Part 1: 16 yo F, Relentless Abdominal Pain and a Dark Tornado 🌪️

Hey there healers 👋

I want to share a case that has stayed with me.
Not because it resolved neatly, but because it kept saying, “Something here is not adding up.”

This is Part 1.

The case in a nutshell

She’s 16.

For the past two years, she’s had severe right lower quadrant abdominal pain:

• Intense, daily pain
• Sometimes curled in a fetal position for long stretches
• School attendance significantly reduced and modified
• The pain has become a central organizing force in the family

With that level of impact, you’d expect a clear clinical explanation.
That’s exactly what we didn’t have.

How it started

Two years ago, she went to the hospital with severe RLQ pain and had an appendectomy.

• The appendix was “somewhat” inflamed, but not a dramatic surgical picture
• She improved at first
• Then the localized RLQ pain returned and slowly escalated

Since then, there have been multiple hospital visits and, per family report, she’s been cleared for:

• Gynecologic causes
• Ovarian cysts
• Other obvious “big” pathologies

So on paper, nothing that fully explains why a teenager’s life and family system are now wrapped around this pain.

This is the exact point where “just stress” often gets used as a placeholder.
For me, this is where Emotional Anatomy asks us to look closer instead.

The neurological layer

On top of the pain, she developed some clear neuro findings:

• Loss of sensation along an anterior cutaneous nerve distribution
• A dermatomal-type numbness pattern
• Reduced piloerection (“no goosebumps”) down the right anterior leg

Those findings matter.

They kept me from minimizing this as “functional” or vaguely psychosomatic.
Her nervous system and body are doing something very real, even if we don’t yet have a neat label.

First working lens: post-surgical / scar / visceral

Given the history, my initial working hypothesis was simple:

Post-surgical irritation + scar / visceral restriction
(especially with no prior visceral work)

After the first treatment, we saw a mixed response:

• The more diffuse abdominal discomfort quieted
• The highly localized RLQ pain actually intensified

So her system reorganized, but it did not settle.

The level of pain she reported also felt out of proportion to what I was finding with my hands. That was my first clear sense that this wasn’t a straightforward:

“Find the restriction → release it → symptoms resolve” pattern.

The “something else is going on” moment

In one session, with my hands over the RLQ, I kept getting a strong internal image of a dark funnel cloud or tornado right there.

I don’t take that literally.

For me, images like that are my system’s way of saying:

“You are not just dealing with tissue.”

What reinforced that was this:

• The more I treated it as a purely structural/visceral issue
• The more her symptoms worsened

When the body responds to reasonable input as if the input itself is a threat, I don’t assume “she’s overreacting.”
I assume the system is overwhelmed and organized around something we’re not yet naming.

Why I didn’t stop at the physical plane

By this point, I had:

• Significant, life-altering pain
• A clinical workup that didn’t match the level of suffering
• Real neurological findings
• A body that reacted badly to structural work
• A strong internal image (“dark tornado”) around the area

The physical plane was clearly involved, but it wasn’t telling the whole story.

This is where Emotional Anatomy pulled me back to the three planes:

• Physical
• Mental / emotional
• Spiritual / meaning

In Part 2, I’ll share what happened when I started asking questions on the spiritual/meaning plane, and how that opened up a very different understanding of what her system might be holding.

If you’ve had cases where the findings don’t match the life impact, I think you’ll resonate with where this goes next.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

💛Geneviève

PS Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments below or bring it to the community to go deeper!