Illness, somatization of lovelessness
Brigitte Champetier de Ribes
Living in the heart, this would be living healthy.
Every time I judge, reject or despise someone, I trigger a reaction in the field of belonging to correct this exclusion: the field itself will return (to me or to my descendants) that intention of exclusion, mirrored, by means of a metaphor of my rejection.
I will experience physically, in myself, in my own body, the exclusion I wish for the other, until I become aware of this and return to the love for that person and for myself.
This phenomenon, which serves reinclusion, is the illness, which I am going to reject with the same intensity with which I reject that person.
Our first experience of exclusion goes back to our first months of life, when our unconditional and magic love stumbled upon the first deprivation or the first trauma, and, as an innocent baby, we run head on into the first crack of this blind trust in life.
The unexpected encounter with that pain, with that first pain of love, is too much for that baby: he cannot live out that pain, he does not know how to manifest it. And the pain is replaced by the secondary emotions of fear, anger, guilt and shame that will allow a pseudo protection for the child.
That is where the NO to the mother, the NO to life, the NO to love, is formed. NOs that will become our primary resource when faced with situations that catch us by surprise, deceiving our blind trust again. Fear, aggressiveness, and rejection strengthen every time we are faced with a conflict that breaks the balance we had achieved. And in self-defence, we expel from our lives both the conflict –which means life as it is-, and the person that promotes it.
When we take the decision of seeing the person we have rejected as equal to us, when we accept the presence of that conflict in our life, illness is transformed.
Before getting to accept life as it is, we tend to go through a stage that is complementary to the previous one, a phase of physical as much as mental repair. We identify with the excluded person, we are in the victim state and, sometimes, we even give up on life completely.
Following the pattern of our first months once more, we now search for independence and protection, wrapping ourselves up in complaints and accusations against the healthy and the illness. Again the NO to life as it is emerges, with its procession of impotence, fear, self-pity, envy, resentment, guilt, manipulation. And the suffering of our body, which is going to be the reflection of our victimhood.
Until we accept to love life as it is again, to love ourselves as we are, to love the illness, to love the conflicts and the crisis. At that moment, the field returns that energy of love to us in the form of health.
Health’s mission is to reconcile us with life, with our mother, with the others and with ourselves.
Illness serves health. Illness is love.
Brigitte Champetier de Ribes
Published in GuíaGente, November 2012