The mind-body connection:

that false idea of dualism...

Lately, I’ve been reading about the emerging field of psychoimmunoneurology, a fancy way of exploring the mind and body connection, how stress and emotions (especially ones repressed) may have on the body’s immunity and development of diseases. In Dr. Gabor Mate’s [co-written] book, The Myth of Normal as well as in When the Body Says No.

The above mouthful of a field is defined as “the study of the effect of the mind on health and resistance to disease.”

It sounds simple and straight-forward enough. And yet, how odd it is that we have to have this field and explore it in our culture in the year 2023.

Think about it:

It reveals the false dualism of how we approach medicine in western cultures. That we can parse out the mind from the body and the body from the mind and external factors from how it influences the internal realm.

In other words, certainly there is a mind-body connection that ought to be explored in practicing medicine. And yet, it seems to take holistic and alternative medicines, traditional indigenous knowledges, or fancy terms like psychoneuroimmunology to get us to even think about these things.

I get that the connections are hard to measure with research and empirical data. I’m not a scientist but it only stands to reason that when there are many different organs and systems functioning and hormones and all the things working together, congruously, that it must be difficult to ascertain where certain hormones or organs or systems are going awry.

Better, it seems, easier, to parse them out…

Yet, still, our bodies work as together as an integrated, interconnected system. No amount of parsing it out into separate organs and attempting to distinguish between the mind and the body, or the lifestyle and social, atmosphere, cultural components, are ever going to really ever give us any complete unified idea of how the mind, stress, emotion, affect the body’s responses to diseases.

I see trauma, obviously, as an important part of this conversation. As I’ve discussed in this newsletter, and from the time of PTSD’s classification as a diagnosis in 1980 and current research has noted, trauma involves both the brain and the body. We can’t simply push it to a mental illness or even simply a psychological or psychiatrist condition, in the truest sense. Because of how it affects us, very viscerally.

Because it’s not all in the mind, but very physiological and in the body as well.

In short, I marvel more and more, at how much the emotions and stress and trauma and abuse effect the body/mind, leading to diseases…how so much of this has been left so largely unexplored.