On what our symptoms are actually trying to say.
There’s a question Gabor Maté keeps returning to in his work, and it’s not the one medicine usually asks. Medicine asks: what is wrong with this body? Maté asks something different. He asks: what happened to this person?
It sounds like a small shift but it would change completely how we see and perceive healing.
The first question treats the body as a machine that has malfunctioned. The second treats it as something that has been communicating all along, and that we have, for a very long time, not been listening to.
The Body Keeps the Score
Most of us were taught, in one way or another, that emotions and physical health are separate world. You go to a therapist for feelings. You go to a doctor for your body. The two rarely meet in the same room.
What research in psychoneuroimmunology has been demonstrating for decades is that the separation was always artificial. Psychoneuroimmunology is the study of how psychological states shape the nervous and immune systems, and its findings are eloquent. The mind and body are not two systems running in parallel, but one system, in constant conversation with itself.
When we suppress an emotion, not process it, not express it, but actively hold it down year after year, that suppression doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. Into the muscles. Into the gut. Into the immune response. Into the cells.
Maté’s clinical work, first with addiction and then with chronic illness, brought him to the same place from a different direction. The people he sat with who were dealing with cancer, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune conditions, chronic pain: what he noticed, again and again, was a pattern. Not in their genetics, not in their lifestyle choices alone, but in their emotional histories. In what they had learned, early and well, not to feel.
What We Were Taught Not to Feel
We didn’t suppress our emotions because we were weak or broken. We suppressed them because at some point, usually in childhood, it was the safest thing to do. The child who learns that anger makes a parent withdraw, or that sadness makes a parent anxious, or that need makes a parent impatient, learns quickly to tuck those things away. To be easier and be less.
That adaptation was intelligent and it worked. The problem is that the body stores what the mind learned to hide, and it doesn’t forget.
When a mysterious autoimmune condition appears decades later, or a cancer diagnosis, or a body that simply refuses to function the way it should, Maté would say we have to be willing to ask what that body has been carrying and to understand that illness is often not random. It is often the body finally saying, loudly, what couldn’t be said any other way.
Listening Instead of Silencing
What Maté’s work suggests, and what I find myself returning to in my own life and in watching people I love, is that healing rarely goes in the direction we expect. We want to fix the physical thing and get back to normal. But the body is sometimes asking for something that has nothing to do with medication or surgery or the right supplement. It’s asking to be heard. To finally have space for what was never allowed to exist.
Gabor Maté explores these ideas across his books, including When the Body Says No and The Myth of Normal.