What Is Your Chronic Illness Trying To Tell You?

May 24, 2021 // by Ben// 116 Comments

I warn you now, this post may go a little ‘out there’ but if you sit and think about it in the context of your life and how your chronic illness has developed then you may realize that there’s something to it.

I want to start with the concept that your subconscious tends to manifest certain similar situations for you in life as a way of directing you to it so that this time you can ‘solve’ the pattern. Generally this comes from something early in life that was traumatic and you weren’t able to deal with back then.

Think about somebody who keeps attracting abusive relationships, due to their upbringing and that being all they know. It’s kind of like “Ok here you go, this time maybe you’ll be able to deal with it”.

I’ve noticed that these situations tend to persist until you work internally and heal whatever is causing you to continually attract and repeat this pattern.

This may also lead you to deeper core issues that are running your life.

For me it was abandonment. I was adopted and abandonment has been one of the things that has constantly been there causing me issues, popping up at times to derail things, causing me to react in needy or negative ways to certain situations in a way that was very unhelpful.

I was under the impression that if I slept with more and more women that I might finally feel good about myself, and that the abandonment suddenly wouldn’t matter anymore. It never worked, other than temporarily. I’d just find myself back at the same spot wanting more and more and never being satisfied.

I had several situations happen where it become very obvious that my abandonment issues were running this, and i’d stop for a while and work on it, but then end up being drawn back into the same pattern and forget about it until the next time it popped up.

What i’m suggesting here is that sometimes your body can take on or invite an illness as a way of saying…

“STOP.. you have to deal with this now!”.

I was so sick and due to some of my symptoms I literally could not engage in that same pattern anymore. I wouldn’t have even been physically able to have sex with some of the pain I was having in my body and my levels of fatigue.

This brought up some very intense emotions – abandonment, rejection, hopelessness, helplessness, anger, hate, rage, frustration.

I felt “If I could only be with a woman everything would be okay again”.

But that isn’t true. I’d feel okay for maybe 5 minutes or so and then want more. I got to a point recently where I thought i’d really dealt with this, and I have in certain contexts, like now I have a good group of friends who are positive and encouraging, which was something I didn’t have for a long time.

But when I decided I might start dating again these issues come back up in force, because this is the context where it triggers the most strongly. It really triggered strongly with one woman and I got drawn in way too much and too quickly and found myself not being able to really stop being needy until eventually I made myself stop, and just spontaneously created a process in my mind to take my power back and disconnect from the situation.

So my current thought is “Do I actually need to be in these situations to work through them while in the middle of it, instead of just saying i’m not ready and continuing with my healing by myself?”.

I’m not totally sure yet. I have taken a bit more time out to work on some more things internally for now.

My point is, I want you to think about if it’s possible that you’re in a similar situation. Is your illness a way of making you stop and look at something in your life that you need to heal or deal with?

It might be that you’re really in a job you hate and pushing yourself way to hard to exhaustion all the time and your body suddenly shuts down as a way to get you to look at other options.

Though really it’s not ‘all of a sudden’ as for me there was indications of something was going wrong for a few years before I got really sick with lyme.

Just think about it, and how you can use this insight to further your own healing and reveal something else that might be important for you to work on as you heal and recover your health.