If you have endometriosis, there is a good chance you’ve already spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand what is happening within your body.
You may have looked at hormones, inflammation, nutrition, supplements, surgery, pain management, exercise, stress reduction, gut health, pelvic health, or a combination of several different approaches. Whilst you may see improvements from these things, and I absolutely believe they have an important role to play.
I also speak to women who feel as though they have done everything they can think of and yet still don’t feel as though they have the full picture.
This is the reason for writing this blog to highlight a commonly overlooked part of the picture that is worthy of consideration.
One of the things that fascinates me about the human body is that it doesn’t just respond to what we eat, the supplements we take, or the treatments we receive.
It also responds to our:
- Experiences
- Relationships,
- Environment
- Beliefs
- Emotions
and the ways we have learned to navigate life.
Every experience creates a response within the nervous system. Whilst some responses are short lived and resolve naturally, others can become deeply ingrained patterns that continue running in the background long after the original situation has passed. These can be things you barely think of as much as things that replay on your mind.
An Important Consideration
It’s important to remember that we are all individuals and have our own unique blend that may or may not create physical symptoms you are experiencing.
During private sessions we can directly find out what your body is still holding onto and heal those memories.
At the same time there are also a number of core themes that come up for people with endometriosis. So as you read through this article, take these points as possible insights rather than a fixed explanation.
The precise things that are still held at your mind/body level will be personal to you, and that is something we can explore should you wish to work together.
Common subconscious mind/body themes for endometriosis include:
- Suppressing your emotions.
- Holding back your true feelings.
- Struggling to express your needs.
- Feeling disconnected from your own power.
- Carrying unresolved hurt.
- Living with a nervous system that has spent years trying to keep you safe.
Many women become accustomed to putting themselves last, adapting to other people’s expectations, and losing touch with parts of themselves in the process.
You don’t wake up one morning and decide to suppress your feelings, doubt yourself, avoid conflict, or ignore your own needs.
These patterns usually develop over many years.
They are often intelligent adaptations to situations where expressing yourself didn’t feel safe in the moment, where your needs weren’t met, or where becoming the strong one seemed like the only option available. The conscious mind may move on, but the body can continue responding to those experiences in a loop for decades afterwards.
Endometriosis and the emotions that have been held in
One of the strongest mind-body themes connected with endometriosis is suppressed emotion. This can include anger, grief, hurt, fear, resentment, frustration or sadness that never had the chance to be fully expressed, most likely because it felt too overwhelming at the time or you were told not to.
Many women become very skilled at coping. They can hold a family together, run a business, support everyone else, manage a household, and keep going even when they are exhausted. It’s no wonder your body can begin to feel like it’s screaming.
Your body doesn’t ignore what you’ve learned to override or push down out of the way. If you’ve spent years swallowing down what you really wanted to say, holding back tears, minimising your needs, or pretending that something didn’t hurt when it absolutely did, the body may still be carrying the charge of those experiences which can then manifest as physical pain.
This is where the subconscious mind is so important. We can consciously decide that something is in the past. We can tell ourselves we should be over it. We can understand why someone behaved the way they did and even think we’ve forgiven them. But if the body and subconscious mind still hold the emotional memory, it’s still there.
Difficulty Expressing Needs, Feelings and Boundaries
Another common theme with endometriosis is difficulty expressing your needs, feelings and boundaries. This may show up as being the peacemaker, the helper, the one who doesn’t want to upset anyone, or the person who finds it easier to say yes than deal with the discomfort of saying no.
At the other end of the spectrum, you may be highly independent and capable because needing anything from anyone has never felt particularly safe.
If you have learned to adapt yourself around other people, it can become so automatic that you don’t notice you’re doing it. You may know what everyone else needs, wants, expects, likes and dislikes, yet find it much harder to identify what is true for you. Over time, this can create a real disconnection from your own inner voice.
The mind-body message behind endometriosis can include the theme of being lived by others, where life has become shaped around other people’s needs, opinions, judgements or expectations.
This can happen in obvious ways through:
- Controlling relationships.
- Criticism.
- Family pressure.
- Difficult childhood dynamics.
It can also happen more subtly through years of trying to be:
- Good.
- Agreeable.
- Capable.
- Easy to be around.
- The person who doesn’t cause a fuss.
The problem is that the body knows when we are not living from our truth. It knows when we are smiling whilst feeling furious, saying yes whilst everything inside is saying no, and when our needs have been pushed down for so long that we barely recognise them anymore.
Personal power, self-doubt and trusting yourself
Another theme that often comes up with endometriosis is around trust in yourself.
I see this a lot with women who have spent years questioning themselves, putting other people’s needs first, or looking outside of themselves for the answers. Somewhere along the way, you may have stopped listening to that inner knowing that recognises when something feels right and when it doesn’t.
Sometimes this starts in childhood. Perhaps your feelings weren’t taken seriously, or you learnt that keeping the peace was easier than speaking up. Maybe you were regularly told you were too sensitive, making a fuss, or overreacting. After hearing those messages often enough, it’s easy to begin questioning your own thoughts and feelings.
This can also come from relationships where you felt unheard, dismissed or criticised. Over time, you may find yourself asking everyone else’s opinion before making decisions, worrying about getting things wrong, or needing reassurance that you are doing the right thing.
Eventually, this can become so normal that you don’t even realise you’re doing it. You may know exactly what everyone else needs whilst struggling to identify what you need. Do you automatically consider how a decision will affect everyone around you before considering how it affects you?
Or do you notice that you’ve become so used to adapting to other people that you’ve lost touch with parts of yourself along the way.
When we look at the mind-body themes associated with endometriosis, this loss of connection to yourself appears again and again. Your opinions, creativity, passions, instincts/intuition, these are all what makes you, you.
By reconnecting you can feel like you’ve come home to yourself by allowing yourself to do things you enjoy, expressing what you really think, making decisions with more confidence, and acknowledging that your needs matter too.
Trauma and its impact on the nervous system
The trauma linked with endometriosis may be a one off event or an accumulation of experiences that left you feeling unsafe, unsupported, abandoned, betrayed, criticised, rejected, taken advantage of, or emotionally alone at times when you didn’t have the capacity or resources to deal with them fully. Those experiences can become unhealed wounds.
The nervous system responds to all of this. It learns from our experiences and then does its best to protect us from anything it believes could be a threat in the future. This can become exhausting when the body continues to live from old survival responses long after the original situation has passed.
This can show up as being constantly on alert, planning ahead, trying to stay in control, and bracing for what may happen next.
Control can become the way the nervous system tries to create safety.
If life has felt unpredictable, painful or unsafe in the past, it makes sense that a part of you may try to manage everything tightly in order to prevent more hurt.
In these situations you can’t simply switch off. Do you ever have people say ‘You just need to relax..’ or ‘Why can’t you just let it go. Frustrating isn’t it. When you can’t there’s a good reason for it. Your nervous system is responding from events that have happened in the past.
If the subconscious mind and nervous system believe that protection is necessary, no amount of positive thinking, trying to relax or stop thinking about it, will permanently convince your body otherwise.
This is because the stored response is held in your body, through methods such as those within PSYCH-K® we can find out what they are and bring your body back to safety.
When you do, your thoughts, beliefs and opinions about yourself naturally change.
This may relate to your own experiences, the women in your family, or messages you absorbed growing up about what it meant to be a woman.
For some of you, there may be painful experiences around periods, fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, birth, sexuality, body image or feeling dismissed by medical professionals.
For others, there may be memories of being controlled, judged, shamed, criticised, silenced or made to feel unsafe in your body.
There may also be patterns passed down through your female line, where generations of women learned to cope, endure, stay quiet, put themselves last, or carry far more than they should ever have had to carry.
These patterns can become woven into the subconscious mind.
You may consciously want to feel confident, creative, expressive and connected to your body, whilst another part of you holds fear around being seen, judged, powerful, sensual, emotional or fully yourself.
The mind-body message here often points towards a split between the woman you truly are and the woman you learned it was safer to be. That can create a huge internal conflict. One part wants to expand, create, express, receive and live more fully. Another part may still be trying to protect you by keeping you small, careful, controlled or hidden.
This is why suppressed creativity appears too. Creativity is life force and expression. It is the ability to bring something through you and into the world. When that energy is restricted, judged, blocked or suppressed for years, it makes sense that the body may begin to show us where life has stopped flowing freely.
What happens if insight is not enough?
Recognising these patterns can bring a real sense of relief because suddenly things start to make more sense. You may begin to see why your body reacts in certain ways, why you find it difficult to express yourself and feel responsible for everyone, or why your nervous system struggles to settle even when life looks fine on paper. Which can make it frustrating wh.en you simply can’t seem to stop yourself
However, insight alone does not always change the automatic reflex response (this is a clue that this is coming from a stored memory). You can know exactly where a pattern comes from and still find yourself repeating it, because many of these responses sit within the subconscious mind and nervous system rather than the logical part of the brain.
This is where approaches such as PSYCH-K®, and Root Cause Therapy can help to identify and change subconscious beliefs that may be keeping old patterns in place and release any memories that still have an emotional charge and inner dialogue attached to them.
The beauty of these Methods is that you don’t spend hours going over every detail of the past or spend years trying to unpick everything.
Your body and subconscious mind know exactly where we need to go and what needs to change. When we work at that level, patterns that have felt stuck for years can begin to shift because we are no longer trying to think our way out of something that was never created by logic.
A different way to look at endometriosis
To come back to the beginning of this blog there can of course be many layers to endometriosis and it is always important to assess any condition from all angles on a physical as well as emotional level. The purpose of this article is to bring your awareness to the connections and memories your mind-body may have held onto and how they may be showing up in your life.
Remember this isn’t about pigeonholing what the mind/body link may be, or reducing endometriosis to one simple emotional cause. I hope this has given an extra dimension to understanding that we are whole human beings. Our bodies, minds, emotions, beliefs, memories, nervous systems and lived experiences are not separate. They are constantly communicating with each other from the body up.
When we start to look at the whole picture, we may begin to understand why the body has been responding in the way it has. We may also begin to see what is asking to change, be released, expressed, and brought back into balance.
If you have been living with endometriosis and feel there may be more to your symptoms than the physical body alone, this may be something to explore. There may be memories, trapped emotions, subconscious beliefs or old survival responses that are ready to change now, and you do not need to work it all out by yourself before you begin.
Lorna & Rachael Kennard-Wall
We both help people to find the mind-body messages behind their symptoms.
We both work in-person from our home clinic in near Kingsbury Episcopi, South Somerset and over Zoom with clients all over the world.
