A body is not a weapon being used against you

What if my body was working on my behalf? + parts work as a tool

Dear soft heart,

At the beginning of the year, I decided to have an intentional exploration about why my body had collapsed and what my body needed to recover from this event. I had some questions I was willing to hear the answers to, I wrote about my body in January: What if I let her be sick and found out what she said? Perhaps she’d help me, perhaps she’d help us.

Starting with being on my body’s side.

Okay, so let me start at the beginning. I had two big things I wanted to respect on this journey that was inspired by the very amazing work of Jamie Lee Finch.

The first being that my body is always working on my behalf.

And so at every hard symptom juncture, the huge question became, what if my body was working on my behalf?

How might that change the way I am interacting with this injury/ illness and autistic burn out if that is what I assume?

There were parts of me that resisted this philosophy. But it ultimately felt better to engage with it than to reject it, so I did.

Through this practice, I refused to start a dynamic of me vs you with my body. I refused to dominate my body and I refused to act as though my body was not intelligent or trying to communicate something to me that would ultimately help me.

Of course, sometimes I felt like my life was being ruined, but I did not give up the curiosity that led me to start healing my body and mind and spirit very deeply.

I decided that my body needed me to decipher her messages, whether that be concerns, thoughts, anxieties, repressed memories of various emotional states, or anything else she had to say that she thought was important.

Secondly, I would listen to my body as a compass and believe that what she was saying to me was truth.  No matter how complicated the situation was with my body, I was determined to take her seriously and show her that I was there and I was truly listening.  One can listen but not integrate and let the information they hear influence their point of view or their behavior. I was committed to integrating and letting the information change me as need be.

This meant that my body would have me on her side, protecting her, and also acting in her best interests with her goals, wishes and dreams, as I journeyed to figure out why this was happening. I wanted to know about the roots of what had caused my total body collapse, especially after being in remission for so many years, and to do this, I had to learn how to stop getting mad at my body and also work with different parts of her, to ultimately find harmony again.

I was in a bad spot a year ago.

I was completely housebound from the end of November 2023 until the end of March 2024. I spent 4 months barely leaving my dark cave room. I had such bad vestibular symptoms that movement would create immense vertigo, nausea or vomiting making it impossible to travel or to get to places even close by.

I also had a misdiagnosed injury that had been diagnosed solely as a wrist sprain initially. It wasn’t until April that I got a proper and accurate diagnosis atop the wrist sprain which was a grade 3 AC joint sprain as well as 3 dislocated ribs.

I had a slew of symptoms that ranged from massive allergic reactions to POTS, to severe fatigue to nightly insomnia to hormonal issues that were serious cause for concern. At one point, my night sweats and other worrisome symptoms were so bad that I had to be tested for serious illnesses, like cancers. It was terrifying.

Because when this happened, I had just spent one decade working professionally with the question: what is the story your body is telling you? at the forefront of my daily work, I was not ill prepared to meet my body in all her shambles. I knew what to do. For that, I am grateful. I had the wonderful experience of being an intuitive coach to myself.

I began to feel less intimidated by my body. And that is because a body is not a weapon being used against you. A body is not a gun held up to your head. But it feels like that if we think that the body is working against us. And if we believe that the body is something that is our way.

I also think our bodies often need our competency and our belief in them. In these times of injury or illness or symptoms, our bodies need a loving parent like figure, someone who doesn’t feel like they are too much. A body that feels they are too much has trusts issues. Competency, a sense of, I will figure you out and you do not scare me is what is needed.

Coloring: one of my body’s favorite activities this year.

I had a lot of symptoms, so I began with one at a time. The ones that were the most persistent, loud and trying to get my attention went first. As they do. In a not so surprisingly chain of events, these were the ones that resolved the quickest. The ones who knew what they wanted to say, and what they needed.

First, the vestibular issues healed and I could drive in the car again to local appointments. I no longer felt like I was being hit by a pan on the back of the head randomly and the vertigo stopped entirely when and after I was in movement. It felt like a miracle. Perhaps it was. Likely, I heard my body in what she was communicating and therefore, gave her what she needed, and because her needs were more met, she didn’t need to get my attention in the same way anymore.

Then as of the summer 2024, I was completely back in remission with all hormonal problems I was having after spending weeks and weeks of my life having nausea/ vomiting, and in various inflamed states that included pain so bad I would howl, horrible hormone induced insomnia and night sweats. My cycle, among other hormonal markers went back to normal.

There was also the fact that I had to figure out how to unmask my autism in order to heal because this was going on in my autonomic nervous system due to autistic masking:

Stressor → Stress response → (if no de-escalation due sensory pain bypassing/ masking) → Chronic stress → Nervous system dysregulation (ANS branches doing the wrong things at the wrong times) → Symptoms (including autistic burn out)

For me unmasking is about not hiding that I am in a stress response due to stressors that others may deem inconsequential because it doesn’t affect them the same way. In other words if I am in fight or flight, or in freeze, I am going to show externally that I am affected. Unmasking for me is about letting my internal state reach my external presentation. So long are the days of pretending to be unaffected.

Unmasking for me is also about transforming the shame that I had inside of me for being the “over reactor”. I can wake up from a neighbour’s car starting, and the thing is, I am not overreacting, that is literally how intense it is for me to hear and feel sounds - they knock me out of my window of tolerance pretty much immediately without my consent. At first in my life, I had displayed appropriate stress responses to stressors I was experiencing, like a car starting when I was sleeping, but because I soon noticed that most of these stimulus did not bother most of the peers around me, I started to hide my reaction, for social belonging and cohesion. I did this out of my own free will in order to gain safety, acceptance and connection (all part of our core developmental needs), and also because I was prompted through reward and punishment cycles. I noticed that people were happy with me if I didn’t show just how sensitive I really was, it was less hassle for all of us. It’s probably the same for a lot of autistic people. And thus, autistic masking is born.

I masked a lot for many reasons throughout my life from a very young age, and they all made sense, every single one of them, and after some close inspection, guess what? They were all on behalf of me. Thank you body, brain, nervous system. And I had to lovingly orient to the fact that masking was not the only way to get safety, acceptance and connection anymore so that I could actually meet my body’s true sensitivity and de-escalate when need be instead of just pushing through, which led to autistic burn out when done repedeatly eventually. There were other ways to get these needs met. I was also someone who my body could count on now - an adult who sees things pretty clearly.

A fall tree. My body loves trees.

There are still many symptoms I am going through, including a good 20 % left of the injury I am experiencing to heal. I haven’t had a completely pain free day in about a year now, so that is still in need of deep attention. My recovery from total body collapse isn’t complete yet. Still…

I continue to thank my body for her wisdom in all these symptoms, for telling me what was bothering the whole eco-system. Whether that was something going on internally, a way I viewed myself that held me back from the love I deserved. Or something externally that I hadn’t healed from yet or didn’t have the chance to have the space to express about. When I think about my body as an ally and when I realize she is never not on my side, fear dissipates about my symptoms.

A large part of what keeps my nervous system in a perpetual stress response when I am ill (which is very understandable because being ill is traumatic) is that I tend to be afraid of my symptoms as a default. How long will they last? What will happen if they last? Why aren’t they going away quicker?

I needed to align with not being afraid of my symptoms – of course within reason, if I need to go to the hospital for an IV because I am dehydrated, I need to feel fear to take action– but overall, when I am not in immediate danger, so that I could stop keeping myself in hypervigilance which my inner state was causing due to so much pain and uncomfortable symptoms.

Now, let me assure you, I am not perfect at this. I am simply a student of this practice. There are a lot of days that my practice is wonky and imperfect and some where it fails entirely.

Illness and injury is a unique hell because the stressor and the trigger is internal. You cannot walk away from it physically. Therefore, our relationship to the stressor and trigger changing is the only alchemy available.

I’ll be honest, sometimes I brace. It’s too painful. I’m too tired. I’m too resentful. The world has pissed me off too much. I think everything is useless and I’ll never be okay again. I honor that. Sometimes, that is what the pain wants to express. It wants to tell me about my helplessness. It wants to say I am in pain, god fucking damn it. It wants to say, here are all the ways and times I felt helpless and had to hide that, and move past it quickly, to survive. Here is what I actually felt.

When my pain wants this, I turn my attention to it. Yeah, you are in pain. Yeah, you’ve been through a lot. And then if I really go to the end of that expression and let it complete, I usually get curious again. Sometimes what my body needs is simple. She says she wants the healing medicine of phonons, sounds that are pleasant to me, to heal all the things she heard that were cruel and untrue about herself. Other times, what she wants is complex and she talks to me in metaphors. In fact, sometimes parts of my body does a compensatory boundary through a symptom that is wildly creative because the voice cannot bare it, or the voice did not work.

My body never collapsed when there was nothing there to catch her. She would have never put us at risk like that. Therefore, I trust her timing too. She knows, she senses. And sometimes, I need to guide her too, because she thinks something that has already happened is about to again, she takes the past and feels it in the present as if it never ended, and projects it on the future as if things never change. Whatever it is, we figure it out, together.

Me, on my body’s side. :) Learning to unmask, and no longer suffering from vestibular symptoms or hormone issues

How that works practically…

A parts work example.

In working with my body and not against my body, I intuitively began to do a lot of parts work, which is an amazing internal resource that I’ve used as a tool when needed for years (parts work is developed by Richard Schwartz). In doing so, I deepened my relationship with the Sick Girl, a part of me that formed in teenagehood, that was in conflict with a part of me that is leading part of my body which I call, The One That Knows What She Is Doing (TOTKWSID for short).

When I asked the sick girl what her job was in my body, she said that she is the keeper of authenticity. She told me that she was created when authenticity was under threat, around the time of my first autistic burn out and first chronic illness diagnosis, and that she goes into what I call remission when authenticity is being respected, and she pops back up when it’s not.

Okay, woah. Huge info. Continuing my relationship with this part, I learnt more.

Mostly that she didn’t want to make us unsafe, and she felt for me that I felt sickness did that to us (both my Self and my leading part TOTKWSID), but she said that she had to do what she needed to do, no matter the cost, in order to ensure we were being authentic and that our own experience and our own needs were not forgotten or bypassed because the world could easily make us erase ourselves. She felt completely exhausted by the fact that she seemed like the only one in the entire system of my body who cared and felt that we mattered. She felt like she was at odds with other parts, who prioritized other things.

And I (and TOTKWSID) held such a tension with her of like, well I hate you because you make us unsafe in this world (it is obviously not safe to lose vitality under capitalism at all), while really all she wanted was to make sure our authenticity remained, and she was trying to work on behalf of me.

I wanted to integrate the Sick Girl with the rest of my parts so my Self feels more coherent. To work together was the goal.

The Sick Girl was this really wild and intense force in my life that my leading part was honestly scared of. She was also really intense because she didn’t feel heard. She felt betrayed because she didn’t feel heard, so she got more intense and I got more scared of her the more intense she got. It was a feedback loop that kept us out of touch with each other. And the more she roared, the more TOWKWSID felt out of control when it came to her; and the more the global Self (my entire body) felt like I had an inherent self-sabotager.

We had to get some things clear.

The sick girl was not trying to sabotage me. She was trying to get me to live according to my blueprint – no matter how outlandish it seems to be able to do such a thing under capitalism with no family wealth and the most sensitive nervous system.

And TOWKWSID was not trying to ignore her or betray her per say, but this leading part of me did think she was too naïve and too young to understand the harsh realities of the world. TOWKWSID felt that there was only one way to survive, which was to depend on yourself entirely for all your needs, because no one could be trusted, and that she was keeping us safe by not being authentic and masking and pushing through and seeking traditional means of belonging. TOWKWSID was like damn, I was doing my very fucking best to keep her alive and I felt like she wasn’t even grateful. She was also scared of the Sick Girl and didn’t feel like I (or she) could make any requests from her or have her respect any needs or wants I had. She felt like the sick girl was going to dominate if I even gave her the mic once.

I had to find a way for these parts to work together, instead of letting them try to establish control by being the only ones who mattered because they believed their points were more valid than the other’s. By getting clear on the basic truths, and the true intentions involved, we could re-establish a relationship between us all and earn trust between us. The thing, well the goal, became, safety + authenticity at once.

The Sick Girl didn’t know that TOWKWSID was trying to keep us alive by masking and by pushing through limits and boundaries of my body as a whole. And TOWKWSID didn’t know that the Sick Girl was not trying to take away all her hard work or that she was actually really smart and reasonable and cared about the body so much.

I eventually got excited about this. And the parts did too. But not immediately. It’s been a long year.

The Sick Girl really wanted to make sure her authentic desires were met. She wanted to have an autistic pace of life, not a neurotypical one. We stopped denying her this; she needed this to heal. It was important to all of us who make up this body. Because my body was no longer forced to function under an incompatible pace for her, autistic burn out symptoms began resolving.

To make this happen, TOWKWSID had to learn how to be with things she initially did not like because it makes her feel so vulnerable; uncertainty, teamwork, learning to be in a family, learning to receive love, being dependent on others. saying no and establishing limits and boundaries and the right conditions for the body as a whole even when that means people could get mad, and even surviving ruptures. This part also had to learn about cultivating trust and faith and orienting to the present for safety over and over again, and having that be good enough. My beloved TWOKWSID had a real future tripping problem, where if her entire future wasn’t solved and safe right now forevermore, she could not relax. We had to help her decrease anxiety about survival and long-term survival and help her orient to the fact that life on earth is inherently risky and that’s okay; there will be new resources and things available to us when we need them if we are open to it, creative and resourceful. She had to learn that she had to be rested to be more flexible and resilient. The way to ensuring her survival, although important, was not in pushing through and depleting herself in the present for the future to be perfectly safeguarded.

When I got into an even deeper relationship with the Sick Girl part of me, she revealed even MORE things to me. She shared with me that she has to do a lot of clean up for another part of me – the one that is scared to be alone. That part often made decisions that weren’t always in our best interest (the interest of the body as a whole). This led me into this initiation of spending time with my psyche and nervous system figuring out my truest biggest fears, like I’m talking instant panic attack level fears, the ones that are embedded into our system because of the worsts of past trauma, which were part of my shadow. As long as I was not fully aware of them or sort of aware of them, but just side-eying them because I didn’t think I could handle facing them, I was being controlled by them and I was making an array of decisions to avoid them, suppress them, or alleviate them…. Which was, in a full circle moment, affecting my authenticity and prompting the Sick Girl to try to get my attention and reinforcing that TOWKWSID couldn’t actually relax, furthering the conflict between them. It was amazing to unpack, understand and alchemize.

The healing that I have done and continue to do thanks to this burn out, injury and illness will last me a lifetime. And it all started with the question, What if my body was working on my behalf?

Well, then that would be amazing.

All my love,

Emily