Here's something I'm trying hard to teach myself so that I really get it, like the way I get that the sky is blue and my name is Kelly.

There is no psyche without the soma.

There is no soma without the psyche.

Therefore all illness, and all wellness, is psychosomatic.

All illness is psychosomatic.

There is no living body without the nervous system, and the nervous system is an integral part the body that does not exist outside of the body.

Nothing happens in the nervous system that is not in reality happening in the body (it is the body). Nothing happens in the body that is not on some level happening in the awareness, or the reality, of the nervous system, whether consciously or subconsciously, voluntarily or automatically.

Health, wellness, and recovery are psychosomatic states and processes.

When I hit a snag in my recovery process sometimes I can pause and stay on course. Other times I get so derailed I forget what that course is supposed to be. I get so confused about where I am and where I'm going, and why and how, and all of it.

I know this must be a common human experience because of all the idiomatic language we have around it: we get off track, we go in circles, we go back to the drawing board, we reinvent the wheel, we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My circles of confusion usually revolve around this: is my illness a mind-body/neuroplastic illness; or is it a complex medical problem rooted in physical dysfunction throughout multiple body systems?

Well, I have real, physical, life-altering symptoms, many of which are felt experience but not directly observable or measurable (such as pain, chest pressure, profound fatigue, lightheadedness, blurred vision, brain fog), and many of which can be observed or even carefully measured (such as balance issues, extremely slowed movements, slurred speech, word retrieval errors, eye abnormalities, and decreased blood flow to my brain).

The symptoms are intense, but they vary in their intensity.

They are real, but they come and they go.

The symptoms are not in my direct conscious control and they can appear at counterintuitive times (for example, I love walking and have always loved walking, but currently walking triggers post-exertional malaise).

They can appear random, but there definitely are patterns. The patterns relate to so many different things.

I have postural orthostatic cerebral hypoperfusion. This is real thing happening in my body that I felt happening for a long time, and was able to describe with what turned out to be pretty good accuracy. Then when I was able to get a tilt table test it was right there—measurable and quantifiable.

And adaptable. With two weeks of rest and intensive functional neurology treatment my symptoms improved, and so did the data.

They were treating my brain and my body. That much makes sense to me. The exercises involved training my eyes, retraining my posture, and using both movement and sensory input to stimulate different areas of my brain. They were carefully retraining my brain-body connection, and it worked really well.

There was no talk the whole time about sympathetic activation, polyvagal theory, trauma, or how the brain adapts to ongoing stress. No meditation exercises, mantras, brain retraining, or vagal toning.

So were these exercises fixing a physical illness, getting my eyes to work properly and my neck to line up correctly and my baroreceptors to come back online and my sensorimotor cortex to pay better attention and my autonomic nervous system to call for the correct amount of blood flow to the brain when I stand up? Yes, I think that's all right.

Were the exercises ignoring the way I think about and respond to my illness, how I feel about it, the language I use around it, my mood, emotional regulation and stress patterns, my trauma history, my vagal tone and neurochemistry, my mind?

Except...I felt safe in the clinic. I felt I was in good, competent, kind, well-trained hands. I felt completely seen and heard. I was told over and over in several ways that my brain and body make sense. That my felt experience is accurate. That my symptoms are definitely treatable and that I would continue to improve with practice.

So were they fixing problems with my body or how I think about and relate to my body? Is this illness caused by a problem with my soma, or my psyche? I think the answer can only be "yes."