Can everyone develop a stress-related RA?

Everything that we have inherited or acquired (such as behaviour, helpful knowledge or skills) influences how we individually deal with ourselves. Besides the fundamental anatomical, physiological and psychological comparability, this is what sets us apart from our fellow human beings.

Basically, everyone could develop a stress-related illness due to overload or harmful tension. But in fact, not everyone does. Handling stress differs from person to person, and the stress level also plays a role.

Our musculoskeletal system and posture, and movement offer a wide scope, which we actively influence. No matter how well we are aware of this, the way we move and our bodies’ posture influence the health and disease of our bones, joints, muscles and tendons, our connective and supporting tissue.

Thus, diseases of the musculoskeletal system – like RA – can arise from a lack of knowledge and appropriate treatment regarding oneself.

We can see from this that roughly speaking there are two ways of dealing with ourselves: in such a way that benefits or in such a way that harms us. With the HeilÜben exercises, I would always orientate towards what benefited me.

Our abilities and skills interact and constantly engage with one another. As we experience our multifaceted and complex nature as human beings with a direct connection between mind, body and soul, through our physical problems, the path to better dealing with ourselves and others becomes possible on so many levels.

In a way, we can compare a good relationship with our bodies to a good partnership. The better we keep the conversation going, the better an understanding can develop. This way we learn much about our peculiarities, reactions and needs.

As a couple therapist, Michael Lukas Moeller described relationship work as the ever-new opportunity that creates love¹.

And as it is for any other work, it is here: When it primarily causes joy, success, and enrichment, we willingly and happily do it by and for ourselves. 

Also, in terms of how we deal with our bodies, we can always find ways to achieve understanding, congruence and good sentiences within ourselves.

That we take up on this opportunity makes a healthier life possible.

Dealing with our “soft” competencies, with our thoughts, feelings and ideas needed for such relationship work, is easier for some people than others. Moeller cites a husband talking about a couple-talk with his wife, “For my entire life, I never really found any access to myself. I couldn’t answer the question ‘What moves me most at the moment?'”²

For me, the question was what I wanted to put up with:

  • the inflammatory pain, the restrictions and the impending destruction of my joints through my rheumatoid arthritis or
  • dealing with my feelings and my relationship with myself.

At the beginning of RA, I wasn’t very experienced when handling my feelings and my relationship with myself; back then, I had not much experience. All in all, I would have described my mental health as “as always” and hardly worth considering.

With the HeilÜben exercises, we’ll first look at some of our abilities to bring them to better use. Through that, we can take a closer look at our wishes, feelings and ideas. Back then, I soon found this intrusive, unpleasant and even disgusting. On the one hand, words with which I associate good, healthy, and important things often come across in so much shallow and meaningless chatter. On the other hand, being aware of my feelings for me felt like something strange touched me. Too often, my feelings were associated with discomfort: the impression of disorientation, embarrassment, shame, worrying about weakness and loss of control.

Thus far that we are tense (in a specific situation, beforehand, or in general), the physical sensation of tension itself can feel uncomfortable and everything we perceive under the influence of this tension:

Ourselves and our surroundings.

Such negative sentiences, in turn, can cause tension.

Back then, when I was confronted with situations linked to negative sentiences, I used to

  • try to avoid them or
  • to compensate them with something, allowing me to relax and thus feel better again: a good meal, a conversation with dear, and trusted people, a movie, an exciting book. In the course of that, I could diminish or eliminate the paraesthesia I felt for as long as the moment lasted.

If I couldn’t avoid or compensate for the negative sentiences because the opportunities didn’t arise for me at the time, I automatically started to reduce them by pushing them away with just a little more tension, suppressing them to stop feeling them.

Thus, I could put the concern with the cause of tension and the resulting discomfort off for a while. At the same time, dealing with my feelings became increasingly unfamiliar to me and, from a certain degree of tension, even unpleasant. Additionally, unpleasantries cause feelings of defence and uncertainty. One tends to avoid them. Especially because one might not have found good solutions yet and for that reason believes that there are none at all.

Because I accepted that, I hadn’t been able to experience that I can reduce stress and thus tension and discomfort through relaxation.

When I practised my HeilÜben exercises, I caught up on this experience and deliberately used relaxation both in everyday life and in the face of additional challenges.

Of course, we can ask why we got so distanced from ourselves. We can decide to go and search for reasons why by following the connections of our experiences and life situations. That, however, would lead into the exciting but giant field of psychology and there waits much that has been already written just waiting to be found and read.

The aim of the HeilÜben exercises is to help relieve everyday life and give impulses for further self-determined development.

With my HeilÜben exercises, I naturally and without pretty words found piece by piece more of myself. I experienced how enriching a better approach to myself is and with what great intensity it had a relaxing and thus healing effect on my body. I learned to take it very seriously. Previously, my inner inhibition threshold build up with unpleasant sensations (feelings of embarrassment and failure) and comparatively little good experience seemed almost too high for a while.

When one reaches an inner defensive threshold during such reflections, letting the arising feelings come up freely, then setting them aside for a while and directing one’s attention³ more to the line of argument in the text can help.

When we’re motivated to change something for ourselves for the better, when we refuse to suffer from pain, be restricted, or even be destroyed by the effects of inflammation, we communicate with our bodies about our needs. And by that also about those needs of body, soul and mind that stand against each other. Sometimes I limit my time for sleep because I want to read a thriller or have an exciting conversation. Sometimes I want recognition until I realize that I do not want to pay the price and do not want to bend. Sometimes I ignore feeling hungry or cold while I’m busy writing. I can take some limited, temporary deficiencies because I know about my actions and their effects on my body. Suppose this is not the case, and things get unbalanced (up until to the point where one has to deal with a chronic inflammatory joint disease) for our own sake. In that case, we need to stop and improve our relationship with ourselves by conversing with our bodies.

But how do we communicate with our body to get to know our physical needs better in order to be able to improve our care for our health?

Such a conversation with our body can be led by good ideas and sensations, exercise, stretching and a massage. We can watch the answers to monitor the reactions of our bodies and learn more consciously. This is a quite fascinating process.

Our healthier fellow human beings usually achieve sufficient relaxation in their everyday lives, do compensatory sport and or purposefully use relaxation techniques and generally achieve a better dynamic of tension and relaxation in their posture and movement. Then tension won’t become a continuous habit. In addition to that, sufficient relief follows in overwhelming situations – all of this ensuring that the individual can stay somewhere below its overload level even when put under stress. Often the one affected knows little or nothing about it.

Each of us reacts to sentiences by tensing or relaxing some muscles and connective tissue parts rather than others. This means that creativity, action, thoughts and emotions of some people find their strongest expression in the posture and movement, the body language of the hands, arms and shoulders, for other people it is the back, the neck, the feet … you express yourself, you think and feel, you are particularly reacting with those body parts. They are the place of the strongest physical expression of each of our ideas, thoughts and feelings even if we have learned to hide that we subsequently will express ourselves through them to no small extent. Even when burdened by stress and overload:

  • when we are tensed, we feel paraesthesia

  • when we feel paraesthesia, we react with tension

Although I felt the inflammatory pain and movement restrictions, my habituation to the excessive tension of my own body still prevented me from realising this excessive tension as the cause of my complaints and by that from helping myself.

No one in their right mind would lay their hand on a hot stove and take medication to numb the pain as the cause of the pain is apparent. I found it crucial to see the connection between the symptoms and their cause with my RA. Only this way was it possible for me to determine it. And the longer the reason stays unknown, the graver its effects will be.

As long as I had not observed the temporal consilience between overloading and inflammation, pain, and destruction, I felt a higher level of suffering and the need for action. But at the same time, I felt perplexed, concerned, and frustrated and sometimes I’d even feel resignation in terms of healing. I couldn’t be healthy and had to live with the constant subliminal strain from my habitual but too high tension.

So one could wonder:

Why did I fall ill with rheumatoid arthritis?

Why is it spreading to larger areas?

Why is it so continuously respectively occurring in phases?

Where do the other complaints come from?

How do I get rid of RA?

In addition to everything else, the consequences of overloading stress can also become clear by several simultaneously occurring or secondary diseases.

The more we continue to reduce our strains, the further down we get below our stress limit.

The further we get below our upper-stress limit, the less quickly stress turns into overload, which can cause a wide variety of diseases.

Once I stopped overload in day-to-day life, prevented it from the outset and dealt with stress differently than before, my rheumatoid arthritis healed.

I found excessive tension in my entire everyday life:

  • at rest and on the move, with strength, speed, stamina and coordination;
  • in response to specific events and
  • in response to the expectation of certain events.

From my point of view, stress-related rheumatoid arthritis is:

  • the result of strains that were caused by some peculiar bad habits and
  • the physical reality of its own causes a further overload and works again through the same bad habits and is maintained by them (chronic course) at the same time.

Leaving that aside would mean merely working on the symptom to fix what one thinks to be the entire problem, even though it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

With my HeilÜben exercises, I focused on the painful, chronic inflammatory process triggered by RA and healing.

The quality of how we treat ourselves makes the difference whether our posture and movement cause inflammation and wear or whether it has a beneficial and strengthening effect.

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Manja and the HeilÜben team

Allg. Produktbild en Luis Quintero two women doing push ups 1671218

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¹,²,³ List of references

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