Psychosomatics is a familiar word, but what is behind it? Diseases that arise due to a lack of understanding between the child and parents, experts say.
“My daughter has had herpes since she was five,” says Zhanna. – For three years, we turned to different specialists, took acyclovir, cortisone, vitamins. Helped for a while. Then one doctor recommended to talk to a psychologist.”
There are many problems that pediatricians cannot cope with. Asthma, skin diseases, heart rhythm disturbances, unexplained abdominal pain… According to various estimates, from 40 to 60% of childhood diseases can be considered psychosomatic (when a psychological difficulty manifests itself in the form of a bodily symptom). But doctors rarely refer children to a specialist in psychosomatics. The initiative comes from the parents.
“More often they turn to me because of behavioral problems: isolation, aggressiveness, poor academic performance,” says child psychoanalytic therapist Natalia Zueva. “Later, it may turn out that the child has other symptoms, such as a rash or enuresis.”
Conversation without words
Body language is very important for children. From the very first day of life, the child communicates with parents and, without speaking, uses the body as a means of communication. The “statements” of the child may be skin rashes, screaming, regurgitation or vomiting, insomnia, gestures.
“The mother knows how to understand their meaning, hears them as a speech addressed to her, and reacts to the importance of the information communicated to her,” said child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. The mother knows why the baby is crying: whether he is worried about wet diapers, hunger or thirst, or he wants to communicate with an adult, feel his presence and warmth. But sometimes a woman is too tired or anxious to delve into the shades of her baby’s “speech”, and his needs go unrecognized.
Endless colds and SARS can mean “I don’t like kindergarten, I don’t want to go there”
“It happens that a mother habitually gives a crying child a breast,” continues Natalia Zueva. And when he turns away because he’s not hungry, she gets angry because she doesn’t understand what he wants. The child is also angry because he feels misunderstood.” This is how communication fails. In the near future, mutual understanding between mother and baby will be restored, but moments of unrecognized needs may be repeated, creating the preconditions for problems to arise.
The lack of understanding communication leads to the fact that through his own body the child gives out louder signals. The goal is the same – to be heard. Many children react with diseases to the appearance of a kindergarten in their lives.
“Endless colds and SARS can mean “I don’t like kindergarten, I don’t want to go there,” Natalia Zueva notes. “For some reason, the child does not dare to say it in words and says otherwise.”
Meaning of symptoms
The child learns from his parents to understand his desires. “By talking with the child, the mother creates space for his experiences and helps him to recognize and name these experiences,” explains Natalia Zueva. He understands and realizes himself to the extent that his parents taught him to. If they were unable to do so, then he has at his disposal a wordless method of communication – with the help of symptoms.
The skin can express the state of children, wrote the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto:
“Eczema can mean a desire for change. Peeling of the skin and rejection of something means a lack of something necessary. Asthenia can manifest itself in a child whose mother has left and he has ceased to smell her.
Psychoanalyst Diran Donabedian, director of the children’s department at the Institute of Psychosomatics in Paris, shares illustrative cases from his practice. For example, a little boy had constant pains in his stomach: this was his inseparable emotional connection with his mother.
A 16-year-old girl began to suffer from epileptic seizures. In infancy, she experienced convulsions when crying, loss of consciousness and cessation of breathing after bouts of tears and anger, but they did not pose a serious threat and responded well to treatment.
She had her first epileptic seizure at the age of nine, the year her parents separated. After that, nothing happened for a long time, but recently there were three seizures at intervals of several weeks.
During the sessions with Diran Donabedyan, it turned out that these seizures were caused by emotional overstrain due to falling in love. The girl rehearsed the role of Isolde in a theatrical play and fell in love with her partner without memory, but did not dare to admit it to him. The separation of her parents taught her that love stories do not end well. And the story of the knight and his beloved was disappointing.
Awareness of the repressed
“Each of us can have a psychosomatic illness,” says the psychoanalyst. – In adults, it is most often superimposed on experiences associated with the loss of a loved one or parting. Psychosomatic illness occurs as a result of “repression from consciousness”. Loss causes such a risk of mental destruction that our impulses that accompany loss are not expressed in feelings of sadness, guilt or anger, but are mistakenly redirected into the body.
And the child is struck by an epileptic seizure, severe urticaria, all-encompassing psoriasis … “Not all childhood illnesses are psychosomatic,” Diran Donabedyan clarifies. “But if they are difficult to heal, you need to look at the history of the child to increase his chances of recovery.”
Psychological observation does not replace treatment, but becomes an addition to it.
Psychological observation does not replace treatment, but becomes an addition to it: a child with chronic asthma continues to take the drug prescribed by the doctor. Drawing on play, drawings and fairy tales for the little ones, on verbal work and psychodrama for the older ones, specialists try to help the child regain integrity by connecting his bodily experiences with words that give them meaning.
The work lasts an average of two to three years and does not stop with the disappearance of symptoms: it is known that they can simply change the place of manifestation. Although Jeanne’s daughter did not get rid of the herpes virus, she had not had a rash for two years.
Perhaps the time will come when pediatricians and psychologists will seriously join forces in order to take into account the characteristics of the personality of the child and his environment in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.