Ashok Gupta explains how overwhelming emotions in childhood can be repressed and stored as bodily tension, leading children to dissociate from physical sensations. This learned dissociation trains brain regions (notably the amygdala and insula) to perceive bodily sensations as dangerous. Later, when an adult experiences physical triggers (e.g., viruses like COVID), the brain may apply the same resistance/dissociation strategy, activating immune and nervous responses that amplify symptoms and create a vicious cycle.
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When we were younger, if we had difficult emotions that we couldn't process because we didn't have the resources to process them, let's say we suddenly felt extreme danger and fear. Whatever reason, as a child, that emotion and that memory was too much to manage. So our brain came up with a solution, which is, let's repress that physical emotion. Let's repress that memory so that we can resolve and process it later in life when we have more resources to be able to do that. The issue is, even though it's not, it's not a perfect repression, so the tension and tightness just gets stored in our tight nervous system. In the balloon. Yeah. And what happens is because that impact emotion and the physical sensations of that emotion are so difficult, we learn as a child to dissociate from our physical body and not inhabit our body. Dissociate from those physical sensations of the symptom. Yeah. Now this is where it gets interesting in the brain neurology of this. Why is it that there's that having a background of trauma is a higher risk factor for these types of conditions that we see time and time again in the clinic as an adult, when you then have a physical trigger, which could be a virus, bacteria, mole, whatever it is, it creates physical symptoms in your body, doesn't it? Right. Having a virus, having Covid, creates physical symptoms in your body. Guess what? Your brain, your amygdala and insula specifically, have got so used to resisting and dissociating from physical symptoms that they start now attempting to dissociate from physical symptoms that are coming from the illness. And if you get this, this will be an aha moment. So let's just really process what I'm talking about. There's a similarity between the two. The sensations of an emotion, the sensations of a virus, there's a physical sensations in the body. The brain perceives that as just as dangerous as when it did those previous sensations in your childhood. So the brain comes up with a strategy, which is that resistance strategy to the sensations in your physical body. The same brain mechanisms are involved and therefore when we do that, that trains the amygdala and insula, that these physical sensations are dangerous. They represent ongoing infection, ongoing presence of that trigger. So let's trigger the immune system and nervous system to deal with it. Oh, no. But doing that creates more symptoms in my body, more danger, more resistance, dissociation from symptoms. Do we see how that then creates a vicious cycle? So because our brains and our bodies got used to dissociating from difficult sensations as a child. The brain does it as an adult as well and dissociates and resists physical sensations, physical symptoms.
