How c-PTSD affects your physical health – introduction to psychosomatic shenanigans

Hey, brave soul!

Have you ever been to a doctor for symptoms, like headaches, tiredness and muscle pain, that were very real, but they could not find any physical explanation as to why? Many of us are running from one doctor to the other, getting tested and scanned repeatedly, without ever finding any answer as to why we suffer. For example, from chronic pain and fatigue, as these are typical for people like us.

In this blog article, I want to give you a brief introduction to the term “psychosomatic” and how this concept can possibly be the explanation for your chronic physical problems, that might have slipped your doctors until today.

• ClevelandClinic.org on Psychosomatic Disorder
• Wikipedia on Somatic Symptom Disorder
• VeryWellMind on Psychosomatic Disorder

One thing, that is crucial, is that you must know – and this is as well for all the supportive humans here – these symptoms are not all in your head. They are real, and they can go from slight pain all the way to fainting from pain.

One last thing, before we continue:
We have to differentiate between

“Somatic symptom disorder” -> which is when you have a physical symptom to begin with, like pain, and it stresses you out so much, that the symptom itself becomes worse.
“Psychosomatic disorder” -> is when the mental stress causes physical problems.

First off, some people are more sensitive to stress than others are. Yet, if you experience stress, you should know what happens in your body:

• A shift in your autonomic (it does that by itself, without your input) nervous system balance from parasympathetic (“rest-and-digest”) to sympathetic (“fight-or-flight”) happens.
• Changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. This is how your endocrine (hormonal) system adjusts your balance of hormones in response to stress.
• Increased blood pressure, heart rate and breathing. (Getting your muscles and brain pumped with oxygen and other things via the blood stream.)
• Increased blood glucose (sugar) levels. (More energy for your body to use immediately)
• Increased blood flow to skeletal muscles (the muscles that make you move).
• Inflammation. (May sound a bit weird, but yes. Stress can also come from infections, so your body turns on the heat and the gets the weapons ready to fight whoever wants to harm you. Even the smallest ones.)
• Decreased bodily regenerative (recovery) activity. (Recovering and being ready to react towards a dangerous situation are not combinable actions because the same system parts, need to operate in entirely different ways. F.e the heart rate, needs to be up for action and down for rest. And if you ever find yourself having both nearly at the same time, you might want to see an ER asap.)
• Changes in digestive activity. (Also a thing, that only works properly when you rest or do calm things, like walking in the park f.e)
• Decreased blood flow to your prefrontal cortex. This is a part of your brain that’s responsible for executive functions like focus, impulse control and emotional regulation. (We can argue now, if this is simply a side effect of the blood flow changes towards your muscles, or if it is actually beneficial. Back in ancient times, we had to make immediate decisions, in front of wild animals, hostile other humans or even nature events. Having your brain think this all through, simply takes too much time.)

Now that you know what your body does and how it affects different areas, you might start to understand why different professionals and practitioners will recommend you strategies to lower your stress.

From what I have learned over the course of time, what I missed someone telling me was this:

Your body (yes, the physical layer) cannot heal,
as long as it is convinced that you are still in danger.

Even if you manage to get your brain into a functional state again, and feel relatively relaxed at times – your body needs its own fair share of attention from you. For healing we need rest, and peace. So what happens, when we stay too long in our “activated” mode. Aka, the chronic stress kicking in.

Let’s find out by talking about the biggest baddie in the room first, that many of you might know:

You now have learned that your body has different tools of survival, that will be activated when you are stressed, may it be small or large stress.

Hypervigilance is a word that you definitely need to understand. It comes from the parts

Hyper → which means over/more/much
Vigilance → can be translated as Attention/Focus/Awareness

So, when we talk about “Hypervigilance” & Trauma, we need to understand that your conscious mind, and your body are two separate systems in this, from my experience.

Let me give you an example.

Yet, – and here comes the plot twist – your body will still remember the encounter way longer, and tighten itself in preparation for a terrifying and maybe even painful event. If everything goes well, this tightening and activation will happen on such a low scale, that you won’t notice it any more, even though it still might be there. Your body will be prepared, as a consequence of what it learned.

This is how it mostly goes & should go. Yes, a bit of rest-activation is good because f.e slipping on a wet floor and hurting your butt and back, becomes less likely, if your body has learned how to autonomously & immediately react to that situation (muscle tightening to protect structures and organs, moving a certain way to not fall or at least buffer the fall).

So, but what happens, when we have to endure many, similar yet different, encounters that are threatening to us, over the course of time? This small “left over activation & tightening”, will build up eventually, especially if we don’t take action to help our mind AND body, to let the stress go again.

Here are things that you might find yourself doing, that are indicators, that you might have stored up stress in your body:

• Sucking in the belly & hardening belly muscles
• Flat breathing
• Shoulders lifted to the ears (turtle mode)
• Cracking joints from permanently overly tightened muscles
• Tight neck and shoulders
• Tight lower back area
• Making fists when you are standing and nothing is really happening
• Crossing arms, protecting your body without a visible threat
• Jaw clenching
• Need to touch your hands, face, arms etc → self-soothing movements that are there to counteract your own stress-response

This is how it might feel:

• Uneasy feelings
• Feelings of not being able to sit calm and relaxed /Restlessness
• Eyes wandering abruptly
• Being easily irritated by stimuli from outside (sounds, people walking around, voices, smells, etc.)
• Being easily “on the edge” during social interactions (low levels of frustration tolerance, fast exploding or easily crying due to emotional overwhelm, sensitive to arguments and feeling a constant need to defend yourself / avoid situations altogether).

There are typical physical symptoms of stress, such as:

• Chest pain; feelings of your heart racing
• exhausting
• trouble sleeping (insomnia)
• headaches & dizziness
• shaking and tremors
• high blood pressure
• stomach & digestive problems
• changes of appetite
• sexual dysfunction
• weakened immune system

But there are also emotional and mental symptoms:

• Feeling overwhelmed
• Anxiety
• Irritability
• Depression

Please read that again: A psychosomatic stress response, f.e due to c-PTSD and the mind pushing the stress into the physical dimensions → can lead to anxiety & depression. That is critical to acknowledge.

Okay, phew! What a long article, huh? I am glad you stayed with me, and I hope you will now be able to understand your body and mind a bit better. Let us shortly recap what we have learned and then talk about the most important question.

You have learned now:

1. Psychosomatic means that the psyche/mind is causing physical symptoms.
2. Your mind can, when overwhelmed, and/or forced to function, push stress towards the physical dimension of yourself.
   • That can negatively impact the bodies’ functionality, causing pain, a weakened immune system and make us vulnerable to other diseases.
   • The list of symptoms is long, and especially because they are sometimes so wage, they can get diagnosed as something else.
3. That your body and your mind handle stress differently and therefore also need different treatments to calm down again, and avoid late effects.

What can you do now with your knowledge?

One, if not the most important first step is to acknowledge, what an incredible job your body has done for you, to hold the stress so you could continue living without collapsing.

👏Your👏Body👏Is👏A👏Survival👏Machine!👏

Many symptoms we have, we often deem as “Oh, I get old!”, “My stupid body doesn’t work any more!” and so on and so forth – all while we actively do not properly take care of it.

To be honest, if I could choose, I would not be a human’s body, nah-ah. In terms of stress management, I would be a Gazelle! Have you ever seen a gazelle get hunt by a cheetah? If she escapes you will find her shaking violently for a couple of minutes, before she simply continues with her happy little life. And this brings me to the first tool you can use to ease your body stress.

[Note: I am continuously working to expand this blog project, and will try to give you hands-on tools written and set up by me, but for the moment – please use these keywords to learn about following practises: ]

What you can look into, to ease your body & minds’ stress: (from easy to complex)

• Get moving, start walking around your neighbourhood (movement helps us process emotions!)
• Go swimming (it’s a bit exhausting, but not too much, and the water has many positive effects on your bodies perception
• Dance in your home to music you like
• Write a stress-diary (vital to start understanding where your stress triggers are)
• Shake it off, with TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises)
• Start journaling (or how I call it: gracefully vomiting your fears and worries onto paper, so your brain does not need to hold on to them any more)
• Start a mediation journey

When you choose to do workouts →please, do not do HIIT workouts, or things that stress your mind and body over the edge. Start small, and build bigger, depending on your stress level. Especially as a person with c-PTSD and a “performing survivor complex” as I call it, you might get yourself really intro trouble here.

Okay, this list might grow even longer over time, but for now, I would conclude this blog entry. Thank you for being here with me, and I hope I could give you a few insights and a few impulses for your healing journey or your way of supporting someone dear to you.

If you found this entry helpful, it would mean a lot if you could pay me a little coffee here on my support page, to fuel me for the next entries to come. ♥ Readers like you truly have the power and might to dictate which content creators grow and which projects are relevant and get pushed out more to the world. So if a coffee is out of reach, please make use of the sharing buttons below and help me reach even more people who could benefit from my blog project!

I hope you have a wonderful day / night now and I hope to see you soon again! Stay positive, things will get better.

~Cheers, Alka.