The notion that the appropriate response to experiencing “symptoms” is to seek their immediate removal is a bizarre product of our time which has become dangerously ordinary. It positions us immediately against our bodies, hearts, and souls, and frames them as systems that are prone to meaningless malfunction, like an iPhone engineered to break after a certain time for no apparent reason. People with lots of symptoms, or more severe symptoms, are deemed very unwell, and by virtue, less powerful, less important and less good than those who are not symptomatic. In our capitalist economic structures, they may also be less productive and therefore less valued or successful.
Some modern psychotherapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy, offer the beginnings of an antidote to this way of thinking, suggesting that we find room for our symptoms alongside us rather than aiming for their eradication. Psychoanalysis and bioenergetic therapies hold a reverence for symptoms that is deeper still - in these models, symptoms are treated as great truth holders. They are investigated for their underlying cause and meaning, rather than removed with the uncurious, annihilating power of medications or sheer force of will.
In spite of the offerings of these modalities, people often prefer to seek symptom removal, rather than symptom healing, for many human reasons. They don’t want to suffer. They feel under-resourced to address deeper issues and frightened of the impacts of the potential reduction in their productivity and capacity that might come about if the symptoms are not removed or suppressed quickly. Their relationships are based on a version of them who is ‘okay'. They have become so numb and dissociated that they can no longer even really tune into their bodies or how they really feel. Their sense of self is built around ideas of resilience and infallibility. It feels like if they attend to the well of what’s actually wrong, it might be infinitely, unimaginably deep and unbearable. Perhaps, truly, their suffering is too great to begin to think of understanding without some relief first.
But what if we did things differently? What if we listened deeply to ourselves, and looked at our hurts as intricate information, not only about ourselves but about our world? Amidst the systems around us that demand our okay-ness, our masculinity, our productivity, our homogeneity, this can feel like a terrifying act of revolution. But in the absence of this revolution, we stay inside the excruciating narrative that anything that hurts is some kind of failing on our part. We are drastically underestimating the suffering we experience, not as a function of our original or primary symptoms, but as a result of this story. Real, deep healing gets to the bottom of what ails, and a love and respect for self that includes the parts of us in pain is the necessary starting point of this process, one that makes the process itself so much more meaningful and less agonising.
In the moments of heartbreak mandatory to a human life, we must consider those who are hurting (including and especially ourselves) not as less powerful or good, but as important custodians of the uncomfortable truth. We must honour ourselves and each other as powerful mirrors, rather than seeking to denigrate and numb and minimise our experiences for the sake of temporary convenience or comfort. This position begins as a personal one, in the cultivation of internal reverence, curiosity, and patience around our own symptoms. This might be anything - a recurring headache, persistent anxiety, a psychotic experience, conflict in a relationship. Anything but patient listening and space-making is at risk of being an act of self-hatred, the amputation of some part of ourselves we find annoying, unacceptable or distasteful. Anything we leave behind like this we will no doubt have to go back and retrieve in the end, in the same way we will have to acknowledge that every piece of plastic we’ve thrown “away” did not actually go away, but still exists, and is contributing to the slow suffocation of our Earth. Let us not make any more orphans of pieces of ourselves and pieces of our world, but instead, take responsibility for the lost children of our symptoms and listen with love to what they have to say.