How chronic illness can leave you grief stricken
Recently something unexpectedly made me cry. A lot. And I kept returning to it like a glutton for punishment. They weren’t tears of happiness either. And I felt generally lousy. So this begs the question, can crying make you sick?
After reflecting for a few days on why something clobbered me repeatedly in the feels so much, I eventually realised why I felt so sentimental. And I thought I would share it here because this affects most people a few times during their lives. So you might find it helpful.
I watched a performance competition called Kingdom (킹덤) Legendary War featuring some of the best young Korean boy groups in K-Pop when Stray Kids put on an incredible cover of a song called “I’ll be your man.“
It’s customary for music and harmonies to make me emotional, but that’s not exactly what made me weep. On the other hand, lyrics are essentially poetry and can convey powerful emotions. But a big chunk of the lyrics were in Korean, so my understanding of what they were singing about was sketchy since it’s hard to concentrate on the translations while listening and watching the performance. So it puzzled me why this particular song was so hard-hitting.
And then it struck me: the song was about loss and grief, and through their performance and the props on stage, they could act out a story that I could understand. In fact, it was like an entire novel condensed into 4 minutes. It was such an accomplishment it would have made the Reduced Shakespear Company proud.
Grief and loss are arduous elements of the human experience. But, unfortunately, they come knocking on all of our doors, so it’s not like we can avoid them, although we may wish to.
On the surface, this song was about how we react to bereavement. But music and visual arts are open to interpretation. And Stray Kids seem to write songs with many layers of meaning. So although the original song was about love lost, Stray Kids reworked it to completely alter the meaning.
Whenever we talk about grief, our thoughts usually automatically turn to the experience of losing someone we love through death. Of course, this is natural as, for most of us, death holds a terribly grim finality where you can never reconnect with that person again in this life. And we’re faced with the loss but also regrets about things we feel we ought to have said, done or not done. And over the last few years, death has become more common than it had been for a long time. I’ll say no more here about the underlying drivers of the massive death rate spikes.
But I wanted to talk about a few other sources of grief apart from bereavement that we all face and how they can be devastating.
Some overlooked causes of grief
Grief can be triggered by just about any loss. And some of the most significant losses we can face are caused by wounds to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Illness is never welcome. Sometimes, it can seem like sickness is genetically predetermined, leaving you unable to dodge it. And that can make you feel helpless. But it’s important to remember that you can also suffer from grief over chronic illness.
But other times, your health fails because of your life choices or some harm done to you by another person. Many of the injuries inflicted by other people are all too apparent. But others are more subtle yet no less calamitous. Even people you turn to for help can injure you, usually unintentionally. The absurd and appalling truth is that your doctor is the person most likely to kill you.
The covert and perfidious world of medical injuries
Unfortunately, medications may be the third leading cause of death in the Westernised world. Meanwhile, unknown numbers of people are maimed and harmed by medications but survive with a quality of life far lower than before. Like many other people (including a significant segment of my clients), I’ve dealt with the long-term repercussions of toxicity from gadolinium MRI dyes. I’ve written about this experience here, here, and here if you’d like to compare notes. While many other clients have had their well-being destroyed by other medications like psychotropic drugs and fluoroquinolone antibiotics. The fallout from medical injuries may affect you for the rest of your life.
During the free clarity calls that I offer, it’s common for people to break down into tears as they release the overwhelming grief that accompanies the violation and hurt they feel having experienced the destruction of their health at the hands of health care. They feel betrayed because they know that the people with whom they placed their trust let them down. And frustrated and aggrieved when instead of trying to undo the harm, their doctors trivialise their drug-induced side effects and reassure them that it’s all in their minds in what can only be described as medical gaslighting. The only thing that shocks me is that everyone who speaks with me about their experiences isn’t bawling their eyes out. Can crying make you sick? In this case, it’s the other way around; chronic illness can lead to anguish.
And many people start on new medications not only to manage their grief over chronic illness but also to deal with the adverse effects of drugs, heavy metals, and toxins like gadolinium contrast. The standard treatment route is to prescribe more and more medications to suppress symptoms of toxicity like:
- pain,
- abnormal digestion,
- low mood,
- high blood pressure,
- weight changes,
- and poor metabolic health.
So even when the despair and crying don’t make you sick, the antidepressants and other medications you’re prescribed likely will. You can discover more about how prescription drugs and other toxicants can destroy your health here.
You might even be prescribed antibiotics to treat infections, as the immune system is another casualty of toxicity.
If you’ve also suffered from drug-induced side effects, I bet you’ve felt betrayed, angry, and violated. That’s a predictable response because something very special has been stolen from you: your health and your future.
What emotions can you experience while dealing with grief?
Dealing with grief is an emotional rollercoaster ride. You’re not only subject to the disbelief, anger, sorrow, and fear that the 5 stages of grief chronic illness models talk about. There’s also:
- guilt,
- anxiety,
- hopelessness,
- bitterness,
- distrust,
- sense of betrayal,
- confusion,
- disappointment,
- fear of the unknown,
- fatigue,
- demotivation,
- restlessness,
- isolation,
- emptiness,
- shame,
- irritability,
- revulsion,
- feeling tearful,
- angst, and
- the loss of your dreams for the future.
To complicate things more, the physical effects and your response to them don’t just affect you; they can also affect your family, friends, colleagues and the people around you. This has many repercussions. You might even feel that you need to be the strong one, comfort other people, and hide how much you’re hurting from them. This can be especially tough when you’re suffering. And can feel very unfair.
How your life can change as a result of chronic illness
When side effects are severe, you may also need to alter several aspects of your life. Your symptoms arising from the stages of grief with chronic illness may limit your ability to perform tasks. These can range in complexity and severity, so their impact can encompass the spectrum from irritating to life-changing. Symptoms of grief over chronic illness may affect your ability to work and to care for yourself and others, and they may reduce your capacity to maintain your social connections through symptoms like:
- brain fog,
- loss of concentration,
- memory issues,
- fatigue,
- pain,
- incoordination and movement problems,
- anxiety,
- depression,
- lack of motivation,
- weakness,
- gut symptoms, and
- insomnia.
Can crying make you sick?
..you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit."
Crying is one of the ways we cope with grief. But I hope I’ve been able to show you that the grieving process is complex. Crying is one of the healthier ways to deal with loss. You even wash away some of the stress hormones you produce when you’re feeling distressed in your tears. In this way, you can help to regulate your emotions and alleviate some of your emotional overwhelm.
On the contrary, if you bottle up your feelings, you may remain tense longer. And this can extend and amplify the effects of stress on your body in physical and psychological ways.
On the contrary, if you bottle up your feelings, you may remain tense longer. And this can extend and amplify the effects of stress on your body in physical and psychological ways.
But the reasons you’re crying can make you physically sick, especially if you avoid facing them for prolonged periods. The hurt can gouge out your insides like a hyena disembowelling a wildebeest.
In the next post, I’ll discuss how the stages of grief with chronic illness can worsen physical and mental health. But if you’ve been affected by grief brought on by lost health, you can get in touch with me here and book a free clarity call to discuss how it’s affected you and what steps you can start taking now to begin getting your health and life back on track again.
