I’ve had many discussions with people in recent years who often have thought I should be on some sort of medications to cope with my ongoing mental, emotional, and physical health issues I’ve been dealing with for some time now. There is a main reason why I continue to not pursue the medicinal path and that’s because of all the damage medications did to me as a kid during my formative years.
I was most definitely overmedicated as a kid and much of the reason why I believe my mind and body is the way it is now is because of that. Whether my being overmedicated was due to all the mental health issues my mother had back then or the beginning stages of my own mental health issues, I don’t know. What I do know though is that I’ve done my best to allow my body over the years to correct what was incorrectly done to it for all of my childhood and even young adult years.
How many times my mother sprayed Chloraseptic down the back of my throat for every little tickle or strange sensation there? Too many to count. How many times I was given Sudafed for every single sniffle I got is also countless. Add in the amount of times I took antibiotics, specifically Amoxicillin, each time I developed any bit of a cough or cold is countless as well. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how medicinal treatment was administered to me during my formative years. As a young adult, in my mid 20’s, after leaving home, I continued seeking pills to fix me from one doctor after another, with one perceived pain after another. Heck, one time I even though I had issues with one of my knees and had surgery where they found nothing. The result though of that was my mother coming to stay with me for a good while and pampering me during that period while I took the prescribed drugs to deal with the pain.
The fact is, this pattern began with me growing up believing that for every little issue I had going on with my health, that the only solution was to run to my mother, usually in worry, where she’d comfort me and provide something medicinal for help. I’d then trust it would do its thing, and honestly, it always did, at least from the expected outcome I wanted. I’d get comfort temporarily from an alcoholic mother and I’d feel closer to her because of it. It’s quite possible that the very reason for becoming overmedicated in life was knowing my alcoholic mother stopped being the dysfunctional person she normally was each time I was “sick”. Because when I was “sick”, she consistently played the loving mother I needed. And, it’s also just as possible that my mother needed a “sick” kid to nurse back to health to give her a sense of purpose, or at the very least, a distraction from her mental imbalances and addictions.
I learned recently that there is a medical diagnosis called Munchausen syndrome that may be exactly what I went through as a kid, and that both my mother and I suffered from it. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, I believe all those medicines I took poisoned my body and never gave my body the chance to learn how to function healthily on its own immune system. How much of that really has contributed to all mental, emotional, and physical imbalances today? Maybe a lot.
If there indeed is any truth to this, as this being the main source of all my health issues today, the only solution I’ve seen to rectify this beyond my weekly therapy visits, is to walk through what I’m feeling and let my body do what it needs to do to heal itself. That means not running to a doctor, a pharmacy, a drug store, or even a health food store to find some pill to fix anything that’s making me feel uncomfortable inside. In 2011, I actually stopped this path for an entire year, all because I allowed one of those in my life at the time to convince me that medicine was a better path, rather than continuing to listen to my spirit telling me to remain on the path I was. The result of that was a descent into madness, institutionalization for a few days, and growing far sicker. I returned to this path in mid 2012 and have remained on it ever since.
I know some may think I’m crazy for following this path, but I can tell you that living the life I once did, taking one medicine after another, visiting doctors constantly, seeking some sort of reassurance through it all, never worked. I always felt worse the longer I remained on that path in both mind and body. While the healing path I’ve chosen, one free of medicine, is often quite arduous due to having to sit with so many hypochondria-based fears surrounding my health, I still have my faith in God that I’m on the right path. And I pray that one day my mind and body will be free of all the damage I once did to it through medicinal abuse throughout much of my younger life.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
