"Lyme Disease Is Not Emotional But Physical" (And It's Emotional Too)

We received an email yesterday regarding this week's Lyme Less Live More Showcase with Connie Strasheim about the Emotional Aspects of Lyme Disease. We thought we'd share our response in case others had similar thoughts.

"Be careful here - in my experience I was sent to psychologists because no one knew what was wrong. I went through any and all issues I could even find and remained in dire pain. It wasn't until I found out what was going on and started antibiotics that the pain went to zero. I would argue that this disease is not emotional but physical, that this is the nature of spirochetal illness, to take over the body until recognized and dealt with, and to be very careful in making any statements about emotional factors mattering, which in my case I don't think had anything to do at all with being sick." - R

Dear R,

Thank you for your email. We appreciate your participation with us here.

We'd like to take this opportunity to make very clear that in no way do we feel that Lyme Disease (or any other chronic illness) isn't a physical condition or that it is purely emotional.

We both have suffered greatly with this illness and have endured bullying and disbelief from the medical community and had to fight for our care.

While we agree that Lyme Disease is so very clearly a physical illness (as it is an infection), from our perspective, it's also a multi-layered issue.

We are thrilled to hear that you don't have any residual emotional pain or trauma and that your case was cut and dry once you found Lyme. It's wonderful to know that exists in the world.

Unfortunately however, many of us haven't been that lucky. You see when we talk about emotional trauma, what we are really talking about is chronic stress in the body.

No one can argue the fact that stress kills, and at a minimum it steals our resilience. And as it is with emotional stress, unless we address it, and remove it, like (pathogens) it continues to stress our bodies and robs us of our vitality -- leaving us no strength for recovery.

We explore in many of our interviews how toxic emotions, (and negative self talk) can weaken our systems and keep us stuck in chronic illness, sometimes for decades.

The emotional pain/trauma doesn't have to be happening now... it could have happened weeks, months, years ago -- and often stems from our childhood.

Even if a person has cleared the hurts of the past by injecting some awareness into them, the pain, trauma, frustration of having an illness NOW needs continual healing.

We feel, Lyme (and all illnesses for that matter), stem from a systematic breakdown -- physical, mental, emotional and environmental -- each of these factors deserve due diligence as much as antibiotics or other protocols. Even our birth holds keys to our future health.

I hope you had a chance to watch Connie's video. Perhaps it will clarify even further.

Wishing you continued health.

With love,
Dana and Brent

Written by Dana Walsh  |  3 Comments
Posted in Lyme Less Live More