The Emotional Roots of Illness – and What They Meant for Me
- Resipesi
- Jun 8
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 2
A reflection on mind-body patterns, compassion, and self-accountability.
Hey, happy Sunday! 👋 I hope you have a great start to the day. It’s a rainy day today in Melbourne and I’m sitting at home, painting, and listening to the audio book 'The Myth of Normal - Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture' - by Dr. Gabor Maté.
In those early days after the diagnosis, I kept circling the same questions: “Why me? What did I do wrong? How can I fix it?” I was desperate for an explanation, something to hold onto. I thought maybe if I could just find the cause, I’d feel more in control.
But over time, I began to understand - it’s not that simple. And maybe it’s not supposed to be.
The truth is, no one gave me a clear answer. And I get it, the doctors didn’t try to pinpoint a cause, because that’s not how cancer works. It’s never one thing. But that didn’t stop my mind from searching. I kept circling back to how I’d been living. How I’d treated myself. How I was talking to myself. And why that felt like it had to matter.
That’s where Gabor Maté’s work hit me in a completely new way. Not as a theory, but as something that gave shape to what I had already been sensing underneath all my questions. The connection between life experience, stress, and illness. Suddenly, it wasn’t abstract anymore. In his words:
“If we could begin to see illness not as a cruel twist of fate or a mysterious puzzle, but as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, the impact on our approach to health would be revolutionary.”
At first, this perspective felt provocative, almost confronting. But the more I sat with it, the more it made sense.
I’ve always saw health as something I'm giving myself externally: supplements, movement, nutrition. But what about the inner patterns? The constant doing, underlying stress, the people pleasing, the missing boundaries?
Gabor Maté noticed something profound: that many people with chronic illnesses share certain personality patterns. Traits that don’t just appear overnight but take shape over a lifetime of coping. These aren’t character flaws, but survival strategies developed in response to early life stress or emotional neglect.
Here are some of the patterns he’s observed:
Compulsive caregiving, putting others’ needs before your own.
A deep sense of responsibility, identifying strongly with roles and obligations.
Chronic busyness, multitasking, and overcommitting.
Suppression of healthy anger, the inability to say no or set boundaries.
Beliefs like, “I’m responsible for everyone’s feelings” or “I must not disappoint others.”
These patterns don’t cause illness in a simple sense, but they shape how we live, how we respond to stress, and ultimately, how our bodies carry the weight of our experiences.
So when I read through them, I'm like: Yepp. That's pretty much me. Especially in my twenties, that was my essence. I was living for the feedback and external validation, because I couldn’t give it to myself. That was my fuel.
Some of these beliefs and patterns run so deep, it’s like old software running in the background, installed so early, I didn’t even know it was there. And yet it shaped everything.
For years now, I’m learning to rewrite that code. And honestly? It's fucken hard. I was hoping for a shortcut (of course haha). But this process asks for patience. Through inner child work, somatic approaches, and nervous system healing, I’m starting to reconnect with parts of myself I didn’t even know I’d shut off. This work is subtle. But it’s also the most real thing I’ve ever done.
And now, as I near the end of my treatment journey, with surgery still ahead, I find myself less focused on the “why” or “how did this happen” - and more on how I want to live from here on out.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm so scared about so many things about this hopefully 'Life After' chapter. But this time, I want to choose doing less over the constant pleasing, the 'doing', the rational understanding and knowing. The control. While this all might be legit, I want to build new habits of slowing down, listening inward.
This journey makes sense now, more than ever. I’m not searching for “the answer” anymore. I see how it fits into my story. It’s an invitation to find a new way of being, to heal the wounds I was too afraid to face, to feel emotions I was taught were off-limits.
And I will forever remember the words of a dear therapist back in Berlin and it became my mantra:
“Do less, be more.”
It's so simple and powerful. Healing isn’t just about what I do. It’s about how I am with myself.
And yeah... looking back, I often wish I’d handled things differently. I wish I had been kinder to myself, more forgiving, more present. But I’m learning to understand those survival mechanisms for what they were: ways to cope, ways to survive. They served me back then. But not anymore.
And as scary as this diagnosis is, this feels so much bigger then healing physically. It reminds me that mind and body cannot be separated. And yes, this journey will be long and hard. But for me, it’s the only way forward.
And if you’re reading this, maybe you're invited too.
To pause. To question the speed. The scrolling. The coping. The endless doing.
To look at the patterns we’ve normalized: overworking, overthinking, overgiving, because they made us feel safe. Because they kept us distracted from the one thing that truly asks for our attention: ourselves.
Look around. How many people do you know who are truly healthy - mentally, emotionally, physically? Exactly.
So maybe this isn’t just my story. Maybe it’s yours too. An invitation to slow down, feel, and unlearn what survival taught us. To stop managing life and start living it.
Wanna come with me? 🫴🏽
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