Carol Egan

Why Treating Symptoms Instead of Root Causes Destroys Your Health (and Your Spirit)

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Have you ever had a headache?

Of course you have. Recent studies show that 52% of the global population experiences active headaches, but you don’t need a statistic to know this truth – you’ve lived it.

Let’s look back at your own headache experience for a second.

Your alarm goes off, you hit snooze once or twice, then finally drag yourself out of bed, and there it is: that tightness in your neck, the pressure behind your eyes. You’ve woken up with a headache.

So you trudge to the bathroom, grab some aspirin, wash it down with coffee, and wait for relief.

In a few hours, hopefully sooner, the pain subsides. You feel better. Problem solved – or is it?

The Quick Fix vs. The Real Cause

If you pay close attention, there’s one split-second thought that flashes through your mind on that walk to the bathroom:

“I know why this is happening.”

If you’re in your twenties, maybe you’ll say, “Yeah, I overdid it on the drinks last night.”

If you’re a new parent: “Baby didn’t sleep, so I didn’t get enough sleep – no wonder.”

If you’re working long hours: “Too much screen time again.”

Those thoughts pass in a millisecond, and then you reach for the pain relief.

But there’s something happening in that millisecond that most of us miss entirely. A choice, though it doesn’t feel like one. One path: we acknowledge why the headache is there – we said it ourselves on our walk to the bathroom – and then we suppress the symptom and move on. The other path: we listen to what our body is actually saying to us, and rather than acquiescing to the quick fix, we look to see if there’s a problem we need to address.

Most of us don’t even register the choice. We move on autopilot, so the second doesn’t even appear as an option. The master of understanding the unconscious mind, Carl Jung said,

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” 

Now imagine you never change the habit, the root cause – say, the daily drinking, but keep masking the symptom with aspirin. What’s happening inside your body after weeks, months, or years of this pattern?

Just because the headache is ‘erased’ doesn’t mean the problem isn’t compounding. You’ve removed the symptom but not solved the root cause.

That one drink (and the daily aspirin) can and does trigger a whole chain reaction behind the scenes:

  • Irritates your stomach lining
  • Forces the liver to work overtime
  • Inflames the pancreas
  • Raises your blood pressure
  • Disrupts heart rhythm
  • Affects your nervous system
  • Strains your kidneys
  • Represses your immune system

All while you think there’s no problem.

The Domino Effect: Body, Mind, and Spirit

The dominoes that fall aren’t just physical.

What happens to you emotionally and spiritually when your body keeps breaking down from both the quick fix and the deeper cause, while the pill gives you instant relief?

When you wake up every day foggy and inflamed, what happens to your thoughts, your energy, your self-belief?

Maybe you start thinking you’re just lazy or unmotivated. And once those beliefs take hold, they seep into who you think you are, who you think you’re not… and, consequently, everything you do.

Like a nebulous fog taking over, because you can’t see the far-reaching damage to your thoughts and spirit, you stop trusting yourself, your inner knowing, and even your body. You stop recognizing your ability to discern the cues your body is sending you.

And when you stop hearing the cues your body sends you, your relationship to your intuition – that still small voice within – fractures.

This is the mechanism we don’t discuss in medicine: every time we muffle the cues our body sends us rather than listen to them, we sever a very important connection. We train ourselves to see our body’s signals as problems to be eliminated rather than information to be interpreted.

When we disconnect from our body and all the ways it speaks to us, we disconnect from our deeper inner knowing, our spirit. And when we forget who we are at this level, when we lose touch with that internal compass that knows what’s true before our mind can explain it, we become unmoored and at the whim of literally everything and everyone around us.

That’s not healing. That’s spiritual bereftness, or perhaps even worse, spiritual bypassing —a poverty of the soul in which we’ve lost access to our own internal guidance system. And from this place, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to trust ourselves and the decisions we make.

Why Symptom-Based Healing Fails (and Root-Cause Healing Works)

Headaches are easy to spot, but this same pattern shows up everywhere in modern medicine:

Anxiety gets an SSRI. Irritable bowel gets antispasmodics or acid reducers. Hypothyroidism gets hormone replacement. Acne gets birth control or antibiotics. Fatigue gets energy drinks and caffeine. PMS gets painkillers and synthetic hormones.  Sleep issues get melatonin or sleeping pills. Depression gets chemical antidepressants. Joint pain gets NSAIDs or steroids. Brain fog gets stimulants or nootropics.

These medications can be life-changing when needed, but most are designed to treat symptoms rather than address root causes.

And I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting you white-knuckle through pain you don’t have to endure, or that taking medication means you’ve failed somehow. Sometimes you need the aspirin to get through the day. Sometimes the SSRI is what allows you to function. The medication itself isn’t the problem.

The problem is when we stop at symptom relief and never ask what else could be going on, when we use the pill as the solution instead of a temporary fix, when we mistake the absence of pain for the presence of health.

When root causes like environmental toxins, nutrient deficiencies, chronic inflammation, and unresolved emotional trauma go unaddressed, we end up treating symptoms while the fire below keeps spreading.

This isn’t just theoretical, it’s something I see in my client work every day.

A client came to me with “managed” hypothyroidism. After years of dosage adjustments, she still felt exhausted, her hair was thinning, and she couldn’t lose weight. ‘I can’t tell if I’m hungry or anxious, tired or depressed.’ Years of medicating had eroded her ability to discern what her body was saying.

That’s the disconnection from self I’m talking about.

The medication was replacing her thyroid hormone, but it wasn’t addressing why her thyroid struggled in the first place, why her body couldn’t use the hormone it was getting, or why she’d stopped trusting her own internal signals entirely. Through our work together, we slowly rebuilt the connection—body to mind, mind to spirit. Within six months, her energy returned and her hair stopped falling out. She got her health back. But more than that—she can hear and trust her body again

The medication managed her lab values, but root-cause, mind-body-spirit healing restored her connection to herself.

The Instant Gratification Trap

This pattern isn’t isolated to medicine. It’s embedded in how we live.

In a world of instant gratification, where there’s a pill for every ill and Amazon delivers tomorrow, it’s no surprise our approach to health mirrors our approach to everything else. “How we do anything is how we do everything.”

We want relief now. We want ‘it’ gone. Click, buy, fix, deliver.

Our entire way of life reflects our preference for quick fixes over the deeper work that is more often needed. Immediate gratification isn’t just about pills, food, social media, or the dopamine hits we’ve come to seek; it’s baked into our entire relationship with who we think we are and what we think we are capable of… including our health.

And that mindset keeps us locked in a symptom-based healing ideology rather than real root-cause healing work.

That hangover headache, the one from the drinks, or the late night, or too much screen time.

What happens if you don’t immediately reach for the aspirin? If you sit with it for five minutes and ask: what are you trying to tell me?

Maybe the answer is straightforward: I need to drink less. I need more sleep. I need boundaries with work.

Or maybe it’s layered: I’m using alcohol to numb something I don’t want to feel. I’m exhausted because I don’t like who I am when I slow down for too long. I’m staring at screens because I’m avoiding what I actually know I need to address.

Your body already knows.

A Holistic Approach to Real Healing

In my 15 years as a health coach,  I’ve seen it over and over: root causes of illness can be anything—gut imbalance, toxicity, emotional repression, spiritual disconnection, chronic stress.

And here’s what matters: you can address every physical root cause, fix the gut, balance the hormones, remove the toxins, and still not feel whole if you haven’t restored the fundamental connection between body and spirit.

Real healing isn’t just solving the physical puzzle. It’s rebuilding trust with yourself.

So before you reach for another quick-fix pill, injection, or supplement to numb the pain, pause.

Listen to your body. Get curious. Ask, “What are you trying to tell me?”

And if that question feels impossible to answer, if you hear nothing but confusion, start smaller:

Ask, “Where in my body do I feel this?” (Not just “I have a headache” but: pressure behind the eyes? Tension in the neck? Tightness in the jaw?)

What was happening in the hours before this started? (Not just yesterday’s drinking, but: Was I holding my breath during that meeting? Did I skip meals? Am I dehydrated?)

What pattern am I noticing? (Does this happen every Sunday night? Every time I talk to this person? Every month at the same point in my cycle?)

You’re not looking for the perfect answer. You’re rebuilding a relationship, a communication line, that’s vital to your health.

Because turning off a symptom is not the same as turning off the root cause.

The work of listening is harder than swallowing a pill. But it’s the only path back to yourself. And that self? Has been waiting for you to tune back in for a long time.

Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made For These Times

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Photo from Michaela St

This is the original letter in full as written, unabridged, from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a writer whose every work I recommend. If you have Audible, be sure to listen to her read her books there as well. There may be no more captivating storyteller ever.

Mis estimados queridos, My Esteemed Ones:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, “the new normal,” the grotesquerie of the week.

It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

…You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking.

Yet … I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is – we were made for these times.

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.

…I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in arighting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone.

Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.

Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a forest greater. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

… We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over — brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially … we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered – can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

…Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say “fat chance,” and “management before mercy,” and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been ‘to Hell and back’ on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.

Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, the smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.

…In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.

…In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more rapidly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core – till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.

It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts – adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

…One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires … causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

…There will always be times in the midst of “success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But … that is not what great ships are built for.

…This comes with much love and prayer that you remember Who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.

CODA

The original title is Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times: with the subtitle, Do Not Lose Heart, We were Made for These Times. This is the original letter in full as written, unabridged.

Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times ©2001, 2016, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

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