Let’s Stop Punishing Ourselves

In her book Toxic Parents, Susan Forward says that many adult children of alcoholics “subconsciously find ways to punish themselves with various emotional and physical symptoms” like headaches, gastrointestinal problems, etc.” This certainly rings true for me.

Both my codependency issues and my obsessive-compulsive disorder have caused many psychosomatic physical problems for me. Looking back over my life I can pinpoint many times when I had physical problems that made no sense. My first ever panic attack happened when I was in my early twenties. I was in our den at home watching television when suddenly I felt warm, then I started having chest pains and difficulty breathing. I thought I was having a heart attack, which made no sense to me since I was so young at the time. After I calmed down, the symptoms eased.

A few months later, I went to bed one night and felt short of breath. Breathing became more and more difficult, and no matter how hard I breathed-in, I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs. I was afraid that if I fell asleep, I’d asphyxiate. Next thing I knew I was hyperventilating. I also remember a time when my little fingers were so stiff I couldn’t bend them to make a fist. I’ve had stiffness in my neck, numbness in my throat, soreness in my elbows or under my arms, and heightened gastrointestinal issues—none of which made any sense to me. But I can look back and see that every time these issues popped-up I was seriously stressed.

Most of these symptoms were caused by fear—like fear of being me, fear of being “found-out,” fear of existing and fear of dying without ever having felt loved. Unfortunately, my OCD takes me into fatalistic thinking. A simple cyst suddenly becomes a cancerous tumor in my mind, or a little excess hair-loss becomes male-patterned baldness. I remember in the early 1990s, I was under so much stress at work and in my personal life that my hair started coming out in handfuls. That made my stress worse, which made the fall out worse. Once I was able to finally calm down, the hair loss ended.

I’m afraid that much of my negative thinking is more than OCD. Certainly the OCD makes it worse and less manageable. But I think the root of this negative thinking is self-punishment. It is how I have always punished myself for believing I was defective and never good enough.

Recently I’ve started to counter this negative thinking—and the emotional/physical damage it causes—by concentrating on these words from Eckhart Tolle: “Surrender comes when we no longer ask ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in the world.”

Too often the things that I have obsessed about are unacceptable things to me. So I’ve had to surrender them to my Higher Power and declare that I am willing to accept these unacceptable things in order to loosen the grip of fear that they cause. And Tolle is right. Once I choose to accept whatever it is that I have been fighting against as unacceptable, I start to feel better. The grace of God is then able to take hold of me and I am no longer paralyzed by my fear. Sometimes I have to continually surrender something, but each time I do, it makes me stronger.

If you are suffering from physical symptoms, you too may be punishing yourself for feeling like you failed your parents, caused their problems, or weren’t good enough to be lovable. Try surrendering to your Higher Power by accepting whatever has been unacceptable to you about yourself or life. It can help just to accept the fact that we feel fearful and by saying “that it’s OK to feel some fear.” We then stop struggling with it and lessen its grip on us and we open the door to peace.