Addison's disease: emotional and spiritual meaning

What Addison's disease is

Addison's disease is a lack of cortisol from the adrenal glands, which sit above the kidneys. Thomas Addison, an English physician, described the slow insufficiency in 1855. The glands also make the hormones that, when life is in danger, let the body muster an extreme effort. When cortisol fails, tiredness becomes profound, blood pressure falls, salt is lost, the skin can darken, and a vomiting illness can tip into shock. Treatment replaces the missing hormones, every day, for life, with extra doses when the body is under stress. That replacement is what keeps you alive. Nothing in an emotional reading stands in for it.

The questions below belong to disappointment, submission and a word that was never said. They do not explain why the glands failed. The adrenals are described on the glands page. Acromegaly is a different gland, the pituitary, with a different excess.

The emotional meaning of Addison's disease

This is read as a form of disappointment in yourself. It is an extreme state of emotional and spiritual under-nourishment. Having the illness is placed beside having lived a great deal of submission in childhood, in relation to one parent or the other. You may have felt attacked psychologically, lived a trauma or an intense irritation in which you could feel your life was in danger. You have the impression that someone "wants your skin" and that you should escape at full speed. That state brought a great insecurity about the future, and a deep doubt about your capacities.

The illness is distinguished, in this reading, by an extremely defeatist attitude, an absence of aim or of interest for yourself or for what surrounds you. You had to abdicate, to throw in the towel, without saying a word, and it broke your heart. You can compensate for your disappointments by a dependence on some substance, or on a person. You consider yourself an anguished victim. You have the impression your whole life is made of torture. You live a great deal of anger against yourself. You cannot receive love from others. You live a great deal of anxiety and of antipathy.

If any of this describes a present danger, a substance dependence, or a childhood in which you were not safe, the right move is help from a person, not a harder effort to cope alone.

A gentler way to hold it

You take your place. You go forward. You manifest the energy needed to elaborate certain personal aims, without waiting for the approval and the consent of the people around you, whatever the importance of the aim. You find a method that helps you connect more with an inner self. You can thus find a mastery of your life again. The tablet remains the mastery of the cortisol. The aim is the mastery of the direction.

• Never miss the replacement, and know your sick-day rules. An adrenal crisis kills. A reading does not prevent it.
• Ask where you submitted until you had no word left. A parent is the figure given. The defeat was silent.
• Name the towel you threw in. A broken heart is the cost this reading names.
• Look at what the disappointment is compensated with. A substance or a person. If it is harming you, get help.
• Notice anger at yourself that blocks love coming in. Anxiety and antipathy sit in the same place.
• Pick one aim that does not need the room's permission. Small is allowed. Waiting for consent is the old pattern.