My story about an aching body and about neglecting my emotions

I'm a regular guy who started exercising in different forms when I was in middle school. The feeling of success, the physical development and the euphoric feeling you get after physical exertion and the boost in self-confidence that followed swept me away. Of course, the biggest prize was waiting in the future, that being my dream of working in the security field where good physical condition is required.

Everything around sports interested me. I learned about nutrition, sleep, mobility, anatomy and physiology. I participated in several coaching sessions, from which I gained more knowledge and experience.

In addition to everything mentioned above, exercise also acted as a mental "medicine" for me. Bad experiences and adversities got pushed into the back of my mind from where they would haunt me. All those unpleasant feelings and thoughts were almost always turned into fuel, which I converted into motivation for heavy training, hard interval training or whatever else. That's how I was able to neglect my own feelings, without even realizing it. In addition, my brain still rewarded the conversion of all those negative emotions with a feel-good hormone cocktail.

During my time in the army, I served in a guerrilla company for a year, where I was able to improve my physical condition even more. In addition, I got to experience what it was like to work under heavy pressure, fatigue and stress. I succeeded in this too! I started to build my identity on the belief that I was able to survive and cope with almost anything! After the army, I didn't get directly into the profession I wanted to and I stayed for a few years in my hometown, where I joined volunteer fire department.

Again, a place where I was able to excel with my ability to tolerate high pressure and stress as well as with my good physical condition. I completed almost all the courses on offer. Within real fire alarms, I was able to participate in smoke diving in burning buildings, as a first responder meeting people in distress, road traffic accidents to cut people out of crashed cars... I wanted to experience and see all kinds of things. Sometimes people asked whether such situations scared me. The answer “No” came almost without hesitation. With hindsight, of course it was sometimes scary to face all the hysterical people in terrible pain. You just knew how to silence your emotions in those moments and just think "This just has to be done. This is my task and role now".

With hindsight, I understand how all those emotions that got pushed aside should have been dealt with after the situation was over. But as I didn't feel anything in those moments, then why bother going through them, I thought. There were many defusing sessions available, but of course I never attended any. And to be honest, I doubt that I could have ever said or felt anything even if I did.

At the age of 24, I was again training at the gym.I had almost finished the training, but a little before the last move I started feeling sick. I felt like throwing up. I thought that the training had just already been so hard that it was better just to leave it to that. In the dressing room, the bad feeling just continued and I was surprised when the feeling did not start to diminish. I left the dressing room and while walking down the stairs I started to feel like I wasn't getting enough oxygen. I quickly tried to take a deep breath, but I just couldn't get any air in. Panic and confusion hit "What the hell is happening now? Am I going to die?". I was able to call the emergency center and the ambulance arrived after a short while. A little before the ambulance arrived, I was able to breathe again. After performing a few tests, the first aid person said that you don't seem to have anything wrong.

I felt very confused. I've never been in the hospital, broken bones or gotten anything bigger than small wounds, and now out of nowhere I felt completely disabled. Once the situation was over, I didn’t give it a second thought. I thought it must have just been just a temporary thing. The next day, I could no longer just ignore all the strange physical symptoms. While playing computer games at home, my heart started pounding out from nowhere. I had experienced occasional palpitations before in my life, but they had always stopped shortly after. This time they didn't, which got my attention... which then increased the level of activation in my nervous system even more and I had a panic attack. So I had to call the ambulance again . This time, the paramedics saw an acute extra beat in the EKG and consulted a doctor remotely. After a while they said, "There is nothing wrong with you. Everything is fine."

"Everything is fine??!!" It bothered me enormously when I was experiencing such severe physical symptoms and they couldn't give me any logical reasons why they were happening. After this event, I started experiencing similar type of sudden attacks more and more often. I couldn't go for a run as I felt as if I couldn’t get enough oxygen in and my heart started pounding. I couldn't go to the gym for the same reasons. I had to stop all physical activity very abruptly and together with that, also my identity as a strong, resilient and active person completely crumbled in less than a week.

That was the beginning of the hunt for “the truth”. I went to a cardiologist and they took both; an EKG-test and an ultrasound of the heart. But nothing was found. During the ultrasound, I luckily got some extra beats, which the cardiologist saw and said "everything is fine". I thought "There's no way in hell it was fine... I've never had anything and now my heart was pounding like there was no tomorrow. So surely some cause-and-effect relationship must be found". I thought that the doctor had missed something, when my symptoms were so concrete. The hunt for the truth continued by visiting countless specialists, doctors, OMT physiotherapists, orthopedists, naprapaths, chiropractors, magnet and x-ray imaging. But nothing was found.

My anxiety about the situation deepened. I experienced a huge amount of uncertainty, and there seemed to be nothing that helped, except for only very momentarily. Over the years, I heard the words “ We will figure things out for you, don't worry" multiple times. But those promises fell apart time and time again which only just deepened my despair. The walls around my own life got smaller and smaller over the years as the fear toward my symptoms increased. My mind was going in circles trying to solve the issues I was experiencing with logic and the fear of panic attacks made me stay at home again and again.

In the middle of all the despair, I sometimes dreamed about the person I used to be and all of the things that I was able to do before all this storm began. I dreamed about being able to enjoy sports and life in general just like I used to do. It felt heart breaking to compare life before and now, when the future didn't show even a glimmer of hope. After six years, I met Ansku, with whom we started to unravel the knot. I don't remember exactly what Ansku said to me at our first meeting, but I'm almost sure that my thoughts were "Maybe this time things will change. Probably not, but I want to believe that they will".

Having worked together with Ansku for two years now, I can look back and say that it has been "one hell of a ride". The contrast at the beginning was heavy. The way we started to balance the breathing, the nervous system and the mind was completely different from what I had tried before and it also started to work. For the first time in years, I started to be cautiously hopeful, as I started experiencing moments when I felt better, my back pain that I had tried solving with massage for years started to subside, my breath started to flow quite effortlessly and the exercises she gave me felt good. As I said at the beginning, the contrast was huge at the beginning. The highs and lows of the nervous system felt overwhelming in the beginning. One moment everything was calm and then the next moment I was again on the verge of a panic attack. Despite these fluctuations, a spark of hope had ignited.

In addition to the exercises, we talked about the influence that the mind has on the body and to all of the somatic symptoms that I experienced acutely and during the past years. At first, I didn't really understand the link between my mind and my physical symptoms. For a moment, I could internalize what Ansku said, but then after a couple of days I was again trying to rush and rationalize my symptoms through logic. I was being my own worst enemy. Ansku gave me tools based on what I was able to internalize at any given moment, but as I had been a "prisoner" of my own misery for years, just the thought that it could take months, even years for the situation to settle, seemed impossible to accept.

I started to again rationalize and use logic in an attempt to solve my somatic problems. I tried to rush and make shortcuts on the time I needed for healing. Once again, I found myself in another low on my journey. After a few years of more stability, I started having panic attacks again. We discussed what was happening and why and continued with the exercises and I began to notice the importance of the mental side and the nervous system. After about seven months working together with Ansku, the idea of ​​an "impossible" option started to seem possible. To see a psychiatrist.

While talking to the psychiatrist, it became clear that the decades of emotional debt had to be paid, and the creditor was alarming for the the payment of the debt with physical symptoms. The first wake-up call was the time in the gym when I couldn't breathe and countless other times after that. Now, one year since starting therapy and two years since the collaboration with Ansku, the feeling is absolutely incredible. If someone had said a little over two years ago that the smiling guy in the military training in the picture of this post would be me, I wouldn't have believed it.

All the lessons I had gathered over the years about training and the physical side of our health and of all of the components that support it, one really big part had been completely ignored: Mental well-being. The mind is able to stretch really far if you don't listen to it or really face your emotions. The mind also lets you know if something is wrong to which my body alarms me with physical symptoms such as back tension and pain. Sometimes I might experience palpitations or my skin dries to the point of getting open wounds. There are an infinite number of ways in which the body speaks. Fortunately, my own understanding of these signs has increased and I can stop going through the burdens of the mind, before they get transferred into bodily symptoms.

There is still a long way to go, but now I can say to myself with a smile, without doubt: “We will figure things out, don't worry”