#3 How Symptoms Become Chronic

What if your chronic symptoms aren’t a sign that your body is broken — but a sign that your healing keeps getting interrupted?

If you’ve “done the work,” tried the protocols, cleaned up your diet, managed your stress, and your symptoms are still flaring, it’s exhausting. You start questioning your body, your effort, even yourself. 

This episode breaks down — from a biological perspective — why symptoms become chronic and why they don’t simply disappear once you start trying to heal. When you understand what your body is actually doing, you stop fighting it… and start working with it.

After listening, you’ll understand:

• What actually makes a symptom become chronic.
• Why healing gets interrupted — even when you’re doing everything right
• What you may be doing that is interrupting your healing

Press play to finally understand what your body has been trying to do all along — and shift from battling your symptoms to completing the healing cycle.

------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for listening! 

👉Join the next Breaking the Symptom Cycle Challenge

• INSTAGRAM- @themindbodyrewire
• FACEBOOK- Mind Body Rewire
• www.themindbodyrewire.com

Transcript

Copy

SPEAKER_00 0:04

So your symptoms aren't going away. Some days they're better, some days they flare, some days you think you're finally turning a corner, and then they're back again. And you're asking the question everyone asks, why? If my body knows how to heal, why is this still happening? Well, today I'm going to answer that clearly from a biological perspective. Because once you understand why chronic symptoms actually stay, you stop fighting your body and start working with it. In this episode, you're going to learn three things. What actually makes a symptom become chronic, why healing gets interrupted even when you've done the work, and how fear is influencing your progress. If you understand these three things, your entire approach to healing will change. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Rebellious Healer, where we stop chasing symptoms and start leading our healing. I'm Jenny Peterson, a former holistic practitioner turned Mind Body Rebel. I help women break free from surface solutions and rebuild their health from the inside out. If you're done outsourcing your power and ready to do the kind of work that actually gives your body the green light to heal, you're in the right place. Now before I jump into why your symptoms become chronic, I need to set a solid foundation of how symptoms start in the first place. Because if you don't understand how your symptoms begin, it's almost impossible to understand why they don't go away. I will briefly summarize that here, but for a full explanation, I suggest you go to episode number two, subconscious 101. Our subconscious is the messenger to our body, like a cell tower is to your cell phone. Your subconscious is always in communication with your body, essentially telling it if it's safe or not safe. That communication is not conscious. You are not deciding to send those messages consciously. They are automatic. They are based on your perceptions, your past experiences, and the meaning your brain has attached to them. That's important because it means your body isn't randomly reacting. It's responding to information it believes is relevant for survival. Your subconscious and body have one primary focus, survival. If you want to understand your body and your chronic symptoms, you have to know and embrace this biological truth. The need for survival is in all of nature, plants, animals, and humans. Everything your body does is in service of staying alive and protecting you. It's not trying to sabotage you, and it's not malfunctioning. It is adapting based on what it believes is necessary for your survival. When you truly understand this, you stop seeing symptoms as the enemy and you start seeing them as communication. And that's the lens we need to look through as we talk about why symptoms become chronic. Alright, so let's talk about symptoms themselves, because not all symptoms are the same. There's a difference between acute symptoms and chronic symptoms. Acute symptoms are short term. They show up in a response to something specific and they resolve once the situation resolves. A cut, a cold, a broken bone, even something like food poisoning. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Your body responds, adapts, and then completes the healing process. In those situations, most of us don't panic. We may not enjoy it, but we trust that the body knows what it's doing. If you cut your finger, you don't obsess about how the skin is regenerating. You don't try to micromanage every step of the healing. You trust the process. Chronic symptoms, though, are different. Chronic symptoms are the ones that linger. They flare, they calm down, then they return, then they become a part of your identity. They don't follow the clean beginning, middle-end pattern. And the moment something becomes chronic, the meaning changes. Now it's not just a symptom, now it's a problem. Now it's something wrong. Now it's something to fix. Both in the medical field and even much of the holistic world, reinforce this idea. If a symptom is still there, something must be broken. There's something wrong in your body. It's a dysfunction, a hidden root cause, something that hasn't been found. So the search begins. You know what it is, the testing, the protocols, the elimination, all the stuff that comes with this. And underneath all of this, we develop a belief about our body, that there is something wrong with it. And that belief matters because the meaning you give a symptom changes how your body responds to it. When a symptom is acute, you see it as temporary. There's no stress around it. When it becomes chronic, you often see it as evidence of damage or failure. And that perception alone can keep your system in a state of alert. Instead of trusting the body, you monitor it. Instead of allowing healing, you brace. Instead of safety, there's vigilance. And vigilance is not neutral. If your body is wired for survival and you are constantly scanning your symptoms as evidence that something is wrong, your system does not receive a consistent message of safety. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It means you've been taught to interpret chronic symptoms as threats. And that interpretation becomes part of this cycle. All right, so now we need to talk about something that almost no one explains properly, what healing actually looks like inside the body. Because most people assume healing feels good. But biologically, that's not true. When you have a cut, you expect swelling, you expect redness, tenderness, you might even expect throbbing. And none of that scares you because you understand that it's part of the healing process. You know the swelling is protective, you know the redness means blood flow, you know discomfort doesn't mean something is wrong, it means something is happening. And the same thing happens with the broken bone. There's inflammation, there's tissue rebuilding, there's a reconstruction process happening under the surface. And we don't panic about that. We understand that the pain and discomfort are part of repair. But when the symptom is diarrhea, a bladder infection, intense fatigue, skin flares, or even something as serious as cancer, the interpretation changes. Now it's not seen as rebuilding. Now it's seen as something wrong. And that difference in interpretation matters. When the body has been in a state of adaptation, meaning it's been responding to a perceived threat, it does a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes. There are tissue changes, there are structural shifts, there are cellular adjustments. Many of these adaptations happen quietly. You don't feel them and you don't see them. It's all happening behind the scenes. But when the body no longer needs to maintain that adaptation, when the perceived threat softens, is gone, it has to return back to balance. And return back to balance is not passive. It requires rebuilding. And that rebuilding process can involve swelling. It can involve tissue breakdown or tissue regeneration. It can involve fluid shifts. It can involve discharge, inflammation, fatigue. If you have had chronic symptoms and flares for some time, your body has not been failing. It has actively been trying to heal. The flares, the cycles, the shifts, those are not evidence of defect. They are evidence of movement. Your symptoms indicate that something is happening. Understanding this is crucial to understanding what is happening in your body. Because if you misinterpret rebuilding as breakdown, you will respond with fear. And fear changes the messages your body receives. So now that you understand what symptoms actually are and that healing doesn't always feel comfortable, we have to ask the next question. If the body knows how to heal, what keeps chronic symptoms from going away? And the answer always brings us back to safety and survival. Let's start with something simple. Imagine you're walking and someone suddenly jumps out and startles you. Your heart races, your muscles tense, your breathing changes, maybe you even feel a surge of heat or shakiness. That is adaptation. Your body moved into a fight or flight response because in that moment it perceived a potential threat. And then you realize it was just a friend joking around. The situation is resolved. It's done and over with. Mentally you register, I'm safe. And once the perception shifts, your body settles. Your heart rate slows, your breathing normalizes, your muscles relax, the adaptation is no longer needed. That is resolution. The body adapted, the perception shifted, the body returned to balance. Now, compare that to chronic symptoms. Chronic symptoms begin the same way, with an adaptation to a perceived threat. But instead of the perception fully resolving, something keeps reinforcing it. Remember, safety doesn't just mean physical danger. Most of the time it's emotional. Not feeling good enough, feeling rejected, feeling powerless, feeling like you have to hide who you are, not loving yourself, feeling alone. To your primal brain, those are threats. They are threats to your survival if you don't feel safe and strong enough. And if those perceptions continue, your body continues adapting. The difference between acute and chronic is not that the body forgot how to heal. It's that the perception never fully resolved. It's like a cut that keeps getting hit and reopened. Every time it starts to repair, something aggravates it again. Not because the skin doesn't know how to regenerate, but because it keeps getting interrupted. Now chronic symptoms are working the same way. What originally started your symptoms was a moment or a series of moments where your perception did not feel safe. And if your beliefs about yourself or the world haven't shifted, or about that particular situation, your system continues to filter experiences through that same lens. Beliefs about yourself, beliefs about other people, beliefs about the world. For example, if you believe you are not good enough, you will interpret feedback as rejection. If you believe it's unsafe to speak of, you will suppress yourself repeatedly. If you believe you must perform to be accepted, you will constantly pressure yourself. Those filters influence how you respond to everyday life. And if everyday life continues to activate, not safe, the adaptation continues. Chronic symptoms don't just pop up out of the blue. They are a domino effect from the way that you perceive life. They are an indication that you are continuing to respond to life in a way that doesn't feel safe. Once you send consistent messages of safety to your body, it no longer needs to maintain the adaptation. It can complete the healing process. The messages you need to send are not generic. They are specific to your experiences and subconscious patterns. Very often these patterns begin in childhood. That's where we first learn whether it's safe to trust ourselves, speak up, make mistakes, fully be seen, etc. And a lot of times it's modeled through our parents. They might be fearful themselves or whatever patterns they have we take on as well. Society and even cultural or religious environments can reinforce fear and self-doubt instead of empowerment. These early programs don't disappear when you turn a certain age. They become the filters through which you see life. And your brain reinforces them by interpreting current situations through those same filters. That way the system stays consistent. And to the brain, consistency equals safety. So this is what keeps chronic symptoms active. Not because your body is broken and doesn't know what to do or you're special and there's something wrong with you. We are all biologically designed the same way. It is all back to safety and survival. So this is where a lot of people get confused once they learn this. They think, well, I've already worked on my past or I've already done trauma work or nothing in my life right now is happening that's stressful. And yet, why are my symptoms still here? Now, from a conscious perspective, this feels true. But on a subconscious level, it's not. Otherwise, your symptoms would be resolved. So we have to remember what's happening here, the messages that your body is getting, isn't something you're consciously choosing to do. Once your awareness muscle gets strong enough, you will start to see these patterns and you can consciously make different choices. But right now, everything is on a subconscious level. And the files that are in your subconscious is what is still being referenced to these messages of not feeling safe. And that is where the focus needs to be. And it's not just about talking about your trauma, going to therapy and talking these things out. While that can be helpful sometimes, sometimes it can also make things worse. We're not looking at going in and opening up the can of worms all the time. We want to know where these patterns started, but we also want to know where in our current life these patterns are continuing to show up that are keeping it still active. And you're going to have things that are currently happening in your life and how you're responding connected to how you were programmed a long time ago in your childhood that are very, very similar because these patterns have been with you for so long and it's who you are. It's how you respond to life and your experiences. So I want to give you an example of what this looks like in real life. So when I was dealing with Rosacea, I eventually connected it to shame and embarrassment. And I could look back at different moments in my life where I felt embarrassed, judged, not good enough, shameful. And there were multiple experiences that carry that same emotional tone back to childhood, back to my entire life. And I worked on those experiences. I reflected on them and I understood how they shaped the way I saw myself. That is important and that's part of the work. But here's what I didn't realize at first is even though I had addressed the past experiences, I was still actively experiencing shame in the present moment. Every time I looked into the mirror, my internal dialogue was the same. I can't be seen like this. I'm ugly. I'm so ashamed. I'm so embarrassed by what this looks like. And those thoughts aren't neutral. Every single time I looked in the mirror and I thought, I can't be seen like this. This is so embarrassing. I reactivated that same survival pattern connected to events from long ago that represented that shame and embarrassment. These were patterns that went all the way back in my childhood that were still showing up today. My body wasn't confused. It was responding to this message of not feeling safe that has continued my entire life. So even though I had worked on the original experiences that wired shame into my system, I was reinforcing those same exact patterns daily. I would check the mirror, I would feel embarrassed, I would brace before social situations, I would ponder if people noticed. And that is repeated activation. I was constantly hitting the cut and opening up the wound. It wasn't the rosacea itself that was keeping the loop alive. It was the meaning I was attaching to it and the stories that was all connected. And my body was just trying to tell me what I needed to work on. And it wasn't until I stopped letting the rosacea define me, until I genuinely stopped caring if I was seen with it, that something shifted in a forceful way, not immediately overnight, not me just stepping into fake confidence. I understood what my body was trying to communicate, that I was holding on to this embarrassment and shame. And I needed to work on letting that go. And I stopped treating the rosacea like it was the problem and instead thanking it for giving me the message of the things I needed to work on. And when the thoughts changed from I can't be seen like this to this doesn't define me, that threat signal softened over time. It's not an overnight thing because of course you it's not easy to just overnight just shift that. These are patterns in your brain that every day you're waking up and doing the same thing over and over. But when the threat signal softened and I did that consistently, that's when the healing completed. Next up, I want to talk about some other factors that can contribute to interrupting the healing process. And there's just a couple things here, but they're really, really important. The first is fear. We've already touched a little bit on this, but it deserves definitely to be talked about a little bit more. Fear is not just an emotion, it is a survival signal. So if you're feeling fear, your body is being told that there is a threat. And if you're constantly monitoring your symptoms, worrying about what they mean, scanning for danger, bracing for the next flare, whatever your mind is taking you to, which I understand I've been there, your brain is very creative in when you have chronic symptoms to be going a lot of deep holes around worry, fear, negative thinking. Okay. And your system continues to receive these messages as it's not safe, that there is something wrong. Those messages are danger messages, and they are actively telling our body that there is a tiger behind the bush. So that doesn't mean you're choosing fear on purpose. It means you've been taught to interpret symptoms as threats, and then it just continues from there. It's a domino effect. As soon as we kind of have this program that there's something wrong with my body, then the fear monster and the rest of its best friends come in and become a fear gang in your brain and it takes over. And biologically, this fear keeps that adaptation cycle active. The second factor is medications. Now, there are situations where medication is absolutely necessary, especially in an acute or life-threatening situation. And that's not what I'm talking about here. But when medication is used repeatedly to suppress symptoms without addressing the underlying survival pattern, it can interrupt the body's rebuilding process. If healing requires inflammation, discharge, tissue breakdown, or restructuring, and those processes are continually being shut down, the cycle may never fully complete. The body adapts, the symptom is suppressed, but the original survival message remains. And this is something you will see active with medication. Some will say, if I'm not on the medication, the symptom comes back. And that's what's happening. When you suppress the healing process, which the healing process is when our symptoms are actually showing, that medication is suppressing it and putting you back into a state where we're not moving into the healing phase, but instead we're in a sympathetic state where symptoms don't show. And once that medication is removed, a lot of the times the symptoms return. And the same can happen with certain supplements. I'm not saying all supplements are bad, but when they are being used as a constant attempt to control or silence your symptoms instead of understanding what the body is doing, they can reinforce the idea that something is wrong and must be damaged. And it's important because they can act very similar to a medication, depending on what the supplement is, by interrupting that healing process, putting it on pause, because the body is saying, hey, I know what to do here, but you're sending this thing in here and turning off my healing process. So I'm going to just sit back and wait until this pill no longer comes in here and tells me what to do. And then I'm going to start my thing back up again. So remember the meaning matters here. If every flare is going to lead to panic, another protocol, another restriction, another intervention, the system does not receive safety. It receives an urgency message. And urgency is a survival state. So when we talk about healing being interrupted, it's not just subconscious patterns. Subconscious patterns are a majority of the issue here. It's also how we respond to symptoms once they appear, that fear cycle. And so when most people come to us, they're stuck in a lot of this fear. And once we take away the fear, a lot of things just naturally calm down just by doing that. We have to start honestly with the fear first, because it calms everything down so we can actually do the work that matters. So taking a look at the full picture of what is all interrupting this healing process, we're looking at subconscious patterns, fear, and sometimes medications and supplements. So let's bring this all together. Chronic symptoms don't stay because your body is broken. They stay because the healing process keeps getting interrupted. Your body is designed to heal. It knows how to heal. But when the same survival message continues to be sent, whether through fear, the meaning that You're giving your symptoms or old patterns that are showing up, the healing process gets interrupted and has to start all over again. People with chronic conditions have been doing this cycle for however long they've had chronic conditions. This is what we call a hanging healing. A hanging healing means the healing is hanging around, and people can be in this cycle for years. And this is truly what's happening. The healing process is being interrupted. That's what makes symptoms chronic. And when the messages change, when safety becomes consistent, the adaptation is no longer needed. Now, if you're listening to this and realizing that you've been trying to fight your symptoms and been in a hanging healing for a long time. And instead of understanding them, you've been trying to fight them. That's exactly why I created Evolve. Inside Evolve, we identify the survival patterns that are keeping the healing cycle open and we systematically change the message your body is receiving. Not through surface level tools, not through constant symptom management. We're going to put that all aside and we're going to do real rewiring work that allows your body to finally complete what it already knows how to do. So if you're ready to stop circling the same symptoms and actually resolve them at the root, you can apply for Evolve through the link in the show notes. Before I close, I want you to think about this. If your symptoms are your body adapting for survival and not evidence that something is broken, how does that change the way that you see them? Because the way that you see them determines whether the survival pattern continues or begins to soften. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode helped you understand your symptoms in a new way, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Talk to you next time.