Patients’ reflections

Patients’ Reflections

“I felt deeply seen.”
“You asked questions I had never considered.”
“I left with a different kind of calm.”

🌸One recurring symptom resolved after a moment of shared understanding. My young son often developed tonsillitis. I began to observe the timing – noticing a pattern around conversations where he may not have fully expressed disagreement. I asked him gently if he thought this might be true. He blushed, paused, and said: “Oh, Mum, how interesting.” He never had tonsillitis again – at least not since that day.

🌸One patient with recurrent breast cancer began exploring a possible link – symbolic rather than causal – between her body creating more tissue and her lifelong sense of not giving enough. This insight led her to begin therapy. This understanding, she and her oncologist feel, has supported the healing process – in ways that were not present during treatment for the primary cancer.

🌸Dissociative identity disorder – which can follow severe and repeated trauma in childhood – has revealed how the body can express itself differently across identities: some with vision, others blind.

🌸Some conversations go far beyond medicine – yet return us to the body in new ways.

From a very young age, one of my sons questioned gender through his tastes – in clothing, colours, jewellery, and makeup. Later, he questioned the expectations others had about whom he should love. Together, we explored gender as a social construct, and saw how his tastes and choices challenged that construct with strength and beauty. He has my full support in respecting his way of being.

In our conversations, we often spoke about the meaning of respecting nature – and the body as part of it, with its form and rhythms.
So what I had asked him was this: if he had been born with two legs, and had said that he was born in the wrong body because he should have been born in the body with one leg only – would I, as a family doctor, have supported the amputation of one leg?
I would not.
I would have been the family doctor interested in why he saw himself as one-legged.

In a similar way, we then had a conversation about hormones.
And this is when he challenged me.
He said: “OK – you say you don’t want hormones in the name of changing a body towards gender norms. But what about changing bodies with hormones in order to escape the truth that heterosexual sex can lead to pregnancy?”

That is where he invited me to a deep reflection – about how my own sexuality had been shaped by denial through the use of hormones.
He asked me to look into that.
And this is where he became my teacher.