How does a psychosomatic symptom arise
Today I will tell you two stories, very vivid and obvious, such rarely occur. This is about how psychosomatics can arise. Colleagues once told me for a long time, and I decided to share it with you. It's not to condemn heroes, not to walk a white coat, but to reflect. Is there anything similar in your own experience? Do we always know what is happening to us? Can we change something?
The story is the first. A mother and son of 25 years old came to see a psychoanalyst. The only son brought up without a husband. He loved his mother, she also loved him, and it did not occur to him that the mother could be somehow against his communication with the girls. While he was just dating them, his mother was very much in favor, but now that he had already applied to the court twice, something strange was going on. He was beginning to have a digestive disorder. The diarrhea was simple. He couldn't even get out of the house to work, he was on sick leave. The girls were offended and disappeared, and my mother said something like: "Well, good, since they are ready to leave you now, what would happen next? They're not ready to you. He agreed, because his mother's words were logical.
Together, they bypassed a bunch of specialists, none of them found a reason, assigned something symptomatic. How they got to the analyst was a mystery. It happens sometimes - from hopelessness. When no one has helped, you grab at shamans, psychics, sorcerers, and psychoanalysts in the same row. Just someone from friends, and they decided.
This analyst, a professor of psychiatry, also asked him a direct question: "What exactly do you do to your mother with your diarrhea? He replied, "I'm shitting on her.
The situation was a dead end for him. He loved his mother, he appreciated everything she had done for him, going against her will would be a betrayal, so he thought. He felt that his mother was actually afraid of being alienated. But "I couldn't admit to myself that I was a wimp like that, Mom's son," and that wasn't why he wasn't getting married at all, but because there wasn't one who would take him in, "with all the diarrhea.
But the story is second. The origin of the psychosomatic problem is also clearly visible here, but also a successful and quick (which is not always the case) solution. I knew the heroine personally, when we were studying together for psychotherapists.
She was a very nice and conflict-free woman who had been suffering from eczema for two months. She was over 60 and worked as a district doctor. Exema was on the back surface of her right hand, and she was embarrassed that it could be seen by her patients, who didn't always realize it wasn't contagious or safe for them at all. That's why we had to treat her right away. But the ointments prescribed by the "skinner" did not help
She lived with her son and daughter-in-law. We lived together, and there was no time to quarrel, everybody worked, and everyone was a doctor. It was my son's second marriage. The first, by her own admission, she destroyed herself by constantly interfering in the young people's relationships and teaching them how to do so. The son did not marry after the divorce for a long time, and our heroine gave herself a vow that if she got married a second time, she "would be silent, no matter what happens.
In the morning, the three of them had breakfast, and after the son and his wife went to work, throwing dirty dishes in the sink. She was washing their plates and cups, being late for work and angry at her careless daughter-in-law, without telling her anything. It never occurred to her to be mad at her son, and the man, the dishes, was none of his business. But at the table, she always held a cup with her right hand, on the back of which she "shone" eczema. She was sympathetic, advised by the best doctors, but she was reluctant to see them, despite the fact that the work of eczema caused trouble.
Already at the first meetings with a psychotherapist, she realized all the illegitimacy of his claims addressed only to his daughter-in-law. She considered her son's behavior in this situation to be normal ("a man in the house should not wash dishes"), and also realized that it was her daughter-in-law she wanted to find out about. After all, the daughter-in-law is a woman who was brought to their house by her son, and it is he who should talk to his wife and decide how they will distribute the duties of cleaning among themselves.
Soon she found the strength to talk to her son, and it turned out that neither he nor his daughter-in-law saw a problem in this, but willingly heard her and began to wash dishes in turn, all three of them. The symptom disappeared about a week later. She was so surprised that she decided to get a new specialization.