Are symptoms in your life pointing to a deeper issue?

One thing which I’ve learned on my journey is that issues I’ve faced which I used to think were separate actually have a common root.

During my 20s, a range of health issues emerged or flared up, including chronic insomnia, persistent anxiety, and two types of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  To be honest, I just began to think that I was somehow defective. It felt like new problems kept popping up before I’d had a chance to deal with the ones I already had on my plate. I felt like everything was falling apart around me.

To take one example, OCD is a mental health condition which is often caricatured and misunderstood. So, I’ve spoken publicly a couple of times this year about my OCD experiences – most recently with Stylist magazine for an article that was published yesterday, which aimed to illustrate how much more wide ranging OCD is than people often realise. And earlier in the year, I told my OCD story in more detail to Yahoo.

I used to think my OCD was just another sign that my brain was somehow wired badly. Another isolated problem for me to fix.

And so it came about that my OCD symptoms first brought me to counselling. Why was that? Well, I was getting cognitive behavioural therapy for my insomnia, and the anxiety was sadly just a way of life for me at that point. But the OCD symptoms were intolerable, and I knew I had to do something to improve the situation before it spiralled out of control.

In other words, OCD was my entry point into starting to talk about my situation in life, because the immediate symptoms couldn’t be ignored.

My counsellor has since told me that she saw the broader signs and links pretty early on in our conversations. But she could also tell that I simply wasn’t ready to “go there”. I wasn’t ready to confront the reality of the emotional abuse which had affected my development in so many diverse ways.

So, she worked with me on the OCD and we made headway with it over time.

Generally in life, if there’s a problem of some sort that we want to fix, the most effective way to do this is to go to the source or root of the problem. There’s no point simply painting over mould in a house, for example – whilst that temporarily masks the problem, it will rear its ugly head again soon enough.  We need to find the source of the damp problem and sort it out there.  

Now, of course, everyone’s situation is different. Sometimes an issue can be standalone. Or there may be a range of different root causes underlying symptoms.

In my case, I wasn’t ready to recognise my root cause. So, looking back, I can see that, in situations like mine, there can be value in managing a symptom, even if one isn’t able to tackle the fundamental underlying problem yet.

Firstly, over time I got some relief from my debilitating OCD symptoms. The OCD didn’t go away, but I could manage it much better. And secondly, I gained some experience of what counselling is like – which helped me to start opening up about how I felt and exploring why that might be. Building up this skill stood me in very good stead when I was ready to look at the bigger problems in my life.

Of course, there can be many other symptoms which point towards life storms. Think burnout at work. Chronic aches, pains and tension in our bodies. Migraines. Digestive problems. The list goes on…  

And sometimes we’re all too aware of the life storm and the wider impact that it is having on us. But other times, we may not make those connections so easily. That might be because we’re not ready to recognise the big stuff, like younger me. Or that might be because we have been taught to compartmentalise our lives in artificial ways.

So, if you are experiencing different symptoms in your life, it’s definitely worthwhile to ponder what might be causing them at a deeper level. This can often most effectively be done with someone trained to support you through the process, who can help you to progress at your pace and see things from different perspectives.

If you’re ready to reclaim your calm, confidence and calling after your life storm, check out my Sing After The Storm 90-day 1:1 Intensive! I encourage a balanced approach, incorporating mind, emotions, body and spirit, which are all interlinked in so many ways. I would be honoured to accompany and guide you on your journey.