Into (And Out of) The Abyss

A brief history of illness and recovery

The Descent

I remember not being able to spell the word “through.” I’d done it thousands of times, and here I was – college graduate, educator, literal teacher of spelling – flummoxed by the most mundane task. I was sitting on the couch of my home in Wellington, New Zealand, attempting to type out an email response to a student’s question when I suddenly became aware that something – actually, everything – was wrong. My muscles radiated with soreness, my vision began to swim, and the contents of my mind felt like they were locked inside a safe, only I’d forgotten where I’d put the key. The day was September 3rd, 2018, and every day after was worse than the one before. 

Over the ensuing two and a half years, new symptoms developed without any obvious cause or explanation: week-long headaches, gastrointestinal issues, and unrelenting physical fatigue. By far the worst were the cognitive deficits – my customarily quick mind had ground to a halt, making it difficult to start a sentence with any confidence I could finish it. Conversations became an adventure, then a chore, and then a horror show; eventually, I stopped trying to have them, figuring I’d best spare anyone unlucky enough to cross my path.

Perhaps the greatest irony of this story is that, at the end of 2019, I moved back to the United States to dig in and find out what was wrong with me, once and for all. As I considered it, 2020 would be the year health took center stage. (I was more right than I ever wanted to be.)

The Bottom

I spent the first few months of 2020 visiting a variety of doctors – most kind, a few not, but all equally unhelpful. Each one offered some variation of “We tried everything we have, but we couldn’t find anything” or “You’re physically fine, maybe some time at home will fix you up.” My pet theories – black mold, zoonotic bacteria, the mysterious “chronic Lyme disease” – all went nowhere.

With each successive swing and miss, I became more despondent. I had been physically incapacitated in New Zealand, but I could at least hold out hope that I hadn’t yet turned over every stone in search of a solution. Now I had, and I was no closer. I’d walked myself to the edge of a cliff, and there was no turning back; I couldn’t magic away all the negative tests and friendly reminders that I was okay, actually. What lay before me was the stark realization that this – pain, suffering, dread, the couch in my mom’s basement – was my life now, and there was no indication that the situation would ever resolve. 

Then, in May of 2020, my fortunes changed with no warning or preamble of any kind. And it started the same way every Hallmark Channel feel-good story does: with a LinkedIn message.

The Meeting

Nearly a decade earlier, I had applied for some tutoring work that didn’t materialize. The owner of the company had apparently kept my resumé on file, so in search of someone to fill a new role, he reached out. At the time, I kept just a few sessions a week – enough to pay health insurance premiums and contribute a bit to my mom’s household expenses. The idea of a real, official meeting with someone older than 16 scared me. Was I coherent enough to do this? Could I focus on what he said and offer appropriate responses? Was there any chance he’d think I had the capability to do what he’d ask?

Our first meeting went smoothly enough, and I asked for a week to think about the opportunity (and to recover from what felt like a marathon’s expenditure of energy). When we met again, I trusted the guy well enough to tell him a few particulars of my situation and to politely deny his offer. I expected something along the lines of “I’m sorry to hear that. Let me know if your situation changes,” but what I actually got in response was far more confusing. He asked question after question about my symptoms; having sensed very little of this inquisitiveness from any doctor, I was happy to oblige. 

We chatted for another 15 minutes about my travails, at which point he smiled and said, “You’re not gonna believe me when I say this, but when I was your age, I had exactly the same thing.”

He gave me the basics of his backstory – debilitating back pain in his early 20s that eventually snowballed into symptoms much like mine. Apparently there was a book that cured him and would cure me, too: “You have to read The Mindbody Prescription by John Sarno.” I hadn’t read a book all the way through in nearly two years – brain fog made even a page at a time a real undertaking – so I bought the audiobook as soon as our call wrapped. 

Barely a chapter in, the fog lifted – not entirely, not even halfway, but enough to clearly indicate that I’d found what I was looking for. To that point in my life, understanding had always been a prerequisite to truth; I could never throw my weight behind an idea unless I could follow premises to conclusions with certainty. So it was the strangest sensation to be confronted with a truth so obvious and piercing that I had no choice but to believe, despite the fact that I couldn’t begin to understand how or why any of the details worked. 

One thing, however, was clear: I’d opened up to the book’s proposition that my problems could have their roots in my mind, and I felt better than I had in two years. No prescription or procedure could do for me what simple recognition of an idea had. I was both grateful and utterly bewildered.

So began my journey into the world of psychosomatic conditions, disorders with no physical cause and no clear cure. These range from the commonplace – back aches, knee twinges – to the obscure – chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and many others. For the past four years, I’ve spent a small part of every day learning about how these conditions develop and how they’re rectified. There’s no single skeleton explanation to each unique condition, but I do believe there is one thing that unites me and every other reluctant member of this club: we’re afraid all the time. Afraid of everything, but most importantly, afraid of our own bodies.

The Lesson

The sensation of acute pain might be the most universal human feeling. We’ve all rolled an ankle or touched a panhandle that was too hot. As our conscious minds process the pain, we scream and shout and dance around to shoo away the agony. No one enjoys the feeling, and that’s part of the point – negatively-coded messages force us to adjust our behavior immediately. We pull our hands away from the hot pan before we consciously know what happened, or we sit down to give our damaged foot a break. A few minutes after the incident, we’re back in control. Even in situations where the injury is more severe, we know that we’re not in grave peril; though a broken arm will take time to heal, we never doubt that it will. 

This is the purpose of uncomfortable sensations in healthy systems: they tell our brains there’s a problem that needs solving. But in brains paralyzed by fear, the messages between brain and body are distorted. Just as the fog of war makes it impossible for militaries to see a complete picture of their battle, a pervasive climate of fear makes it impossible for the brain to distinguish the benign from the truly dangerous. In such a setting, the safest thing to do is to assume the worst about every stimulus. Fear has a purpose, too – it keeps us alive. 

When my symptoms first appeared in late 2018, they were no more dangerous than the run-of-the-mill pains we all experience everyday. But inside my brain, fear was a hammer, and everything I saw, thought, and felt was a nail. So as I became consciously aware of these unusual and unpleasant sensations, my brain reacted to them the same way it reacted to everything: it set off alarms to remind me (as if I could ever forget) that I was under attack. Pain symptoms only relent once those alarms turn off, but in a brain dominated by fear, there is no “off” switch. There is only permanent, exhausting panic, both mind and body stuck in a Groundhog Day of fight-or-flight. 

A crucial fact of living inside these circumstances is that all of this happens with no conscious mental intervention whatsoever. It’s as automatic as normal pain processing. That’s what makes the problem so overwhelming: I knew something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t say what because the problem had no rational or analytical features. Fear is a subconscious feeling, responsible for keeping us safe even when our conscious minds are somewhere else. So when I’d summon my intellect and look inward, I was, in essence, bringing thoughts to a feelings fight. As my confusion and frustration grew, so too did my fear. It felt like being hunted; there was something out there, something that wanted to cause me harm, but I could never see it. The more I went looking, the better it hid from view.

Years passed this way, fear begetting pain and pain begetting fear. I was so deep in the throes of this cycle that I had no capacity to see it for what it was. Some days were better than others, but even the good ones were cursed: I was always ready for the other shoe to drop, for good to turn bad, for my symptoms to get worse yet. Every upswing only provided more downward momentum when I inevitably crashed back to Earth. That’s how the symptoms transformed from an alarming-but-tolerable nuisance to, a year later, an insurmountable burden that kept me in bed 20 hours a day. As the old neuroscience adage goes, “neurons that fire together wire together.” It’s plain to me now that the neurons in my brain associated with fear and pain were bound up as tightly as the pages of a book left out in the rain.

The Upswing

As I comprehended a version of this explanation in The Mind Body Prescription, I finally understood what was happening to me, and the fear abated – not completely, but enough to loosen the vise grip of my symptoms. Just enough, in fact, for me to behold the reality of the cycle of fear and pain for the first time. It had always been there, operating in the background, but with my focus directed solely at my symptoms and my attempts to eliminate it, I had completely missed the force behind the curtain pulling the strings the whole time. Fear underpins everything about psychosomatic suffering.

Where does this fear come from? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are people in the world. We all come from different circumstances and undergo unique formative experiences. It would not surprise me if there were common themes for those with psychosomatic conditions – neglect, abuse, bullying, violence, and the like. What unites all of us beyond doubt is that something taught us to be afraid, and we carried that lesson forward like wisdom from the ancients.

After finishing The Mindbody Prescription, my task felt plain as day: unlearn my fears, reform my life. Naturally, a task that staggering led to another bout of fear and pain – how am I ever going to root out all of this fear? (It turns out that recognizing fear as the problem doesn’t actually solve it – doing so just makes the fear metacognitive.) 

Thankfully, my hapless clicking on the internet eventually led me to the website for the Pain Psychology Center. Since July of 2020, I’ve met with a therapist there to, in effect, reconstruct my mind and my relationship to the world. If that sounds melodramatic, I understand. There are many times I’ve thought the same thing. But as I accrue more distance from the events that led me into and out of my condition, that description feels less and less like hyperbole – it’s just what happened.

There’s a scene at the end of Gravity where Sandra Bullock’s character, just after her space capsule lands back on Earth, finds her way to the beach to begin the long journey home. The frame zooms in on her feet as she stumbles, gathers herself, and slowly remembers how to put one foot in front of the other. Every successive step becomes more graceful, more certain, until the frame cuts to black. 

In a figurative sense, this is how I think about my work in therapy: I had to learn how to walk through the world again. A mind is built over decades; deconstructing it to the studs in a fraction of that time is, frankly, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But once I hit bedrock, I could see my fears for what they were and leave them behind. I could decide for myself what I wanted to think and believe and do, instead of feeling like those things were decided for me from some interior source I could not see.

I’m proud to say I now feel better than ever – physically, mentally, and emotionally. My world extends beyond the four walls of doctors’ offices and (thankfully) my mom’s basement. I am a human being again.

For a long time, I thought my experiences were unique, that only my specific combination of life history and psyche could give rise to my condition. In a very narrow sense, that’s true – no one else will confront what I have in exactly the same way. But in a much broader and more important sense, experiences like mine are shockingly common; there are innumerable people out there going through variations of the same story. My hope is that, in time, they will feel their experiences validated and trust that life exists beyond their tightly circumscribed worlds, even if that doesn’t ring true right now. Mere belief is the first step.