Diabetes: emotional and spiritual meaning

What diabetes is

Diabetes mellitus is a long illness in which the pancreas does not make enough insulin, or the body no longer uses insulin well, so sugar stays too high in the blood. The excess can spill into the urine. Thirst, passing large amounts of urine, tiredness and weight loss are common signs. Over years, high sugar harms the eyes, kidneys, nerves and heart. Treatment is real: food, movement, monitoring, tablets, and for many people insulin. Gestational diabetes appears in the second half of pregnancy and often settles after the birth, though it needs care while it lasts.

The reading below does not replace any of that. It listens to sweetness, sadness and resistance.

The emotional meaning of diabetes

The source says sugar is linked to love, tenderness and affection. Diabetes reflects an inner sadness. It calls it a sorrow of love, a lack of love, because earlier wounds lead you to control the environment and the people around you. You live an affective fast. Repeated sadness, emotions pressed down, unconscious and without gentleness, are said to harden you. Sweetness disappears in favour of a continuous pain. You start to eat sugar in every form, pasta, bread, sweets, to compensate. The emotional life, the social life or the money can take a blow. You feel you must hold on, forced to fight life, people and events.

You become bitter, which is why life tastes bitter and you compensate with something sweeter. There is regret for what was, and for what might have been. You think you do not deserve happiness or pleasure.

Love you cannot take

You find it hard to receive love, so you feel smothered and overloaded, stuck in a situation that is excessive and out of your control. That situation feeds compensatory eating and extra weight, which favour diabetes. The need for love is great, especially from the father, and also from a boss or from whoever stands for authority in your life. You doubt that authority, or no longer trust it. You do not know how to act when love could actually be received. Because you refuse the small sweetnesses of life, the illness then forbids the sweet foods you used to eat. True love is hard to let out. Joy, love and passion may have to stay hidden. Expectations are often outsized: you want people to fulfil your desires. Frustration, anger at life, and withdrawal follow.

The fight the sugar is stored for

Resistance sits on top of this. An event you want to avoid and feel forced to undergo: a separation, a move, an exam. The emotions are often the loss of someone dear, or a deep loneliness, sometimes despair. Family is usually involved. Disgust and disdain join the resistance. The lack and the pain persist as time passes. You may have lost the one person you could confide in. You resist because you are afraid of someone or something, and you think of it constantly. In French the source plays on diabète and bête, "beast", and asks whether that beast is outside you or inside, and which will prove stronger.

High blood sugar is then read as the reserve you keep so you will be ready when the fight comes. Blood sugar is what gives the muscles their energy. There is also powerlessness: you feel unable to act, to get through the tasks, short of energy to go forward, pushed into things you want to resist. Becoming "powerful" through that sugar is the picture the source offers. It is not a medical mechanism.

A child, a pregnancy, insulin

A child with diabetes, in this reading, fears that one or both parents do not trust them and will be disappointed. They fear blossoming into themselves. They need sweetness and affection and do not know how to go and get them. Security is missing and cannot be said, so they harden. They worry, go round in circles, feel that life is imposed, and resist growing up.

Gestational diabetes asks the same questions. A deep sadness, a repugnance or a resistance may come into view, sometimes an old childhood feeling that the pregnancy wakes. After the birth, sugar often returns to normal, which the source reads as those feelings easing. It also asks whether you feel as small and dependent as the baby, whether you cannot take your place, whether the baby will be one more person in your space, and whether the changing body is hard to accept. Seeing yourself as lazy, and persecuting yourself for it, is set against giving yourself compassion.

If you need insulin injections, the source asks what that dependence resembles in the heart: still depending on a parent, giving others as much love as you need to receive, or feeling too empty and alone to give any. It asks who or what you are clinging to, and whether you can see the love people already have for you. None of this is a reason to stop insulin.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself for diabetes. The pancreas, weight, pregnancy and family history are real. The emotional perspective invites you to let sweetness back in, without abandoning treatment.

• Notice the sadness you keep repeating. Hardening against it is the first picture the source gives.
• Let one sweetness be received. Affection you cannot take is part of the fast.
• Name the event you are resisting. Separation, move, loss, exam.
• If you are pregnant or a parent of a child with diabetes, keep the medical plan. The questions can wait beside it.
• Do not stop insulin or tablets. Dependence, in this reading, is an emotional question. The injection is still medicine.