Dying to Please

I write this post from a place of professional and personal expertise. As someone who has worked in the health sector for years; as an over-performing, high achieving professional female (until I learned better); as a person whose strategy to stay safe in childhood was to people please which became a maladaptive strategy in early adulthood, and as someone whose body kept score, giving out catastrophic warning signs like a volcano, but I ignored until there was no turning back.

Here are the simple facts.?

Disease, chronic disease, autoimmune conditions, inflammatory markers, ADHD, ADD and multiple unexplained medical symptoms are on a very steep rise in almost al western societies. Eighty percent of people diagnosed with autoimmune conditions are women, some of whom will be diagnosed with more than one often by the time they are 45. Double the number of women than men will experience depression in their lifetime. More women than men will also experience incurable, chronic diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Hashimoto’s and Meniérè’s? Disease. And women now experience similar rates of heart attack and stroke to men in line with their rise to the leadership and boardroom table, and the commensurate hours and stress that accompany those opportunities. Other things are comtributing to family stress like higher rates of separation and divorce alongside two income households leaving less family support and no village to raise our families.

Why is it that women are getting sicker than men and yet they are often medically gaslit and told their symptoms aren’t real, are “all in their mind” or due to “central over sensitisation” as if they have trained their bodies (like their emotions) to be too sensitive?

There is almost no awareness in the medical profession about the effects of emotional repression, emotional abuse and trauma on the body and its health or homeostasis. A stressed body is an acidic body and disease thrives on inflammation. And there is still a huge partition by specialists, physicians and even some psychologists and psychiatrists, despite the scientific evidence otherwise, between the physical, emotional and mental body. It is no secret that their collective health is shaped by the inputs, conditioning and environment. We all consume a diet of food, exercise, ideas, words, beliefs, support, safety, and development (or the absence of). It all impacts the body, which is always keeping score.

There is more awareness of the impacts of these inputs on children due to a proliferation of early childhood development literature, typically in psychology, but little recognition of the impact upon a woman who has been conditioned, from birth, to betray herself to please others until her body eventually collapses and says no more. A body will always show the secrets and betrayal she has lived through because the body cannot hide expression or repression, like the rings inside the trunk of a tree. The true health of our body and its markers will tell our story for us, even those of us considered by our GPs to be fit and healthy (in lifestyle, appearance and even bloods or other metrics).

And then there’s the tricky issue and its impact….. Too many credible and authoritative professionals label, dismiss or misdiagnose complex trauma as ADHD, hormonal imbalances, or anxiety. More women than men will have it suggested to them by a health practitioner that they may be depressed and offered anti-depressants, not because they are depressed, but because they are misunderstood and misdiagnosed. This as much because the medical model is colonised by misogynistic principles perpetuated by male beliefs, perspectives and teaching, even if you may be consulting with a female.??

As Nicole LePera shares, the profession will do almost anything “to quickly medicate so that women can get back to what they have always done: going and going and sacrificing and sacrificing. Society back to normal.” Society, companies, and families don’t want women to take time off. Or to advocate for what she knows to be true in her body. If she does, she will be labelled as selfish, a hypochondriac, or difficult. Worse still, if she identifies old wounds hurting her from childhood, she will be told she is stuck in victimhood and positive psychologised into believing she should be healed from any past trauma and taking the lessons from the experience. But what won’t happen in a typical medical consultation when investigating any symptoms she presents with is to ask her about her childhood experiences or to explore how much of herself she sacrificed or how much she pleased or pleases others at the expense of herself.

Dr Nicole LePera, Dr Gabor Maté, Dr Eric Pearl, Dr Joe Dispenza and many more doctors are now evidencing the role of emotions in disease. A large part of why women experience the disease burden outlined at the start of this post is because we – for all the medical advancements available – as a profession and a society, have failed to address how we condition women into becoming self-sacrificing machines for their parents, their partners, their families, their friends, their companies and their professions.?

It's essential to empower women to reconnect with and listen to their bodies and to be governed by their intuition rather than the dominant expectations of them in their homes and workplaces. It’s time to empower them to set healthy boundaries and learn to discern between healthy and toxic workplaces and relationships, and to speak to and release internalised feelings so that they need not make them sick.?

It's time to call time of teaching young girls that their primary role in life is to please, appease and be nice. And to stop glorifying the hustle and do it all superwoman persona so that we can support the honouring of healthy limits.?

We need to start joining the dots to stop future generations (regardless of gender) from receiving the same inheritance and for “nice, good girls” continuing to pay the ultimate price with their health.?

It’s time for the health profession to start asking the right questions and offer solutions that are whole person, whole of context and epigenetic in nature.??