A word of welcome from the author
Dear Reader,
I am placing my 59th book into your hands. However, this is not just another dry medical guide or a collection of ready-made, textbook definitions. What you are about to read is a living testimony, a personal manifesto of freedom, and a distillate of my 79 years of existence on this Earth.
As an immunologist, a clinical diagnostician with 25 years of experience, and a long-time researcher of psychosynthesis, I have spent decades learning to look at a human being as an inseparable whole - a system of connected vessels in which biology, mind, and soul speak the exact same language. This book was born out of a need of the heart, written on the fly on balconies and in trams, on the smooth, white pages of my notebook - without pre-imposed lines or anyone else's formulas.
I invite you on a journey that revolutionizes the current view of illness. Together, we will walk through the dark tunnel of difficult organic diagnoses - from Hashimoto's and Sjögren's syndrome to fibromyalgia, and finally to the global plague of modern dysautonomia (POTS) - only to discover wide-open doors to self-healing at the very end. In this book, I show the biological "straight line" and prove that your body never gets sick "in pieces." It simply adapts, with brilliant though often tragic wisdom, to the conditions it has had to live in since earliest childhood.
If you have been bouncing off the walls of doctors" offices for years, feeling helpless against the paternalism and reductionism that treats you like a broken machine - this book is for you. I am handing you a concrete, sovereign tool: an "Entry Passport" that will restore your voice and your status as a full partner in the diagnostic process.
I want this story to lift the paralyzing weight of fear and guilt from your shoulders. I want you to find the courage to silence the wartime alarm siren in your nervous system, activate your natural "safety brake," and return to Universal Love, which is the most powerful immunomodulating medicine. For true healing does not mean the absence of abnormalities in blood test results - it is a return to sovereignty, reclaiming your own agency, and hearing your body's deepest command: "At ease. You are free."
Sit back comfortably, take a deep breath, and allow yourself to return to the Source.
The Author
Introduction
This book is another publication dedicated to synthesis - meaning the integration into a whole of not only medical problems, but above all, the human being themselves. After years of breaking humans down into their parts, it is no longer possible to continue this way. By treating the patient as a collection of isolated elements, we lose their essence and destroy the structure of unity.
The human organism cannot be divided into individual symptoms and specializations; the network of mutual dependencies must be shown. I perceive not only the medical problem itself, but also the situation of patients who cycle between specialists without receiving a cohesive picture of their own health.
I have based my books on my own experience, on the questions that constantly guide me, and on the specific gaps I have observed over the years. These gaps stem both from a lack of "education about oneself across the lifespan" and from treating the human being as a collection of separate entities: organs or systems. These disconnected elements have turned us into an object of exploration in itself, rather than a part of a larger system - a cohesive whole of soul and body.
In this particular book, I will refer to a phenomenon that I have observed in myself for years and which, as a result, I have under constant control. However, when I report these symptoms to specialists, I do not receive a concrete answer, but only a proposal to further dissociate me into parts. A process of ordering subsequent tests begins, which, step by step, loses reference to me as a whole - including my experiences and my history. It is precisely the history of our life that drives the psychological experience of reality, and this directly alters the biochemical profile of the organism.
We are dealing with a vicious circle: the psyche affects the nervous system, the nervous system affects individual organs and systems, and all of this translates into the parameters of the body's functioning tested in laboratories. I began to analyze it starting from my own question: what exactly is happening to my body, given that chronic fatigue cannot be easily explained? I quickly noticed that a similar pattern has been repeating for years in many other people.
Observing my own history of illness and the process of obtaining diagnoses (insofar as it was even possible to get them in a doctor's office), I noticed that a multitude of symptoms drift between many disease entities. The diagnosis spreads like a spider's web between trees and rarely sees the light of day. It usually remains in the realm of suspicion, an idea for another test appears along the way, and the final diagnosis recedes into eternity.
This results from the fact that a practice of unilateral questioning has developed in medicine, oriented toward answers according to a pattern of thinking about the "part" rather than the whole. There is a lack of space for the patient's statement, for their description of experiencing the illness, and for linking it with their own way of thinking and emotions. After all, a patient reacts even to specific remarks from a doctor, such as: "this could turn into something dangerous!". And at that moment, the human being is directed toward the "worst" - fear of the illness appears, along with avoidance, and consequently, the metabolism shifts into survival mode, which is the "fight or flight" response.
This is yet another book in the series of my syntheses. It concerns the search for deeper and deeper connections between symptoms in order to reach the main current flowing between them - like the fork of a river that penetrates the soil and reaches the furthest corners of the land. This current resembles the branching of the nervous system in the body, which sends impulses to all organs and tissues.
I have this unique opportunity to be an observer of myself for decades. On my professional path, I first learned physiology, and then I began to delve into the human psyche. Difficult childhood experiences that took place between the ages of 2 and 8 engraved themselves deeply into my sphere of reacting to stress situations. Thereby, they began to leave their marks also on my physical body and biochemical metabolism.
Emotions, which are energy in motion (e-motion), constitute the first and fundamental reaction of the nervous system stimulated by them. If they are not discharged at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way, they have a huge tendency to remain in the body like energy deposits. We accumulate resources within ourselves - just like in a bank - which, as energy maintained for years, generate specific physical effects. I have already written about this in many books, and now I will summarize it in a broader context: both individual and global, relating to the modern population.
In my descriptions, I primarily use my own experience, presenting the clinical picture of my individual case. Nevertheless, because I have been dealing with the human being as a whole for 30 years, I also include in these descriptions many cases of my clients with whom I worked within my practice of Psychosynthesis - a psychology with a soul.
I want to emphasize clearly once again: I do not deal with treatment. I help each person find their own paths across their lifespan and find solutions to problems that over time have borne concrete results. These results concerned both the external sphere - partner relationships or upbringing problems - and personal, internal experiences that after years brought physical health problems.
My main area of interest is autoimmune diseases. They are very strongly connected to what happened in my life. This is even a model example of a scientific description, as I have been a scientist by passion for over 50 years. This individual example clearly shows what impact childhood has on the quality of our adult functioning and what health problems later become our share.
This book will become precisely such a synthesis. It will show the paths of unfolding pathologies and their consistent budding in situations where the root causes were not properly "taken care of." This problem does not concern us personally alone - it is evident in the entire modern population, which acts like a mirror reflecting what we brought out of the earliest period of our existence.
Therefore, I warmly invite you to the subsequent chapters. Step by step, I will reveal in them the path from a healthy birth, through chronic and progressive autoimmune diseases, up to the manifestation of syndromes which, although already clearly visible in the social mirror, still constitute an increasingly misunderstood problem for modern medicine.
The environment as a mirror reflection in the child's inner world
To begin with, I will start with fundamental information that will help you understand that everything circulates everywhere and that our organism, environment, and relationships are closely interconnected.
During one of the webinars at the Microbiome Masterclass conference in 2017, Dr. Niki Gratrix presented the necessity of resolving emotional problems and traumatic experiences that have lingered for years. They should be resolved as early as childhood, when they first arose, so that they do not carry over into the entire adult life of a person and are not passed on to subsequent generations.
Emotional traumas encode themselves in the cellular memory of the body as the frozen energy of negative experiences, which usually no one looks into because they hurt. Meanwhile, it is precisely these experiences - related to physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, rejection, or the trampling of a child's dignity - that lead to depression and chronic illnesses in adulthood. Among them, autoimmune diseases dominate, such as Hashimoto's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, or diabetes. These usually affect women, although they are not limited to them.
Emotions play an important role in the activity of the immune system. Being energy in motion (e-motion), in this case, they weaken its functioning. They affect not only the balance between dopamine and adrenaline, but they also stimulate brain structures to produce neurotransmitters and hormones (such as cortisol or insulin). They raise histamine levels and affect the GABA system, causing a sense of brain fog, constant anxiety, but also the need to overeat. Thereby, they cause a condition called "brainbiome" - inflammation of the brain - and can lead to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Thus, unresolved emotional problems manifest in physical illnesses and pass on to future generations. Therefore, people speak more and more often about psychological causes that have their manifestation in biochemical parameters.
And now, in a summary, I will return to my childhood and its reflection in what began to happen in my organism over the years, and in the treatment of the resulting problems forced by it.
I was born healthy, at home, under the care of a midwife. From my earliest childhood, I do not remember specific situations in detail. However, my body precisely remembered the feelings from that period.
It was November, just after my second birthday, when the darkness of that evening left a deep mark on my entire body "for a lifetime." It was a panic, almost atavistic fear of losing my life, like having my breath taken away. That was when my father was taken away, suspected of actions against communist Poland - and in reality, of actions to regain independence. The latter, however, was recognized only after years, when he was no longer in this world. That first state decision was engraved into me so that the body would remember it forever. For such was the reality back then - to trample a person's dignity to the very bottom, to the very essence of their existence. Meanwhile, it is precisely within that essence that their spiritual identity is hidden.
Emotions running wild
During the early period of life, a child is confronted with a whole palette of their own sensations. They learn to differentiate and control them. As a rule, extreme situations do not occur where a child is placed in dramatic circumstances - and day after day at that. In my life, this is exactly what happened, because of which I not only had no time to express them, but even less to learn to control them. There was also no one who could give me care, explain anything, or look after me to soothe my daily fear. I had to swallow it and keep it inside myself.
I did not know yet then that I was storing energy deposits that destroy everything, without choosing any priorities. Thus, I was working my way toward life and illnesses through what I could not discharge, and which at the same time caused "tummy aches" specific to a child.
So I had within me - just like in a bank - resources for a lifetime. Unfortunately, these were not healthy reserves that build the quality of my existence, but quite the contrary: something that from the dawn of my history was already destroying from the ground up the foundations on which I was to grow. And so I grew up in an atmosphere of fear and terror, and it did its energetic cleaning inside myself.
Medicine at that time, although focused on the child, was nevertheless symptomatic. The doctor was interested in my stomach pains, though she attached no importance to their origin, but rather only to the effects themselves. The aluminum gel used back then was basically meant to become a protection for my mucous membranes in that part of the digestive tract; however, it did not treat the cause of its daily fueling. And the provocateur of this situation was panic fear, experienced day after day.
And so I made it to the age of 12, when once again I found myself in a children's hospital. There, they took care of my thorough inspection, and then, finding no organ changes, for the first time formulated a diagnosis: vegetative neurosis. This was exactly 68 years ago.
Ladies and gentlemen of the medical profession: my current congratulations! That was a good directional diagnosis, although in those days nothing lay beneath it in terms of any treatment. So I continued to drink aluminum gel and applied my own hands to the pain.
If the direction is set - where does it lead?
And so, even though a direction had been determined from a medical standpoint, my "supplies" for the road ahead did not gain much when it came to treating my daily ailments. During those teenage years, I focused on coming of age, and furthermore, I was busy with my schoolwork and finally my high school graduation exam. Despite my delicate frame, my psyche somehow held together to survive this difficult time for a teenager who had been so heavily tested at the dawn of her life. I then made my choice of university studies, and subsequently, even before completing them, I received an offer to remain at the university. This was something that carved out my path for a lifetime - research within science, but also beyond it, to delve into why I get sick. However, it was not a superficial approach, like the aluminum gel that had been applied to the deep wound of my psyche. I was looking for consequences not so much in the treatment itself, but in the return to lost inner harmony - which in medicine is called homeostasis. I was reaching deep into the psyche.
After years of learning biochemical mechanisms, I felt that I had reached the bottom of what had been laid out in this field of knowledge, but I found nothing there that answered my questions. This was the bottom I reached after 25 years. It seemed that nothing more awaited me and that I would find nothing that could serve as a panacea for my health problems.
That day, I was lying on the sofa and doing one of the exercises from Managerial and Organizational Psychosynthesis. And then, at that precise moment, I realized that from the bottom, you can only see the sky. From there, the view stretches upward.
It dawned on me that I was being led as if on a string and cared for, in order to follow my truth. This was guidance from above. And above all, another level of myself was opening up, which I later named the "immunology of the soul." For I needed a special kind of immunity for this period of life, one that far exceeded the existing paradigms of science, giving meaning to my own existence and the articulation of my truth.
I was slowly entering the 50th year of my existence, which was in fact a breakthrough period. Biology was receding into the past so that a future built on the experiences of the bygone era could open up - in order to understand them from a much broader perspective.
Five topics, perhaps even more - one root
The topics I will now address stem from the diagnoses I have gathered over the years. These, in turn, mature into subsequent, yet-unconfirmed but increasingly real diagnoses. To me, they are merely like a sign on a gate, for they are not a cause for fear, but rather a summary of a life experience - a certain synthesis of syntheses made over the years.
Recently, I developed an "entry passport" for myself to use in the doctor's office. I place a piece of paper on the desk with my life journey: from exploring physiology, through diagnostics, to treatment, described in a brief summary. I also indicate there the direction of potential investigations for specialists to confirm. This is my safe-conduct for conversation, to avoid wandering off into the wilderness and to prevent the depreciation of the path I follow. After all, over the years I have summarized my research and the results obtained, and we can now, as partners, take the next step. For me, this is the balance of many years of clinical observations "on myself," which the gathered data have been confirming for years.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe dysautonomia, fibromyalgia, Sjögren's syndrome, tachycardia, bronchiectasis, and chronic gastrointestinal catarrh to show what connects them. By virtue of my own history and delving into its meaning, I will invoke here the diagnoses revealed chronologically, in order to perform further syntheses later on.
The most striking aspect is the similarity between the history with fibromyalgia from 20 years ago and what I observe today: the symptom is real, the patient suffers, but because the mechanism does not easily fit into a single specialization, the problem is shifted to psychiatry. And then, instead of asking, "what is happening in the body's entire regulatory network?", the question becomes, "what is wrong with the psyche?".
And yet, this is precisely where my highly characteristic way of looking emerges: not to counterpose the psyche against the body, but to see their connection. This is something completely different - something that lies at the intersection of real experience, which modern medicine should confront, viewing the patient as a whole being.
A few days ago, a lady contacted me who had recently found me on the Internet. She could have communicated via the website or simply by email, yet she wanted to hear me directly. What I learned by listening to her mirrored the exact same pattern from nearly 20 years ago: a referral to a psychiatrist and the treatment that was prescribed to me in those days.
This conversation with the woman, who called to ask for books on fibromyalgia, is incredibly telling. Her sentence, "God sent you to me," shows how much people are looking for someone who will not tell them yet again, "it's nothing" or "please go to a psychiatrist," but will instead acknowledge their experience and try to understand the mutual connections.
In the meantime, I have written another book, highly significant for every patient who finds no understanding within the existing healthcare system. I dedicated that publication to searching for the answer to what connects symptoms that the modern system divides among different specialists.
Dysautonomia and several other exceptionally popular diagnoses, present almost on a daily basis in modern times, can serve as a very good starting point for the story I am currently presenting. I will treat it as one element of a larger network rather than another new diagnostic label. Its value will lie in something else: connecting what has been separated.
"See more" - meaning do not stop at the symptom, the name of the disease, or a single specialization. "See what is in between" - meaning the relationships, dependencies, transitions, common mechanisms, the impact of one system on another, as well as the experiences of a human being that do not fit into a single diagnostic column.
And that is why my own path is of key importance here: immunology ? medicine ? psychosynthesis ? working with people ? own experiences of illness ? observing other people ? putting it all back together. This is not a random collection of interests. This is precisely the path of synthesis.
One could even say that my recent books share a common subtitle that does not need to be literally printed: "See what is in between."
Dysautonomia fits into this direction very naturally. For every subsequent piece of information triggers a connection in me with something I already know. This book will create itself not by "adding facts," but by discovering the map of connections.
Before I move on to this thread, however, I must explain the most crucial element according to which I have performed this synthesis. And here, I will introduce the thread of Psychosynthesis - a psychology with a soul.
Psychosynthesis as a foundation
I have specialized in psychosynthesis for 30 years, following my previous 25 years of work in medical sciences, primarily in immunology and clinical diagnostics. Psychosynthesis is the psychology of the whole person - all their spheres of functioning and the connection between body and soul. It was created by an Italian physician, Dr. Roberto Assagioli, and defended as a university thesis in 1910 as a continuation of psychoanalysis, though introducing a spiritual aspect to it. This does not pertain to religion, but to the sphere of the psyche - from the Greek for soul or spiritual realm. Unfortunately, this area is not covered by the psychology taught in Poland, although psychosynthesis and transpersonal psychology are lectured at various academic centers worldwide. I am its pioneer in Poland and I introduced the entries regarding psychosynthesis into the Pedagogical Encyclopedia of the 21st Century. I am also mentioned in the American history of psychosynthesis published in 2010. I have already written several books on this field, so here I will only invoke the application I have given it in my own life.
By practicing psychosynthesis on myself, I realized the most significant tendency that has been forced upon us as individuals since the dawn of our history - both in upbringing, across many levels of education, and in medical treatment. We are treated as single parts: body separately, spiritual sphere separately, and in medicine - each organ separately. Our way of thinking has become reductionist, directing us toward isolated elements rather than the whole. For this reason, we cannot find references to the whole within ourselves, within our environment, or within medical care. Our symptom is treated, instead of observing us as a suffering human being.
Meanwhile, this fragmentation into increasingly smaller particles has resulted in losing the picture of the whole, and now it must be put back together. However, few people experience this, because the dominant way of thinking breaks us down into component parts without assembling them back.
I simply put the human being back together as a whole. I do not add specialized knowledge, nor do I delve into the illness as such, because that is not my task. I am a person who sees the connections between what specialists perceive exclusively in isolation.
I do not compete with the neurologist, endocrinologist, immunologist, or cardiologist regarding their detailed knowledge. My role is to do something else. To answer the question: "What do they see separately - and what happens in between?".
This is precisely the axis of my book, and even more broadly - the characteristic feature of my writing. My specialization is seeing connections.
For clarity, I will outline this in points:
- One specialist sees their own system.
- A second specialist observes theirs.
- A third notices yet another symptom.
They close themselves off within their respective spaces, building structures that fit what they happen to be dealing with. Sometimes they move further apart, though occasionally they also drift closer unknowingly. However, they want to maintain their status quo, so they do not communicate with each other. I, meanwhile, ask: what connects them and these systems?
- What happens between the systems?
- What repeats across different diseases?
- Where do the common mechanisms run?
- What remains invisible when we look solely through the prism of a single specialization?
And that is why my phrase "see more and see what is in between" is far more accurate than a "synthesis of specialized knowledge." That is not my function.
I create a map of connections. For me, a natural coordinator for this could be an internist, who possesses a broader knowledge of the whole, or at least of its physical part.
Yes - and precisely what "connects" should be the starting point, rather than an assumption that one must know all elements of this map today.
Dysautonomia, fibromyalgia, and Sjögren's syndrome can be three "entrances" to observing the same human being from different sides. And if a fourth, fifth, or subsequent element appears during the work and begins to connect logically with the rest, it does not need to be forced out just because it was not in the original plan.
This, moreover, fits my way of working very well: first a question appears, then the information begins to align, and only from this does the whole emerge.
And I will do one thing from the very beginning: I will not write a chapter exclusively "about dysautonomia, fibromyalgia, and Sjögren's." I will leave an open space for myself to discover what truly is the common denominator and what connects yet other diagnoses or symptoms.
Thanks to this, this book will be able to convey something much more interesting. Not: "here are three diseases," but rather: "here are three different names - let's see what lies between them." What connects them? Or perhaps there is something more? This is exactly my place.
I do not diagnose. I do something prior to that: I name a possibility, which the patient can then verify with a doctor.
In practice, it looks like this:
The patient has a set of symptoms ? they do not know how to connect them ? I show a possible connection ? the patient gains a foothold ? the doctor receives a more concrete direction to consider and investigate ? the doctor makes or rules out a diagnosis.
This is a completely different function from diagnosing.
And that is precisely why the "hypersensitivity" of some specialists irritates me. If a patient says: "I wonder if my symptoms could be related to dysautonomia; is it worth checking?", it does not mean: "I have diagnosed myself with dysautonomia and I expect you to confirm it."
Yet simultaneously, there is another side that I notice on forums: a patient without a name for their problem can cycle through the medical system for years because no one has connected their symptoms into a single pattern. This is clearly my own example. On no referral or certificate to another specialist do I have concrete diagnoses written down, only directions. This means those diagnoses never actually officially existed. No doctor has said the final word for 70 years.
And this is precisely where my role emerges: I do not provide a diagnosis, I provide a language - a foothold with which one can ask about their own problem.
A "foothold" exactly describes the function of my books about illnesses. I do not replace the doctor - I help the patient reach the doctor with a better-formulated question.
In other words, in the new book, I will very clearly separate three things:
- Observation - "I have such and such symptoms."
- Hypothesis / possible connection - "could there be a common mechanism?".
- Diagnosis - which is left to the doctor and appropriate tests.
This allows me to preserve exactly what I deal with: seeing connections without usurping the right to diagnose.
And paradoxically, this is precisely why my book can be so useful to a patient. It does not tell them "you have this disease," but rather "here is a concept that might be worth using to begin the proper conversation and the proper search."
Therefore, the distinction between "pointing a direction" and "making a diagnosis" is very important to me.
I do not say: "I have Sjögren's syndrome." What I actually describe is: I have a specific symptom - drying of the mucous membranes - and in connection with this, I would like to check a specific diagnostic direction.
Recently, one female doctor chose a different direction. She had the right to do so, but the problem arose when the result brought nothing new to the search for the cause, and the next step was not taken either. Consequently, the patient remains in exactly the same place.
And this is perhaps even more interesting for the unfolding book than the medical history itself. For I can show the mechanism:
The patient ? observes a symptom ? tries to connect it with other symptoms ? suggests a possible direction ? the specialist chooses a different direction ? the test comes back normal ? the search returns to the starting point.
And the patient loses time and, unfortunately, increasingly often money, as they have to pay for further tests themselves.
At the same time, the boundary that I see very well must be maintained here: a normal zonulin level does not exclude celiac disease, and symptoms and tests have their limitations. In the same way, drying of the mucous membranes does not automatically mean Sjögren's syndrome. That is precisely why it is not about the patient "being right instead of the doctor." It is about something much more constructive:
"I have this observation. Does this diagnostic direction make sense? If not - why? What else should we check?"
And then the patient participates in the process, instead of being its passive object.
