Because the onset and decline of my symptoms all map directly to my experience of trauma and the process of trauma identification and resolution.

Here’s something for you to think about, as I think there’s a flaw in your question: do you think the onset of my symptoms was “natural”, just as the recovery was “natural”?

I believe in causality, and I can comfortably accept that chronic illness is a natural consequence of chronic emotional trauma.

Also, there’s plenty of scientific theory and research findings linking stress/trauma with physiological conditions like inflammation, immune weakness, digestion etc, which aligns with my experience.

But again, causality is the key. Illness doesn’t happen without a cause, and in my case, trauma was the most plausible cause, given that my experience of illness maps directly to my experience of carrying unresolved trauma, and no other cause is apparent.

How can you prove your recovery wasn't due to a sort of a placebo effect, and that the act of you believing you found a panacea for recovery through addressing your childhood traumas was what was actually causing a cascade of neurological mechanisms that made you feel better, rather than working through childhood traumas themself?

These discussions always follow the same script :)

Before I started the trauma-healing therapies, I'd spent about 6-7 years trying to get well using other methods; initially mainstream medicine and mainstream psychiatry including antidepressants, then things like diet (paleo etc), exercise, nutrition supplementation, meditation, yoga.

I believed in them all just as much as I believed in the trauma approach, yet my health continued to get worse. Indeed, when I started the trauma approach I didn't believe in it. Yet it worked far better than anything I'd tried before.

Over the time I've undertaken the trauma healing, I've lapseed in and out of focusing on diet, exercise, etc. These things are of course important; I wouldn't be getting healthy if I was spending all day on the couch consuming burgers and Coke non-stop.

But my experience is that they don't have any positive effect if I'm not also doing the trauma healing work.

Also, you might examine/contemplate what the placebo effect actually is. If it's healing that comes about due a change in emotional state (i.e., belief and optimism that a cure is being implemented) then it serves more to prove the theory than cast doubt on it.

Edit: added the fact that I'd been sought help from mainstream medicine at the beginning of this journey.

> initially mainstream psychiatry including antidepressants, then things like diet (paleo etc), exercise, nutrition supplementation, meditation, yoga.

Of all of those I think only excercise has proven positive effect on some things. Others are at best proven not to be harmful.

Partly true.

Strenuous exercise actually made my condition worse. That turns out to be a symptom of CFS/ME, I found out later.

These therapies generally proved to be ineffective when I didn't do any emotional work.

Since doing the emotional work, moderate exercise and nutrition work and stretching exercises (yoga/pilates) add to the effectiveness of my efforts.

If you tried to improve your condition with strenuous excercise... plus all other things you listed... paleo.. antidepressants... I'm beginning to suspect your improvement might be completely due to you stopping doing bad things to yourself while trying to improve your health.

You remind me of the people that start little unhappy but make themselves miserable for life by strenuously searching their happiness around everywhere.

> moderate exercise and nutrition work and stretching exercises (yoga/pilates)

That actually sounds like reasonable thing to do to your body.

Regardles of my intelectual objections I'm glad you finally started to improve.

> Regardles of my intelectual objections I'm glad you finally started to improve.

Thanks for the kind words and the discussion :)

I understand the urge to be skeptical and dismissive. I've been like that myself over this very topic before I experienced and learned what I have.

Please do keep an open mind and think about what I've tried to convey. After all, the whole reason I shared my experience is because it aligns with aligns with the scientific hypothesis that's in the very article on which this discussion is based. So it's not just something I dreamed up. There is a growing body of research on this topic - though I wish it could somehow grow faster.

Best wishes to you.

> Illness doesn’t happen without a cause

Put 20 balls in 10 buckets each. Choose pair of buckets randomly and move one ball from one bucket to the other. After some iterations you end up with buckets withe many balls and buckets with few.

You might think about buckets with few balls as 'ill'. Did their illness have a cause? Of course. The cause was the were subjected to random process. Just like your body is when it lives.

You can easily see how fragile your body is to entropy if you just stop the flow of blood in your body for few days. You go from living being that could stay in decent shape for few decades to pile of bloated rotting meat. And all that due to nothing more than spontaneous random various processes.

There are always causes but Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character for a reason. In real life situation you very rarely can 'eliminate what's impossible' to be left with one possible cause 'however improbable'.

If you end up with improbable then it's nearly always because you eliminated something you shouldn't have or alltogether missed whole bunch of possibilities.

False analogy: the body isn't a closed system with outcomes determined primarily by randomness. Every state is a consequence of prior conditions, even if they're too complex to discern (same as weather).

That wasn't intended as an analogy just ilustration that causes of strong outcomes might be completely pseudo-random.

When you have pseudo random generator then everything is consequences of prior conditions yet some buckets will end up 'ill' and some 'healthy' without any singular cause.

Besides, body not being closed system strengthens my point that its state is result of so many factors that pinning something as vague as being healthy on a single cause (especially internal and psychological) is usually not a good idea. Especially if you don't know the mechanism.

It's not a single cause; it's several thousand life events and all the decisions, behavioural patterns, and internal bodily functions/reactions that are influenced by them. Thanks to years of research and experimentation I understand the mechanisms quite well. And it's turned out to be a very good idea for me.

Your position just confirms your position. It's circular and can not provide the slightest bit of evidence toward the efficacy of the procedure. Sorry.

This is not a peer review process. I’m not here to persuade anyone who is determined to be skeptical. You’re welcome to propose another cause for my illness and explanation for the fact that it kept getting worse while I kept enduring trauma and started getting better as soon as I started resolving that trauma. Others can judge the merits of responding with a sneering dismissal to the perspective I’m trying to share.

There's a tendency toward misguided objectivity/rationalism here sometimes, but it should be clear your reasoning is fine, even it doesn't prove anything, which you seem very aware of. What more could someone want from an individual internet comment?

You missed where he said "research findings linking stress/trauma with physiological conditions like inflammation, immune weakness, digestion etc, which aligns with my experience."

My experience is similar to Tom's, and the science is increasingly showing that stress and emotions are linked in pain, fatigue, neuroinflammation, cytokines, etc.

> linking

That's pretty weak. I can much easier imagine being prone to inflammation causing psychological trauma than other way around.

Besides... you tried to treat chronic muscle and joint pain, digestive issues, fatigue/lethargy, skin conditions, signs of inflammation with psychiatry and antidepressants? Initially? That's really bad starting point to approach collection of very probably unrelated problems.

Of course I saw conventional physicians first, multiple times over several years. My health kept getting worse.

Poor choice of words. There is extensive research showing that psychological stress causes inflammation (for example), and we have known this for quite a few decades.

I wouldnt expect antidepressants to be a primary treatment.

Stress in research is pretty broad term.

"Stress is a state of threatened homeostasis provoked by a psychological, environmental, or physiological stressor."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5476783/

I think that just rising the pressure, heart rate and increasing few hormones without moving muscles enough causes inflamation. The reason is not important. It doesn't matter if it was caused by your mom telling you she does not love you or by you wining at slot machine or breathing city air or loud noise.

> I think that just rising the pressure, heart rate and increasing few hormones without moving muscles enough causes inflamation.

Correct.

> The reason is not important.

I didn't say it did from an objective point of view, but in order to remove the inflammation you need to identify and discontinue the emotion that's causing it.

Maybe the use of the word "trauma" is a red herring for you. It's any emotional state that causes a chronic negative physiological state.

I have to agree with you that chronically reminding yourself about a bad thing that happend to you can spike your pressure and other potentially dangerous stuff and if you can talk yourself out of this habit it might improve your health.

With myself I observe that I tend to revisit my past minor traumas only when my body is in bad shape. Not enough sleep, flu, not eating enough. Then I obsess about past suffering. But after I get enough rest or flu passes, puff, my obsession with trauma is gone. So I'm not quite sure if traumas are often the cause not just symptom.

>But after I get enough rest or flu passes, puff, my obsession with trauma is gone. So I'm not quite sure if traumas are often the cause not just symptom.

That is true for the most part. However sometimes there are ongoing stressors that aren't easily resolved (such as a problematic relationship or job). In those cases the stress is ongoing, and can lead to detrimental health effects.

And even when the stress has been removed, sometimes the illness can continue (as happens in CFS, which I suffered from myself). In these situations it may be the stress and depression from the illness itself that leads to a vicious cycle.