Pneumonia: The Emotional Need for Breathing Room

0:00Where in my life have I felt that there was no room for me to breathe? Inside a part of you is saying, I can't do this anymore. pneumonia is an infection that causes inflammation in one or both of the lungs. Conventional medicine tends to focus on the infectious agent, so identifying the bacterium virus or fungus and then treating the physical process taking place in the lungs. But it might change we like to ask a different question. Why did this particular person's body become vulnerable at this particular time? For a lot of people, illness becomes the first socially acceptable reason a person has had to rest. The body finally creates the boundary that the person has been unable to create consciously. Everyone needs something from me, I just need a break, I feel trapped, trying to keep everything from falling apart. So from the outside they may look caring and capable,

1:00but what's happening inside might feel as though life is pressing in on them from every direction. You're the person who saves people, the one who solves the problem, the one who can handle all the impossible levels of stress. If you're no longer the one who everyone leans on, who are you? Will people still value you? Will they still include you? An adaptation that once protected you can become exhausting when it's the only way that you know how to live. The question is not whether caring for others is good, the question is whether you have learned to care for others without abandoning yourself. Welcome back to the MindChange podcast. I'm your host Heather McKin. Before we jump into today's emotional driver episode, it would be so wonderful if you would help us out by subscribing, leaving a like and join in the discussion in the comments. Your engagement helps these conversations reach more

2:08people who need them. Okay, today we are talking about pneumonia. Nomonia is an infection that causes inflammation in one or both of the lungs. So deep inside the lungs are a millions of tiny little air sacs. And under healthy conditions, those air sacs fill with air when we breathe. With pneumonia, they can fill with fluid or pus, making it harder and sometimes painful for the body to take in oxygen. Medical authorities say that pneumonia can be caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi, and even parasites. And it can affect anyone, but it can especially be serious for babies, young children, or older adults, or people with chronic health conditions or weakened immune systems. Symptoms can vary, but have stuff like coughing, fever, chills, fatigue, and chest pain

3:14when breathing or coughing. Also, shortness of breath and sometimes even nausea or confusion. Conventional medicine tends to focus on the infectious agent, so identifying the bacterium, virus, or fungus, and then treating the physical process taking place in the lungs. But it might change, we like to ask a different question. Why did this particular person's body become vulnerable at this particular time? What was happening in their emotional world? What they've been carrying around in their subconscious? What specifically for pneumonia? What conflict grief, overwhelm, or sense of suffocation had become too much to contain? Because the mind and body are not separate systems, the body is always communicating. Symptoms are not meaningless betrayals. They can be the body's way of revealing an internal experience that has not been

4:17recognized, expressed, or resolved yet. Our stress response influences breathing, asleep, inflammation, immune function, digestion, hormones, and the way the body allocates energy. And the body's always adapting to what it perceives around us and within us. So today, we're going to explore the emotional themes that may sometimes surround pneumonia. And those are feeling suffocated, invaded, overwhelmed, burdened by grief, or powerless to change in upsetting situation. It can also be feeling responsible for carrying the emotional atmosphere of others, an entire family, or an entire office, or just a lot of other people around you. So these patterns give us a place to become curious, and curiosity gives us somewhere to begin

5:18creating change. So let's begin with what happens physically before we move into what the lungs and breath represent symbolically. One of the main things pneumonia affects is our breathing. And breathing is so automatic that most of us rarely think about it. We inhale and air travels through the nose or mouth down the windpipe into the branching airways that become smaller and smaller inside the lungs. And those tiny little air sacs that we talked about earlier is where oxygen passes into the bloodstream and then carbon dioxide moves out of the bloodstream. Now that exchange is happening every moment of every day. We receive what the body needs, and then we release what it no longer needs. With pneumonia, germs, let's say,

6:18reach the lungs and the immune system responds. Implamation develops, and those tiny little sacs fill with fluid or pus or not nice things. And the space normally available for air becomes compromised. That means the body has to work harder to perform something that is usually deemed effortless. Now different forms of pneumonia develop in different settings. So someone may acquire it in the community or a healthcare environment or I mean sometimes even people develop them while using a ventilator. There's also aspiration pneumonia which can happen when the food or liquid or saliva or even vomit enters the lungs instead of being swallowed safely. But identifying the why or what happened behind it doesn't necessarily explain the deeper terrain in which the

7:20organism was able to get in and the immune system was not able to fight it off. Okay, so that's where we like to get into the more symbolic things that might be happening. So a great question is what does it mean to breathe? Breath is our first exchange with life. The moment we're born, we inhale, we receive life into the body. And from that first moment until our last breathing reflects an ongoing relationship between our inner world and the world around us. We take something in, we allow it to nourish us, and then we let go of something. That makes breath a powerful symbol of our capacity to receive life, occupy space and participate in the world without losing ourselves inside of it. Notice what happens when you're to your breathing when you feel safe, right? It tends to become

8:23slower, deeper, more spacious. Now think about what happens to your breathing when you feel threatened, overwhelmed, trapped or emotionally flooded. Breath usually becomes shallow or chest tightens, or you may be subconsciously or unconsciously holding your breath. Sometimes you might sigh repeatedly as your body is trying to create a little more room or trying to let go a little bit more. So breath is deeply responsive to emotional experience. Long before the conscious mind names a threat, the body changes the way it breathes. And we even use the language of breathing to describe our relationship with life. Like I can finally breathe again or I need some breathing room, or she takes my breath away. I feel suffocated. I'm drowning in responsibilities. I can't catch my breath,

9:23right? The body and our language are telling the same story. Breath is connected to freedom, space, safety, and the ability to receive life fully. So again, from that metaphysical perspective, pneumonia invites us to ask a question like, where in my life have I felt that there was no room for me to breathe? One of the strongest emotional themes associated with the lungs is the experience of suffocation. Now that could be literal, such as living or working in an environment where the air is toxic or unpleasant cold, something like that. But oftentimes it's also emotional. So a suffocating relationship, a controlling parent when you're a child or as you get older, a controlling relationship, an oppressive workplace, an impossible caregiving role. Maybe a family crisis that

10:27consumes all of your thoughts, all of your time, all of your conversation. People living in these circumstances often say things like, I can't get away from it. There's no room for me. Or everyone needs something from me. I just need a break. I feel trapped. I'm trying to keep everything from falling apart. When the nervous system hears that message day after day, it can begin living as though there is not enough space, not enough time, not enough support, not enough emotional oxygen. That person may become hyper aware of everyone else's moods. They'll monitor the room before they relax. They'll anticipate what other people need before anyone asks. And then they make themselves smaller to prevent conflict. So from the outside, they may look caring and capable. But what's happening inside might feel as though life is pressing in on them from every direction.

11:33In that case, we may ask a question like, when did I learn that other people were allowed to take up space? But I wasn't. Another really common emotional driver for pneumonia is feeling invaded. Medically, pneumonia begins when an infectious organism enters the lungs and the immune system responds. But symbolically, that can invite questions about boundaries. Do you feel that people enter your emotional space without permission? Does someone repeatedly tell you what to think, how to feel, where to go, who to be? Are you expected to absorb everyone else's fear, danger, disappointment, grief? Maybe you find it difficult to say something like, hey, you know what, that belongs to you. I care about you, but I cannot carry it for you.

12:36Because a lot of people were never taught that they're allowed to have that kind of a conversation or allowed to have boundaries. And sometimes that can happen in childhood, because as children, privacy may not have been respected or feelings may have been dismissed. Maybe you grew up in a home where you were required to hug someone when you didn't want to, or you may have been pulled into adult problems and asked to hold secrets that you were way too young to understand. And it could also be that maybe you grew up in a home where you may have learned that saying no to anything resulted in you being getting a guilt trip. So shame. Or if you said no, maybe an adult or primary caregiver would get angry, or they would withdraw or even punish. So children have to adapt. They stop protecting their internal space and they become available,

13:40agreeable, useful. They learn to tolerate emotional intrusions because preserving the connection with an adult or a parent felt more important than preserving themselves. Now if we move that into adulthood, they still may feel defenseless in the presence of a controlling person or controlling situations. So in that case, they are people who allow their boundaries to be crossed repeatedly. And when that happens, they may freeze or comply or quietly resent it, rather than ever risk confrontation. Eventually, these people may not even recognize there was an invasion in the first place. They simply feel exhausted after certain conversations or certain things that they need to do in work or in their family or in their church or in various situations, even in friendship groups. This could show up like being tense when particular people

14:49enter a room or feeling desperate to be alone without understanding why. This is about reorganizing and recognizing when your nervous system has spent years believing that your space is not truly yours. And how that belief may have shaped the internal environment of your body. Another big driver is feeling overwhelmed and helpless because pneumonia can leave the body profoundly fatigued. Even basic movement may require enormous effort. And so the body diverts resources toward fighting the infection and breathing, just breathing itself can feel like more work because of all of the other energy that was diverted. Now that physical experience can mirror another emotional pattern like feeling overwhelmed or circumstances that seem impossible to change.

15:54Now that can show up like maybe you're caring for someone whose needs never stop. Even for people who've been doing this their whole life, for women, motherhood can sometimes feel like that. If you've constantly been everybody else's person and then you have little ones and this is the place where you are supposed to be their person, it can get overwhelming. It can be the last straw on an already very full camel's back, right? Maybe it's outside family, extended family. And everyone in the family is in conflict but you're expected to be the one that sees everybody's sides or take everybody's side or mediate the situation. It can happen in like work environments. Maybe you are working under a dominant person or a controlling person who criticizes everything you do. It could be a financial crisis, a divorce. It could be a frightening diagnosis or a loss

17:00that has left you wondering how you can possibly keep going. When you believe you have no meaningful influence over what happens next, the nervous system itself may shift into helplessness. You're still function, you still show up, you may even on the outside appear strong, but inside a part of you is saying, I can't do this anymore. Nothing I do changes the situation. I need someone to come and take over. I just want the world to stop for a little while. And for a lot of people, illness becomes the first socially acceptable reason a person has had to rest. The body finally creates the boundary that the person has been unable to create consciously. The body is trying to make even breathing impossible because the way you've been existing, the way you've been living has become impossible to sustain. And that distinction matters.

18:06The healing question becomes, how did I learn to believe that I had to become completely depleted before I was allowed to receive care? Another really common driver is grief. Across many healing traditions, the lungs have long been associated with grief. And that symbolism makes intuitive sense when we think about what happens when grief moves through the body. The chest aches, the breath catches, we sob in waves, we inhale sharply and struggle to exhale. And sometimes we cannot even cry at all. The grief seems to just sit heavily in the chest, present but unmoving. Not all grief follows a death. Sometimes we grieve relationships that ended opportunities we missed, versions of our self that we never got to become.

19:06Family we wish we had, family we wish we never had. Safety we should have received as children, dreams that were let down or disappeared while we were busy taking care of everybody else. Sometimes the grief is obvious but other times the grief is inherited like through the emotional atmosphere of a family. That could be like a child grows up beside a parent who is carrying an unresolved loss. And the parent may never speak about it but the child feels the heaviness. So the child becomes careful, helpful, quiet. They unconsciously try to lift the parents mood or prevent any additional pain. Over time a child may absorb a responsibility that was never theirs like a belief that it's my job to keep this family okay. And when that's the case for those children they often have difficulty distinguishing their own emotions from those of the people they love.

20:13When someone is sad they feel compelled to feel sad with them or feel compelled to fix it. If someone's anxious they become anxious. If someone's disappointed they experience it as a personal failure of like oh no this person's disappointed in feeling this and I couldn't be the one that got them out of it. So if grief is a contributing factor it might be helpful to ask what am I grieving? And even more so once you come up with things of does all of this grief actually belong to me or is it possibly something that got passed down? Another driver is from childhood could be a child who carries the emotional pattern of the house. And listen we don't normally do drivers for children but if a child develops pneumonia in childhood sometimes this is early on

21:19showing us a pattern that might be in the family because children aren't extraordinarily sensitive creatures especially to emotional atmosphere. They notice tension between adults. Even tension that adults believe that they're hiding they feel it. They feel changes in tone. Facial expression when routine goes off when connection may be not as deep. And they don't have the language to say oh I guess mom is frightened or that is just being emotionally absent or maybe my parent is dealing with grief or my parents are angry with each other or everyone is pretending things are fine but they're not. Children just don't have that prefrontal cortex emotional language yet. So instead they experience the atmosphere directly through their nervous system. Some children respond by becoming demanding or reactive but others become exceptionally good.

22:24They try not to add any more stress they become a little helper or they monitor a parent's mood. They may take responsibility for other siblings and usually they're suppressing their own emotions or fears because or any feeling really because it seems like the adults are already overwhelmed. So the emotional inquiry is about the environment surrounding the child not to assign blame but to understand what the child's body may be expressing on behalf of a system in that child that they were too young to describe in words. But if a child is frequently overwhelmed controlled carrying adult tension the body might be asking what has this child had enough of where do they feel like they have no choice or where are they protecting a parent

23:26emotionally maybe do they feel responsible for keeping the peace in their home or is there enough room for their fear anger sadness independence or any feelings really. Sometimes the most healing message a child can receive is the adults will handle the adult problems you do not have to carry us. All right another driver for pneumonia is when care feels like control and that may develop when love and control become intertwined. So imagine a child whose physical needs are met but whose emotional needs are answered inconsistently perhaps the parent is loving but they're anxious or they're attentive but intrusive protective but controlling the child may receive care only after distress criticism conflict or fear when that happens they learn a confusing association. Closeness feels comforting but it also feels suffocating

24:35distance feels freeing but it also feels unsafe so children want support but then push it away because they long to be cared for but feel trapped when someone gets too close. As an adult they may repeat that push pull in relationships later in life they'll choose people who are dominant because control feels familiar and then they'll feel resentful because there's no room to breathe. They'll ask for help and then feel weak for needing it they crave connection and then retreat when connection begins to feel like engulfment. So the issue is not that they do not know how to love the issue is that their nervous system learn love and suffocation arrive together and that pattern along with most of our patterns deserve compassion it was an adaptation to confusing care

25:35and it may no longer be necessary. All right the last one that I'm going to cover is one of the clearest patterns in pneumonia and that's the identity of being everyone's foundation. You're the person who saves people the one who solves the problem the one who can handle all the impossible levels of stress the one who steps in and does things and figures out things before anyone even asks again those qualities can be beautiful generosity is good or liability is good service is a wonderful thing but the deep question may be what do you receive from being emotionally dependent or dependable from everyone else like what do you receive by being indispensable perhaps being needed gives you a sense of value or perhaps being needed make sure that you won't be abandoned

26:35or maybe it allows you to avoid your own pain by focusing on everyone else's it's also possible that as a child being useful was the surest way to receive attention or affection. If your parents' resemblance depended on you to be the strong figure in the household responsibility may have become more than a behavior it may have become your identity. When that's the case the idea of letting go can feel terrifying if you're no longer the one who everyone leans on who are you who people still value you will they still include you or will you have to face the grief to disappointment or emptiness that you've been too busy to feel. Many people take on too much to prove that they can do the impossible but underneath of that drive is often a child whose effort was never properly acknowledged so they just keep accomplishing keep serving keep carrying hoping that this time someone will finally see how hard they're trying someone will come and rescue them but that comes

27:39at a painful cost they abandon activities that bring them joy they give up rest they postpone their own dreams and eventually they may look at everything they sacrificed and wonder what did I give my life away for. Let me share a quick story a client story that can help kind of bring all of these themes together so let's call this client Anna. Anna was the person everyone called in the crisis she organized family gatherings served at church she also cared for her aging parents she helped her adult children when they needed money or childcare she covered for co-workers at work who were struggling and she rarely complained friends described her as generous strong capable but eventually Anna developed pneumonia after a respiratory infection and her recovery was way slower than she

28:41or anyone expected. Her symptoms were just lingering and lingering for months afterwards and the doctors were just like well this can happen for some people and maybe your lungs got weakened you know there's all sorts of different explanations but she had done multiple courses of antibiotics and it was just weakening her body further and further and finally she reached out for help but not because she was concerned for herself it actually had more to do with the fact that for the first time in her life she couldn't continue doing all the things for everyone that she always did and so her illness had created a pause and inside of that pause things became visible even while struggling to breathe Anna was worried about everybody else she kept trying to answer work emails from bed or say she thought she was better and maybe I can go to work and she gave her

29:46husband instructions about all the stuff that needed to be done for her parents or her or the children at one point her daughter came to visit and she apologized when her daughter even brought her soup so as we do we ask a lot of questions and I asked her why receiving help made her feel so uncomfortable and she said well I don't want to be a burden to anybody so I asked her a different question when did you first learn that having needs made you a burden and so she thought about it for a little bit and then she began of course talking about her childhood Anna's mother had another child and had tragically lost that child before Anna came around but her mother rarely spoke about it but sadness filled the home and his father worked long hours and he didn't really know how to

30:49respond emotionally to the loss and he didn't know how to respond to the way that his wife was dealing with the loss so as a little girl Anna became exquisitely sensitive to her mother's moods she learned to be truthful when her mother was sad helpful when her mother was overwhelmed quiet when the obvious tension appeared between her parents and like many of us no one explicitly told her to carry the family's emotional weight she simply just felt it and adapted um being easy she felt like made her mother's life easier made the smiles come a little bit easier and being useful brought moments of warmth and approval for Anna needing something seemed to add pressure to a home that already felt so heavy so Anna just stopped needing or more accurately she stopped expressing her needs

31:52eventually that child became an adult who could sense distress from across a room she would step in automatically she didn't ask whether a problem belonged to her or even if she if those people wanted help if she could help she believed then it was her responsibility to help so I asked her what would happen if you allowed the people you loved to be responsible for their own lives and instantly she said I'm afraid they won't need me anymore and that really was the deeper wound Anna did not merely help because she was kind or you know just wanted to help she helped because being needed had become proof that she belonged or that it was okay for her to be there and that initial session we really we really dug into that we really went into helping her experience

32:58care without self erasure like without having to um completely deny or defy self and from that she actually began to notice ahead of time when she was felt compelled to absorb someone else's anxiety and we had her practice saying is this mind to solve so she began to allow her siblings the ones that remained alive participate in her mother's care instead of taking all the responsibility she allowed her husband to help without correcting how he did everything and perhaps more importantly she learned to receive without apologizing becoming more aware of those things and starting to catch them revealed and began transforming a pattern that had shaped in this nervous

34:02system relationships and internal biology for decades her body needed rest her emotional work helped her understand why she never believed she was allowed to choose it right after that first session Anna took a deep breath in without coughing or without feeling that familiar constriction that she felt and had been feeling in her chest for months and from that moment Anna was on her journey to breathing deeply into her own worth and value so pneumonia doesn't often happen right away when we are going through something in my experience pneumonia can often appear after it seems like maybe certain things in our environment have finally started to settle down a

35:04little bit and we can have that linked in our subconscious mind of like okay now that everything's settled down now it's time for you know the body is like okay we need a break we need to rest the only way we can do this is to get sick and so people often look for like okay well what's what's going on right now sometimes we need to look you know earlier months earlier and often we we need to look at the the the decades of how we've operated right so it is important to understand that it doesn't always have direct correlation and our mind can actually connect to other things too you know oftentimes pneumonia happens in the winter time and so that was the belief always like don't go out in the cold without proper you know or you could catch pneumonia but we've you know

36:07immunology and everything has proven that that's not exactly the fact now sometimes having to warm the body up extremely from a cold temperature to a warmer temperature with an already compromised immune system that can be just another you know another layer to it but sometimes we can link things like perhaps a child felt frightened and smothered by a parent while cold wind blew against their face or maybe someone was exhausted overwhelmed and physically exposed during a time when they felt unable to protect themselves the subconscious mind always links experiences together it remembers sensations people environment and emotions all as part of the same event so this can sometimes give us another useful question when we're trying to understand the drivers behind our pneumonia if we're doing pneumonia which was what was happening in my life when I became ill

37:12and what did that situation mean to me you might look at things like was there a time when you were frightened or out of control or felt trapped or exhausted or that you were grieving something or did you feel that someone was invading your space did you desperately need a break but didn't believe that you could take one the goal when we ask these questions is not to necessarily force an answer it's to notice whether your illness occurred inside of a larger story that your conscious mind hasn't ever fully examined okay if you were to take away something today from this episode I want you to remember that our emotional patterns are not mortal failures if you did become the strong one there was a reason if you learned to carry everyone else's feelings there's probably proof for that there that was probably a survival strategy if closeness sometimes feels suffocating

38:15there's a reason if you struggle to ask for help until you are completely depleted then that was probably something that you learned these responses were intelligent adaptations they helped you maintain connection they helped you navigate a family system they may have helped you feel valuable safe or needed but an adaptation that once protected you can become exhausting when it's the only way that you know how to live so the question is not whether caring for others is good the question is whether you have learned to care for others without abandoning yourself that's the better question okay if today's episode stirred something in you get curious ask yourself by whom or what do I feel suffocated where in my life do I need more breathing room who's emotions

39:16have I been carrying or maybe what grief have I never allowed myself to express and even deeper what would happen if I stopped being the person everyone leans on or maybe do I believe I must be useful in order to be loved these along with many other questions are not about creating guilt or even asking why they are about learning how how we got here because we are trying to create awareness because awareness gives us choice and choice creates room for a different relationship with ourselves and with other people and with life okay thank you for spending so much time with me today if this episode gave you new perspective I'd love for you to share it with someone who may benefit please be sure to subscribe or follow the podcast labor of review and if you're watching on YouTube then maybe answer

40:20this question below where in your life have you been craving more room to breathe we genuinely read your comments and a lot of our future episodes are inspired by the conversations we have here and maybe you're ready to begin uncovering the subconscious patterns that are influencing your health and relationships right now if that's the case please schedule a free discovery call with one of our founders you can find the link at mindchange.com until next time thank you for joining us on the mindchange podcast where we are changing the world one mind at a time you