The Part of Healing That Medicine Doesn’t Have a Name for Yet
- May 26
- 6 min read
Written by Matilda Wayte, Neuroscientist
Matilda Wayte is a Clinical Exercise Physiologist and Neuroscience Researcher whose work sits at the intersection of trauma, brain health, and human behaviour. She brings both academic rigour and deep personal insight to everything she writes.
Medicine can name what’s happening in your body and map your treatment, but it can’t define the person you become after a diagnosis. This article explores the unnamed territory between medical facts and personal identity, a gap anyone receiving a diagnosis has likely felt.
The moment everything changed
Has your life ever been changed in a matter of seconds by a few words strung together that ultimately decide the fate of your future?
It may have sounded something like “I or we have determined that you have” or “Due to the nature of your injury, you’re now a person living with.”
If your experience was anything like mine, whilst you were trying to determine what this new label means for you as a person, the people around you may have surrounded you with ‘loving’ and ‘supportive’ messages of hope, inspiration, and advice on how to handle what’s to come.
It’s likely what you needed was time to process how this felt inside of you. What does it mean for your mind, body, and spirit moving forward?
Often, a diagnosis comes, and there’s little access to other people with this condition. Sometimes you’ll be advised of a support group with others who are carrying the same burden. But every individual has their own story, so just because someone else has the same diagnosis doesn’t mean they’re automatically relatable. Sometimes support groups feel like places that build victims rather than lift people up, and even navigating them feels heavy. People who society does not deem ‘different’ carry heavy burdens that can’t be seen.
What medicine gives you and what it doesn’t
A diagnosis is useful. It gives you a name for what’s happening. It opens doors to treatment, to support, to understanding what your life and body may look like going forward. But a prognosis is like a weather report, it can only estimate what your future might look like. It is not a verdict.
What people carry out of that appointment goes beyond a medical summary, it includes a changed life, the grief of lost identity, and mourning a future they once imagined. The true challenge is integrating the diagnosis into a new sense of self. No doctor ever touches on this. Medicine looks at the physical. It rarely, if ever, looks at the spirit.
The body, mind and spirit are not separate
How someone thinks about a diagnosis, the opinions and words of others, and the internal and external dialogue they carry, all of these affect how well someone copes with an injury or illness.
People who don’t have the space to process end up with guilt, grief, shame, and often depression. They experience a low quality of life. They let their diagnosis become their personality. Rather than someone living with a condition, they become it. Their identity collapses into a label.
This is not just an emotional observation. It is biological. Research in psychoneuroimmunology shows that traumatic life events dysregulate the nervous system and prime the inflammatory response, meaning unprocessed grief and shame don’t stay in the mind, they live in the body and change how the immune system functions. Elevated inflammation is linked to many of the chronic conditions people are already trying to manage.
Then there is spirit, which the research is only beginning to catch up to. Your spirit is your connection to the world. Your belief that you are here for a reason, a purpose, that you are part of something bigger. The universe is made up of thousands of connections that science can’t even fully understand. When a diagnosis arrives, it can sever that connection. Rebuilding it is often the most significant factor in quality of life, more than any single clinical intervention.
The middle ground, the place worth finding, looks like someone who invites a diagnosis in as a way to better understand their life circumstances, but doesn’t fall down into the rabbit hole of believing that’s all they are.
A world that doesn’t slow down
It’s hard. It’s heavy. You always feel like you’re being left behind. If you slow down, you may never catch back up to the bullet train constantly whizzing by.
Technology overwhelms nervous systems. Everyone puts their opinions and beliefs online, and we know from science and research that anything proven to be ‘true’ can be proven untrue at any time. You can’t hold onto something external for stability. You must continue to ask yourself, your soul, does this sit well within me? Is this something I want to accept, or question?
When the external world becomes too loud, the relationship with self becomes the anchor. Grounding back to your senses, what can you see, hear, smell, feel? What thoughts are rushing by? You don’t have to catch them all. You just have to notice you’re still here.
How to build an extraordinary quality of life and alongside what you’re carrying
The things that actually move the needle are rarely in a discharge summary. They start with real, open, honest conversations. Someone acknowledging that this is a really hard world at the best of times, and to be dealing with everyday stressors plus an injury or diagnosis isn’t easy. Hearing that it’s okay if you can’t think past the next day, hour, or minute. That as long as you’re alive and have your breath in this moment, that in itself is an accomplishment.
If I could sit with someone the day after their diagnosis, I would tell them to keep grounding themselves in this moment. To remind themselves of all the hard things they’ve been through and came out the other side of. The race is better when run together. That they don’t need to be alone. That being misunderstood isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that they are allowed to disconnect and be with themselves whenever they need to. It is not their job to make everyone else around them feel safe or calm.
We know from research that community and connection are not just emotionally important, they are clinically significant. Women with colorectal cancer who had low social support experienced 42 percent higher mortality than those with strong support networks. For some cancers, the survival benefit of strong social connections has been found to be comparable to the benefit of chemotherapy. Connection is medicine.
For someone with a spinal cord injury, or any condition that has redrawn the map of their life, they need to be reminded that the journey is long and it is not linear. That there is hope. Hope of a cure, and hope of a future beyond what a medical professional might tell them.
Quality of life comes from being calm within. Every human being is held within this vessel we call a body. People who learn to harness the power of their minds, to accept what feels unacceptable, can achieve things beyond their wildest imagination. It starts with one belief, that it can get better. That it doesn’t have to get worse.
Who I am, and why this matters to me
I am someone who grew up in chaos. Someone who was told by many people that I’d never grow up to be someone with purpose. That I’d always be ‘just not quite good enough’ for the world to accept me.
I spent years proving them wrong. Only to realise that the person I needed to prove anything to was myself. I hold a Bachelor of Clinical Exercise Physiology and postgraduate qualifications in Neurological Rehabilitation, Mental Health, and Neuroscience. But it is lived experience, of hardship, of rebuilding, of learning what it truly means to heal, that shapes everything I do.
I am building a space where people who feel like they don’t fit can come and feel seen and heard. If this article resonated with you, come find me on Instagram, or simply sit with what you’ve just read. Whatever feels right.
Read more from Matilda Wayte
Matilda Wayte, Neuroscientist
Matilda Wayte is a Clinical Exercise Physiologist and Neuroscientist specialising in rehabilitation, trauma, mental health, and the neuroscience of human behaviour. She holds a Bachelor of Clinical Exercise Physiology from QUT, a Graduate Certificate in Neurological Rehabilitation from ECU, and a Graduate Certificate in Mental Health and Neuroscience. Matilda's work is shaped by both her clinical experience across occupational rehabilitation and neurological settings, and her own lived experience of trauma — giving her a rare ability to translate complex science into something that feels genuinely human. She creates research-grounded content for broad public audiences through her platform @theneuro.ep on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Sources:
Frontiers in Psychology (2022) — Social Support & Cancer Quality of Life
NFCR — Social Support & Cancer Outcomes
ResearchGate — Psychoneuroimmunology & Trauma
PubMed — Social Networks & Breast Cancer Survival
EBSCO Research Starters — Denial as a Cognitive Mechanism
