Introduction to Mental and Emotionally-based Problems

Where the reader has come from…… Intro to various types of fear

Introduction to Mentally- and Emotionally-based Problems

What might I have to offer on this topic?

I’ve been wondering how to approach this topic, since I am not a doctor, nor an academically-trained psychologist. There are so many knowledgeable scientists and medical doctors whose expertise has helped many people get their lives into better shape. Why should anybody be interested in what I, as the author of this Holistic Disease Model, have to say about mentally- and emotionally-based problems?

One important difference is that I consider ‘the whole person’ in matters of health…

In my imagination, I see a highly motivated and skillful professor, who, armed with a magnifying glass, stands hunched over his patient’s body, examining in the smallest detail a tiny little cell of this person’s body. He is thrilled and all fired up to investigate deeper and get to know more details about that person’s cellular anatomy.

Could it be that in the excitement of the discoveries, this professor loses sight of the bigger picture? Maybe he isn’t in touch with who this person who lies on his table really is. How does he live? What does he do? Is he happy? What kind of a person is he? How does his environment treat him and what does he do with his environment? Is he a social guy or a loner? What goes on in his mind on a day-to day basis? What is he all about? What are his goals and dreams and why does he have those? What kind of parents does/did he have? Was he only child?

The potential benefits of getting to know oneself better

There are so many aspects of our daily life that impact the functioning of our mind and body, yet they hardly cross the threshold of a doctor’s office. Granted, time is money; a doctor has many patients, and needs to pay his bills. But, what if? What if each of us stops and looks at our own health more often? We might get to know our system so well that we develop a sense of when something is ‘off’ – and what might be causing that.

So, I am not a doctor – but I have a hunch. Is it presumptuous to publish a hunch? What if my hunch over time would reveal itself to be very adequate? What if my hunch would help a person with one of the diseases mentioned in this section, to truly improve? What if more than one person would be able to dramatically feel better based on what I am offering?

Those possibilities compel me to not stop myself from expressing my inner conviction – that something is missing in the scientific approach so far, because the experts are skipping too many of the health effects of our daily living, which includes our sense of who we are! If we get in touch with our own ‘being an independent and autonomous person with all the rights and responsibilities that comes with that’, great benefits might follow. That’s what I am advocating here.

Our Sense of Self

If I am not using my life to manifest my authentic ‘be-ingness’ then I am clearly doing something else. I use my living-time and my energy and my body to manifest that something else. The underlying Holistic Approach is about opening the opportunity to people to discover what this ‘something else’ that we mistakenly take for ourselves actually is and how to free ourselves from it.

On this journey, the following is a leading question that needs an answer: “Am I living as truly authentically who I am, or am I only continuously trying to live up to some requirements for acting and feeling that, a long time ago, I adopted in order to show to my ‘self’, and/or to my parents and/or to the world, that whoever I think ‘I’ am is able to live up to their standards, demands, and conditions, and get their approval?”

The answer to this question doesn’t come easily but is essential if we want to know who we are, and get in touch with ourselves to improve our health and be able to actually lead our (own) life instead of being an extension of some earlier caregiver. However, it is in the discrepancy between these ways of living that might lie the root cause of many aspects of human suffering. And yes indeed, we have a hard enough time knowing ourselves and what makes us the person we are, physically and mentally. How could a medical doctor know all that?

Can you imagine a doctor asking: Does this patient have a healthy Sense of Self or is she merely hanging in there, trying to get some positive sense about herself by compulsively fulfilling all these self-imposed conditions (Ego-References)? Is she the master of her life or the slave of these conditions? And, if she is a slave, could that have affected her physical and mental system and made her sick or screwed up her emotional life and relationships?

Looking at Sense of Self as relevant to physical and emotional health

From what I’ve seen in myself and others, my hunch is a big Yes! That effect is a lot bigger than we suspect when we slap a label on a symptom. I think it is utterly worthwhile for both the experts and the patients themselves and their loved ones to pay attention to how much or how little they are ‘present in their Be-ingness.’ (= Sense of Self)  It just might be that a lack of truly being in touch with our own Being/Self causes a huge variety of symptoms that so far have been studied only up close with a magnifying glass.

So, of all the factors that I believe can affect our health, let’s step back, or zoom out, and look at this one: Does this person have a healthy Sense of Self or not? If not, would it possibly be of benefit to that person to help her restore her Sense of Self?

A related suggestion from a scientist

Could such a thing as Sense of Self, or lack thereof, affect physical and emotional health? My hunch is, absolutely Yes. I often suspect that while scientific conclusions are great and highly interesting, they sometimes mix up causes of diseases with effects of diseases.  We certainly can’t blame genes as the only cause; in Dr. Bruce Lipton’s Biology of Belief, for example, he argues that our environment is partly responsible for how we function, but ‘our perception’ of our environment has a big effect, too. Like Sense of Self, our perception of our environment is a highly subjective matter, not commonly used in medical diagnosis and treatment.

How to read the rest of this section of the website

So the rest of this section explores physical and mental problems and their possible relationship to Sense of Self, based on these thoughts. Nothing I say is meant as a substitute for medical advice. It is meant as a suggestion to ponder, and maybe do something with. Consult your medical professional before taking any action you think might be good for you.