“Physical reactions are often the language through which we express painful feelings, especially when it isn’t safe to say them to the people we’re upset with. We often say with our bodies what we can’t or won’t say with our mouths.” – writes the psychologist Susan Forward in Toxic Parents.
And these repressed feelings translate into various conditions of chronic pain, tension, insomnia and other symptoms. Just because we can’t say it with our mouth, it endures in our body.
In the particular case of toxic or even abusive parents, Susan Forward’s approach is to enable to talk to the person. Granted it cannot always be a dialogue but the therapeutic impact of just being able to express one’s feelings on a difficult subject, in a calm manner, makes a lot of physical symptoms disappear (it might take quite a lot of time though to reach the stage when this single expression is possible).
If you suffer from some chronic pain that can’t be directly linked to a physical condition, consider whether you would not have some deep feelings repressed somewhere. Then consider how you could express these feelings, calmly, to the person concerned.
