You’ll Never Guess What My Favorite Body Part Is
After reading this, it might be yours, too — especially if you’re an empath
Bloating. Strange gut paralysis. Acne well into my 30s. Seborrheic dermatitis so bad it would leave itchy, bloody sores on my scalp. These were just a few of the mysterious health problems that doctors could never help me with. What was it like? Something like this and this and this — because I’m not the only one.
And like those cases linked above, I found relief only after finding Anthony William, aka the Medical Medium, the one person who finally helped me understand the source of my symptoms and heal my body — for good. If you want to know how someone without a medical degree could develop such an astonishing track record of successfully healing chronic illness and amass over four million followers, see this story:
The first Medical Medium book I read was Liver Rescue, which explained that all my symptoms were connected to my overworked and sickened liver — forever changing how I view this wallflower of an organ. Here’s just a smidge of what I learned:
- The vast majority of chronic health conditions, including autoimmune conditions and heart disease, can be traced to a liver that’s become overburdened from filtering toxins, pathogens, and excessive dietary fats — and lacks critical nutrients to help it safely purge and continue to function well.
- We think of the liver as just a filter, but actually it performs over 2,000 critical functions still unknown to medical research, including immune system duties, regulating body temperature, and storage of vitamins and minerals.
- The liver’s capacity to store memories and process information (such as keeping track of when you splurge on unhealthy food and preparing accordingly) rivals that of the brain.
- The liver is key to emotional as well as physical well-being.
- A clean liver is the “ultimate anti-aging ally.”
- While many spiritual practices focus on the third eye (pineal gland), cleansing the liver does far more for personal spiritual advancement.
- A sick liver doesn’t actually feel painful to us — but that doesn’t mean it’s doing well.
- Everyone’s liver is in trouble because we live in such a toxic world.
Writes Medical Medium:
Your liver will fight to keep you young and safe even if this means that it’s forced to grow old and sluggish in the process. It will even take bullets for you in the hopes that one day you may receive the message to rescue it, as it has done for you for all these years and as it will always try to do for you, no matter what.
Reading this almost made me cry.
Gosh liver, I just didn’t know you were working so hard and hurting so much! I’m so sorry for all the unnecessary toxins I’ve sent your way. Thank you for everything you do for me, and . . . I love you.
But there’s another reason I love my liver that’s way more personal. Medical Medium finally helped me see my liver in myself, of course — but he also helped me see myself in my liver.
How? Because, I realized, the liver is basically an empath. Like me.
An empath is a person who is unusually sensitive, especially to the feelings and experiences of other people. There is some debate about whether empaths are born or made; I’ve seen cases made for both. Certainly many children who grew up in abusive households, like I did, develop heightened sensitivity as a coping strategy to keep themselves safe around a volatile parent.
I figured out from a very early age that to stay on my mother’s good side, to avoid a scolding or worse, I needed to be extra sensitive to her moods at all times. It became second nature for me to put her needs above my own in various ways, e.g., aligning my tastes in activities and clothing with hers and keeping my mouth shut instead of voicing my contrary opinions so I wouldn’t risk offending her. And whenever she directed her tirades of emotional abuse at me, I just took it all in — without complaint.
In a household with two sisters who had enough self-esteem to see our mom’s dysfunction for what it was and resist it, I felt like it was my responsibility to take Mom’s side and keep her as happy as possible regardless of the unconsciousness she brought to the household.
A couple years ago, in a psychedelic-assisted healing session, I was shown a vision of a kitchen sponge. The message? This is a metaphor for the role you played in the family.
How similar my childhood behavior was to the liver: dutifully sponging up toxins an unconscious person brings to the body and sequestering those poisons within itself without protest.
Just as my mom had no idea what she was doing to me (or if she did, she didn’t care), the average person has no idea how much they’re hurting their liver with all the drinking, excessive fats, junk food, coffee, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals they’re putting in and on their bodies. And even if they’re mindful of diet and substances, most people are unknowingly poisoning their livers with constant stress. As Medical Medium explains, a high-stress lifestyle — and the caffeine habit that usually accompanies it — puts the body into fight-or-flight mode on a daily basis instead of only rarely in real life-or-death situations. This overstimulates the adrenal glands to release adrenaline more often than our bodies were designed to handle. And the liver is the organ that has to mop up all that corrosive adrenaline.
But how would you know you’re hurting your liver? If you sprain your ankle, that ankle hurts. If you develop a stomach ulcer, your stomach hurts. But nobody ever thinks, ow, my liver sure hurts today! What can I do to help it? — because the liver never complains.
Until one day it does. In its own unique way, of course.
In true empath form, the liver will be rather indirect — passive aggressive, you might say — in how it signals its malaise. A person won’t experience straight-up liver pain. Instead, as Medical Medium explains, they’ll start to notice cryptic symptoms like elevated blood pressure, persistent skin rashes, spider veins, fungal infections. Maybe they’ll get diagnosed with diabetes or have trouble losing weight. But they’d never know those are signs of an ailing liver (unless they follow Medical Medium).
So they keep their unhealthy habits until eventually finding themselves dragging through their days or flat out on mattress island for weeks or even months at a time, sick with all kinds of symptoms that doctors and medications can’t help — because not even the vast majority of doctors understand that a damaged liver is responsible for so many health problems. At that point patients have to start looking for answers on their own.
Again, that reminds me of my mom and me. After reaching adulthood, I had this nagging sense that I wasn’t emotionally ok. For big chunks of time I’d cut off communication with my mom, wanting nothing to do with her because I could feel this rage building up inside of me with flashbacks of painful childhood memories — and I didn’t know how to talk about it. She was genuinely confused by my behavior. “But I’ve changed!” she’d protest.
And then there were times when I exploded, with sputtering, incoherent emails filled with fury. Again, she was confused — and called me mentally ill and wondered if I was on drugs.
What she and I didn’t realize is that after absorbing decades of her emotional abuse, I was so filled with toxic, suppressed pain that I had started releasing it in unhealthy ways. Back then I just didn’t understand what had happened to me or how to deal with it.
And that’s what our livers eventually do: They become so full of toxins that they start to leak into other areas of the body, and that’s when mysterious symptoms appear.
Knowing what I do now about life and liver, and after experiencing chronic illness and anger myself, I can have more compassion for Mom. Her severe case of varicose veins, thinning hair, and inability to lose weight were all signs of a struggling liver. And her angry, abusive behavior during my childhood could only happen because she herself had taken so much abuse as a child.
I finally saw myself in Mom — and Mom in myself.
And in both of us, our physical and emotional states were far more intertwined than we could imagine. How? Writes Medical Medium:
It’s not an overstatement to say that if every person walking around on this planet right now had a healthy liver, the world would be a different place. Illness wouldn’t have the hold it does on the population. Anger, rage, greed, and violence wouldn’t fill the news. That’s how tied into our beings liver health is.
He isn’t the only health expert making this claim. Traditional Chinese medicine also associates the liver with the emotion of anger. I think the reason why is related to the organ’s empathic nature. After all, quiet, long-suffering human empaths eventually explode at others with a rage burning far hotter than situations seem to warrant.
Both livers and empaths excel at taking on more than their fair share of toxicity — but at some point, something’s gotta give. Medical Medium writes that over time, “[The liver] becomes sick, congested, disgruntled, frustrated, and even angry, pushed over the edge and into battle.”
Neither organ nor empath can absorb the messes of the unconscious indefinitely. At some point they both realize: It’s time to put my own needs first for once so I can heal and do what I was designed to do!
Of course, a big difference between the liver and the human empath is that, once grown, humans have much more control over how they’re treated. Our livers can’t tell us they’re hurting and need help. But when empaths develop enough awareness of how they’re enabling other people’s unconscious behavior and learn to speak up for themselves, they can finally start to get their own needs met.
And an important part of those needs? Taking the time to care for the liver— so it can continue taking good care of us.
If you’d like to learn more about the liver and all the health conditions linked to it, see Medical Medium’s book, Liver Rescue. To learn how to safely and effectively detox the liver for both physical and emotional health, I recommend another Medical Medium book, Cleanse To Heal. He also offers lots of free healing information on nearly all social media platforms.
Note: I’m not sponsored by or affiliated with Medical Medium in any way. I simply feel compelled to share his information because it has massively improved my own health and that of so many others.
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