Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

If there was one thing I could truly change about myself, it would be to be permanently freed of hypochondria, a mental health condition I’ve had for much of my life and probably the single most frustrating part of all my ongoing health issues at this present time, as it may indeed be at the core of them all.

People often think hypochondria is something that should easily be able to be turned off. Honestly, it isn’t, just like it isn’t for someone suffering from depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, or any other mental health condition for that matter. What I find perturbs me the most with this condition from an external perspective is when someone who has never dealt with it thinks they could handle it far better than I do. The reality is someone who’s never dealt with this mental disorder (or any other mental disorder they’ve never had but think they could handle better) has no clue how challenging it can be and how much it wreaks havoc upon living any sort of a stable life.

I know that most think that having hypochondria just means you worry a lot about your health but it’s so much more than that. Take for example a few weeks ago when I was playing a round of mini-golf with my partner. At one point I sat on this wooden crate while waiting for my turn on one of the holes, when suddenly I felt this pain where my butt hit the crate. My mind immediately raced to the worst. Was it a bug bite, a spider bite, a bee sting, did I sit on a rusty nail, is there a sliver in me now, on and on my mind raced, obsessively, to even the most obscure possibilities. For the rest of the day the worry of what it was occupied me, so much so that I kept going into bathrooms and looking at my butt cheek to see if I could identify what happened. It took over 36 hours for my mind to calm down about this, when the small reddish spot finally began to disappear. But for those 36 hours or so, I hardly had any serenity at all, as my mind raced over and over again about something that most likely wouldn’t have bothered the majority of individuals it happened to.

I could share countless stories like this where some “ailment” immediately kicks off a wave of hypochondria, where I end up feeling imbalanced in my mind and body until the “ailment” either completely disappears or doesn’t grow any worse. Frankly, of all the health issues I continue to deal with, this for me is the worst because when it is active, my thinking is the very thing that works against what is reality.

When a pimple is most likely just a pimple, my hypochondriac thinking leads me to believe it’s the start of or part of some terrible skin condition. When an ache in some part of my body occurs, I think it’s cancer. When my hand occasionally shakes while holding something, I think it’s Parkinson’s. I’ve probably had just about every disease on the planet by this point, at least in my mind. The mind obsessions with hypochondria tend to feel so real, real enough that I have often attempted to intervene in the body’s natural healing processes, only to make things far worse. Years ago, I’d run to the doctor repeatedly for this condition, sometimes five days a week to different specialists, asking for one test after another because of the hypochondriac worries convincing me I knew what I had, none of which ever proved to be real.

The harsh reality of how this first began might indeed relate to the unconditional love my mother always gave me each time I was “sick” with some perceived “ailment” as a kid. During those moments of “sickness”, she was so kind to me, giving me treats and attention I usually never got. I don’t remember her ever being drunk or mean to me during those times either. Did my hypochondria totally manifest because of that? I’m not sure, but the solution I used for a long time to deal with my hypochondria was medication, which only made me a zombie more than not in life. Nowadays, I am choosing to walk through each episode of hypochondria free of medications, facing each health-related fear head on, and doing my best to do nothing, except let my body work through it naturally. It is very tough sometimes to do this though, because those fears always feel so extremely real.

Because of how much this negatively affects my day-to-day living, there is one prayer I have with God regularly now and it’s to become permanently free of this mental health condition that most don’t understand. I truly believe that much of the peace and joy lacking in my life comes from having hypochondria and constantly dealing with one health-related crisis in my mind after another.

So please God, if you could answer one prayer for me, I pray you fully take this hypochondria disorder from me for good. You once took another disorder fully from me, that being my addiction to alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, so I know you can take this away too. And I know that when you do, I’ll be able to live a much more stable life, just like I experienced when you completely freed me from each of those former addictions.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

There are a lot of things I’ve written in this blog since its inception, and I do mean a lot, given I’m well in the 3000+ range of personal testimonies shared from my spiritual journey in life. But, there are many days now where I think about quitting this, especially recently with my website experiencing some major hiccups. I haven’t quit though for one reason only because I find it’s the healthiest way to still express myself, even if I may get redundant at times in my subject material. That being said, whether this is redundant in me saying this or not today, my biggest struggle lately is feeling like there isn’t a purpose to my life anymore and that I don’t ultimately matter in this world.

After 25+ years of being in therapy with many different types of counselors, going through a number of 12 Step programs, being a part of several intensive men’s spiritual groups, going away on dozens of self-empowerment retreats, doing regular meditations, affirmations, and prayers, offering gratitude daily, and doing my best to remain healthy, mind, body, and soul through natural healing and helping others, I still find myself questioning whether any of this has done any bit of good. Why? Because I continue to feel like I have no purpose and that my life doesn’t matter. Even worse, I find myself questioning lately whether God even exists, and if God does, why can’t I feel His presence no matter how hard I try to. And at my deepest level of insecurity, all of this leaves me wondering if I died tomorrow, would anyone really even care in the long run or would I easily be forgotten?

While I’m sure I’ve touched the heart and soul of some at some point or another, I question that now more than not. I know I sure do try to make a difference, but, truth be told, there isn’t a day where I don’t still question this. And although I practice gratitude daily, I wake up on most days feeling unhappy and wishing God would bring me home. Frankly, I’m simply exhausted from trying to find my purpose here and feel like I matter. And believe me I have done A LOT to try to find my purpose or create a purpose.

I honestly don’t know how much the chronic pain I’ve felt for as long as I have makes me think this way. I know prior to developing all this pain, I surely didn’t have this low of self-esteem. So, maybe I’m just blocked from seeing the truth? Maybe my chronic pain creates an illusion that I don’t matter when I truly do and maybe it prevents me from fully seeing the purpose of my continued existence? Maybe it also prevents me from really feeling the presence of God as well? I don’t ultimately know the veracity of any of this, but what I do know is that it really does seem to be out of my control to change any of how I feel, given how hard I’ve tried to over the years.

Nevertheless, while today’s words may indeed sound redundant from past writings, just know I shared them today, not just to be fully transparent to the sheer frustration and hopelessness I feel in my life right now, but also to let all those out there who might be feeling similarly know they aren’t alone. Ultimately, I think everyone matters and we all have a purpose here on Earth, but the hardest part in life is to feel that from within, rather than looking for it outside of ourselves, something my low self-esteem lately has done quite a bit of. Regardless, I pray that all of us feeling this way in this world right now may soon find that sunlight of our souls and shine like we are all truly meant to.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Artur Dawson

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