Part 2: 16 yo F, Relentless Abdominal Pain and a Dark Tornado 🌪️

Hey there healers 👋

In the first part of this case, I shared a 16-year-old with two years of severe RLQ abdominal pain, major life disruption, and a clinical picture that simply didn’t add up.

This is where things started to shift when I brought the three planes back in: physical, mental/emotional, and spiritual/meaning.

Realizing the structural story didn’t hold

By the second appointment, it was clear the structural story was thin.

• There wasn’t much in the way of true restriction or dense scarring
• What I could feel didn’t match the intensity of her pain
• Structural/visceral work was actually making her worse, not better

So the “scar tissue and adhesions” hypothesis no longer felt honest. I could keep treating it like a mechanical problem, but her body was already telling us that wasn’t the whole story.

Around this time, another detail came forward.

The strange “gasp” that started after hospital rehab

Every time she changed position, she made a very distinct, high-pitched sound.
Somewhere between a gasp, hiccup, and squeak.

She told me this started after a hospital rehab assessment where they had her doing plank-type core exercises as part of testing.

And it never went away.

So now we have:

• A pain pattern that doesn’t fit the physical findings
• An odd, persistent gasp/squeak that began in a medical context
• A system that reacts badly to structural input

All of that, together with the “dark tornado cloud” image I kept seeing over her RLQ, nudged me to take the spiritual/meaning plane seriously.

For me, visuals like that aren’t random. That's my OWN body signaling that something may be happening beyond a simple tissue or purely emotional pattern.

When the physical and emotional planes don’t fully explain it

On the physical plane:

• No clear etiology beyond mild post-surgical irritation
• Not enough structural change to justify the degree of suffering
• Neuro findings present, but not enough to “explain away” the whole story

On the mental/emotional plane:

• No obvious initiating trauma around the onset
• No big, conscious emotional trigger she could name

The mismatch between her pain and life impact and the clinical findings kept saying:

“You are missing the organizing story here.”

That’s when I opened the door to a different kind of question.

Opening the spiritual/meaning plane

With her mom present, I asked her something that might sound odd. I asked her:

“Have you ever been intuitive?
Do you have dreams that are predictive, or strong ‘knowings’ about things before they happen?”

My line of thinking was simple:
Some bodies are highly attuned to what is unseen. In those systems, pain can sometimes be one of the ways that sensitivity shows up when it’s not understood or held.

She immediately denied it.

And then her mom, almost shocked, jumped in.

She shared that as a child, her daughter used to have wild premonitions:

• She would talk about speaking with spirits
• She had made startlingly accurate predictions about deaths of people close to her within hours of their passings

This was not subtle; it was vivid and unnerving.

I asked when those experiences stopped.

The answer:

Right around the time the pain began.

Why this matters clinically

I’m not here to psychoanalyze her, and I’m not interested in forcing a narrative onto this.

What I am interested in is this:

• There is finally a clear correlation between a major shift in her inner life and the onset of her physical symptoms
• Her intuition and spiritual experiences seem to have shut down just as her body turned up the volume on pain
• This was one of the only meaningful time-linked changes we could find

For me, that’s not a curiosity. That’s data.

It tells me her system might be trying to hold, contain, or re-route something that used to move through in a very different way.

Making space for a different kind of conversation

What felt most important in that moment was not to “explain” her pain, but to create a safe space for her and her mother to even talk about this.

In many clinical settings, this entire dimension would be dismissed or never invited in at all.

But if we imagine our patients are only anatomy and don’t consider the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their lives, we may be missing a huge part of what’s going on.

Those aspects are not separate from the body.
They are fused with it.

Questions for your own practice

When you’re with a patient whose pain or symptoms don’t line up with the clinical findings, you might ask yourself:

On the physical plane:

• “Does the level of pain and life impact match what I’m finding in the tissue, imaging, or tests?”
• “If not, where might my lens be too narrow or purely mechanical?”

On the mental/emotional plane:

• “What is the emotional tone of this case, not just the content?”
• “Where does their story feel bigger, older, or more charged than the current situation alone?”

On the spiritual/meaning plane:

• “What changed in this person’s inner world around the time the symptoms began?”
• “Is there a part of their experience (intuitive, spiritual, existential) that has never been named or given a place to belong?”

You don’t have to have answers to all of these.
Sometimes just holding the questions is enough to keep you from collapsing a complex case into “just stress” and to invite more of your patient’s real story into the room.

We don’t have a full resolution with her yet.

What we do have is:

• A shared language for what might be happening on the spiritual/meaning plane
• A space where she and her mom can explore this part of her history without shame
• A gradual shift in her pain and in how her system responds to contact

We’re still working. The pain is changing, but there is more to do.

For me, the hope in cases like this lives right there:
in our willingness to work across all three planes, and to let the anatomy and the unseen parts of our patients’ lives both have a seat at the table.

💛Geneviève

PS. Please feel free to share your thoughts/comments below or bring it to the community - let's grow together!