Six months ago one of my closest friends gave me the book “The body keeps the score”, which has been on my reading list for a couple years now. I haven’t gotten around to reading it, yet, but I look forward to it — and maybe then I’ll finally understand why, whenever I experience a loss that to me feels like a rejection from a person whom I love deeply, physically I feel it in the pit of my stomach.
Always.
It can vary between feeling like a punch in the stomach or a knot, often leading to incapacity or unwillingness to eat. Twice, in very dark moments of my life about a decade ago, after a terrible fight with my then-partner — fights that felt like I was being rejected and/or disapproved of and/or judged negatively or condemned at my core — I felt so bad in my stomach and even so much self-hatred that I hid in the bathroom and stuck my fingers in my throat to try and throw-up. Fortunately, though, I couldn’t get that far. Maybe some tiny shred of self-love or self-respect stopped me then — and even more fortunately that has never happened again.
But the knot in my stomach, the feeling of a punch at the mouth of my stomach, and the subsequent incapacity or unwillingness to eat, are all there again now…
Why does this happen to me?
The Little Prince and the Fox 