I often wonder that our life energy is a finite resource. You are born with an amount of energy, and you cannot have more, no matter how you live. You can definitely get less, but never more. It makes me think that I must be careful with the energy that I have. Some events take huge amounts of energy without conscious expenditure. People don’t realize that life is taking their energy, stealing it to pay for healing a damaged body, or even a damaged heart. Research tells us that stress and the fight or flight response increases cortisol in our bodies.
These responses to life’s challenges consume our life energy. Instead of a day of life energy, we may lose a month of energy to an awful stressor. Pain can consume us. It can burn through our energy stores like a forest fire on steroids. Great emotional pain is not an exception.
Life Energy as a Commodity
As teenagers, we have no awareness of our own energy and certainly none of anyone else’s energy. We believe that all things in our lives are there forever. We don’t believe in our own ability to change and transform. Our lives are permanent as is our constellation of others that we live and love with. This ignorance leads us to spend our energy recklessly.
We are often fearless and don’t acknowledge a future of aging and our own mortality. The biggest challenge is aging into Fibromyalgia and looking back at those levels of energy and that standard of living.
There is a well-established link between childhood trauma and chronic illness. Life energy is stolen by childhood trauma, whatever that trauma is / was, the expenditure of life energy to manage the trauma is life altering for the victims.
These life beginnings are stored deep within our bodies and stay lurking in the shadows. They haven’t gone anywhere, but you couldn’t tell 22 year old me that my life energy had been drained away by the vampires of my childhood. I would have told you that all of that was behind me and that my future was my own.
As my youth unfurled in front of me. I used my life energy mercilessly. Mothering took 31 years from beginning to the last 18-year-old completed high school. Those years were no holds barred, I worked as hard as necessary to provide everything I could to each and every one of them. That is what made me proud and happy, trying anything to give my children what they needed. I worked full time and went to school at night and when I became single I worked two jobs often.
We moved often (awful landlords) and I could move an entire household in 3 days and return to work on Monday. I was often exhausted but never acknowledged it.
Back to the Research
A retrospective study doesn’t prove causation. A retrospectives study is when researchers ask you about your past life. Researchers notice what is called a correlation. That means that wow, a lot of x ends up when people are y. An example of this is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) which has a correlation with childhood sexual abuse.
For people who are diagnosed with BPD, we notice that a majority of them have suffered through childhood sexual abuse. There is no proof that childhood sexual abuse causes BPD, but clearly there is a relationship. This is what is true with fibromyalgia, there is no proof that childhood trauma causes fibromyalgia, but a lot of people who have fibromyalgia suffered through childhood trauma.
Childhood Trauma then Life…
It is my theory that it is a function of life energy. Life energy that is sucked away by the horrible stressors of being exposed to trauma and pain in childhood. That spent life energy cannot be earned back and so it must be paid for later in life.
Fibromyalgia can be many things, but it is primarily pain and fatigue. Of course, pain causes fatigue, but again, there is a deep and abiding fatigue that is the basis within which this illness lives.
This fatigue stops activity dead in its tracks. This fatigue sends the patient to bed often and unwillingly.
Life energy is not a popular concept because it implies a finite amount of energy. Instead of being scary, perhaps it can be appreciated more for what it is; a valuable commodity for living a beautiful life.
