Refusal as Medicine

Somewhere, long ago—in Asia Minor, or an island in Greece, or a devastated plain by famine and war,
a woman knelt with herbs,
not just for cooking, but for soothing.

She didn’t call herself a healer.
She simply knew what leaf would cool fever,
what essence quieted the pain.
She was called names,
or simply mother.
But she carried something more, something sacred,
the knowing without proof.

The artistry of Touch.
The magic of Breath.

She passed nothing down in writing.
But her knowing curled down the generations,
like Smoke.

One of the modern world’s greatest failures is its denial of the unity of mind, body, and soul—despite a wealth of research, tradition, and lived experience proving that this division is false, unscientific, and existentially absurd.

Over the past decade, I have sat across from doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, hospitals—so many officials of care. It all started back in 2016 when our daughter started having panic attacks.

Picking up the rupture pattern encoded in my lineage, where movement meant abandonment, travel meant danger, and change loss of protection, she was carrying a signal without a source, a fear without a face. Later on, she stopped eating. She created a field within a field. Her body became territory. And through food, through denial, through control, she said : “Here at least, I have a say. You cannot shape me. I refuse to become what harmed you.” This was survival logic. Not rational but relational. She was remembering what was forgotten. She did not know all the stories but she felt the echo of them in her small body. Like an ancestral trigger point, a location tied to both exile and abuse. All of this, compacted in a few sentences, took me years and tears to research, understand, and integrate; and still, I am not sure of anything. I just try to walk with eyes and arms wide open and my heart too. Slowly, I discover new pathways by following a fragile light in the desert.

Trauma. Early on, the word imposed itself. Not chosen—just there, like a shadow cast before we had language. Though the medical system never fixed a label on her (a blessing, in hindsight), we were swept into a marathon of narration. The questions were simple but absurd: What is the matter with her? Where did we go wrong? Her experience was real. Painful. Disruptive. We were desperate to make it better. It was a harsh signal, and we felt it in our bones. At the time, we believed “the system” could help us. We had no better map. No other door. We needed help. Or so we thought.

But year after year, it became clear that these methods would not work. Day in, day out, we became small. Numbers. Papers. Cases. We sat in empty rooms—mostly white rooms. We sat there with high pulse, low pulse, no pulse at all. Dehydrated. Disintegrated. Dissociated. Always with flaring nausea. Days blurred together in different stages of grief and pain. Wound in the body. Hell in the soul.

We thought they were taking care of. But they only cared about protocols.

“I told you so,” whispers the small voice inside me. What did you expect?

What’s most bitter is that I knew this all along: mainstream psychology has hijacked the conversation around mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational well-being. It rarely dares to trace the line between personal suffering and the residue of collective pain—past, present, and even future. I call this the memory of the field. There is a thread connecting what happened generations ago to what is happening now—in our bodies, our psyches, our children. But we are mis-seeing it. As a society, we are in denial of the toxicity we inhabit. This system has imposed on us a slow erosion of our relational, emotional, and spiritual capacities. And what does it offer in return? Labels. Diagnostics. A toxic culture prescribing toxic tools to heal the very harm it perpetuates. This thing we call a “care system” is built on dysfunction. It worships a fantasy: the self-contained, self-regulating individual who meets their own needs, declares their boundaries, and performs health.

But wholeness was never meant to be a solo act.

Trauma is not personal; it is trans-temporal, relational and resonant.

Trauma is like a substance - a sort of plasma - that my ancestors could not digest, and have vomited onto us as field disturbance.

Our daughter is not sick. She is attuned.

She has been singing a survival song, still unfolding.

What psychiatry calls dysregulation is actually her sensitivity—to ancestral incoherence, to spiritual injury, to systems she intuitively knows are unwell. Her refusal (whether conscious or not) to perform in a system that is collapsing is not dysfunction, it is truth.

Her anxiety, truth. Her anorexia, truth. The substances, truth.

Aching but still truth.

She is probably the one who will start the lineage of refusal. All the things she has been through are a proof of her Seeing. It is the witnessing of a daughter’s entanglement—and the mirror it holds to my own. The grief of realizing that what once passed down as normal is now unbearable. The courage to not betray what we now know deep in our bones. Mothers and Daughters.

I am sitting in the aftermath of it all with open eyes. I am sitting next to her, holding her hand, not turning her into a project. The more I let go, surrender, the more safe she feels. Motherhood as a soft place for her nervous system to rest. Conjuring a different fate : a field of enduring love.

Digital collage made on 1st July 2025 - The Underworld is a forest full of people

And so it happens. I am breaking allegiance with a reality that has always been too small, too extractive, too dishonest. Breaking free from what it demands from us, mothers, daughters, and life itself.

Don’t think I have it all figured out. I am still listening to the voice of my mother caught in systems that moralise, pathologize and control. I still feel the loss of my sister reacting through trauma logic, in a model where fear becomes domination, where love is forced compliance. And I still mourn a society whispering through its institutions : protect by intervening, control to care, label to help. But I will not offer my child—or myself—as tribute to a collapsing system that calls itself care. I will not.

Somewhere, long ago, a woman knelt with herbs. And now, in different times, I kneel beside my daughter—not with answers, but with presence. Not curing, but caring.

Carrying the knowing without proof.