
