When Lyme Disease Feels Like Warfare
Explaining what chronic Lyme disease feels like is almost impossible. Some people can comprehend the physical symptoms to a degree, the crushing fatigue, violent pain, migraines, nausea, ect, but the haunting sense of invasion, a kind of warfare with some invisible force, is not easy to articulate, not without questioning my sanity anyway.
It took me a long time to realise this wasn’t melodramatic or metaphorical. There is a reason chronic Lyme, Bartonella, and Babesia feel like a physical, psychological, and even spiritual assault. They don’t just infect the body. And this is what I wish I understood earlier, all the times I though it was madness knocking in the door of my mind, whispering, come child….
The Neuropsychology
Chronic Lyme activates the brain’s immune cells (microglia) and when they stay activated, the brain lives in a state of constant inflammation and attack. The nervous system gets stuck in a loops of unpredictable threat, oscillating between hyper and hpyo-arousal (fight or flight) and making ‘rest and digest’ or parasympathetic states feel dangerous. This results in;
brain fog that feels like existing in a void
fear and hypervigilance that erodes trust
anxiety, panic attacks and intrusive thoughts
uncontrollable crying spells and overwhelming grief
sudden doom, dread, and despair
moments of collapse where the body simply gives up
It’s no coincidence that Lyme can turn into PTSD when left untreated. Neurological Lyme already behaves similarly to a trauma response. Symptoms come and go without warning, at times mirroring violent, repetitive abuse. The body becomes a place you can’t trust, and yet your trapped inside it, a kind of inescapable torture chamber—ok I see how this could sound melodramatic, bare with me
The “Intelligence” of the Pathogens
From a biological perspective, Lyme and its co-infections are incredibly adaptive:
they camouflage themselves, hiding in tissues, joints, and senescent or damaged cells that generally go undetected by the immune system
they create protective biofilms to evade treatment and become resistant to each antibiotic strain that fails to kill the entire population, growing new populations from that upgraded bacteria. Essentially, they get smarter each time a treatment fails
they shape-shift to survive
they feed on stress hormones, attacking the central nervous system, and keep the immune system in an over-activated /survival / sympathetic state, which makes it confused and inefficient
they alter mood, which influences behaviour
they weaken resilience by disrupting sleep and cognition
From a spiritual perspective
it feels like they use cracks in the psyche, trauma, isolation, emotional wounds, spiritual hunger, as doorways. When they infiltrate the limbic system, vagus nerve, and HPA axis, they gain access to our fear receptors, emotional centre, and sense of inner safety. This is where the illness can feel like possession, in the sense of something foreign occupying and manipulating our inner landscape.
our thoughts can feel foreign
our emotions feel hijacked
our intuition and sense of spiritual presence feels clouded or overshadowed
our sense of God or meaning can be fractured by the kind of existential dread that makes the works of Nietszche make sense…
our body—our “temple” feels unpredictable and unsafe
which can;
alter perception
drain life force
isolate us
and feel like fighting for freedom
Each Pathogen
has a signature, which can feel like a personality, entity, or spirit, and over time influences / alters how we feel, think, and relate to ourself and the world. Common manifestations of each include;
Bartonella
panic, night-terror, insomnia, grief, sudden flashes of doom, dread, and despair, irritability, rage, obsessive loops, ocd, paranoia
Babesia
anxiety, heart palpitations, air hunger, internal trembling, dizziness / disorientation, fainting, night sweats, exhaustion, crawling feeling under the skin
Lyme / Borrelia
cognitive fog, dissociation, de-realisation, depression, collapse, numbness, and an eerie emptiness in the mind.
How Lyme Blocks Oxytocin and Positive Emotions
Oxytocin, the chemical behind bonding, love, connection, safety, and even spiritual peace, presence, and connection, is produced in the hypothalamus. Lyme inflames that region and blunts oxytocin signalling as well as accessibility to other positive emotions. Bartonella and Babesia add fear chemistry on top, which shuts down oxytocin even further, because the body will never prioritise connection when it feels in danger.
It often feels like:
emotional numbness
distance from loved ones
separateness
aloneness
inability to easily access joy
muted capacity for love
withdrawal
The emotions don’t disappear, but our access to them genuinely does. And that disconnection can deepen the sense of spiritual defeat, because it takes immense vigilance, resilience, and inner strength to cut through the fog, to not let the storm consume us, to find the eye of the storm, that one place in the heart that is still, peaceful and equanimous each day—states of being that were previously my base-line, and ultimately, all of our baseline if we live true.
But these things aren’t blunted forever, and nothing is permanent.
When the Adversary Throws Down its Arms & Admits Defeat
As the immune system gains dominance over the bacteria and inflammation lowers through treatment, fasting, faith, prayer, nervous system repair, and safety, the oxytocin system also begins to reconnect. In my experience,
love floods back into the body
warmth returns
tears of gratitude come at the simplest moments, instead of tears of sorrow
intuition sharpens
connection, presence and spontaneous joy returns
God feels closer, kinder, not a punisher, but inherently loving
It feels like the heart switches back on, because biologically, it does
Like a giant, heavy cloak lifts, and veils tear away from the eyes, light pours back into places that were emptied, and the beauty is there, brighter, cleaner, purified because its been tested, and stripped bare of the inconsequential noise of the world and a mind unrefined.
In this way, it can be like a forced initiation into higher consciousness and spiritual refinement, because we are forced to face so much of ourselves in the shadows, forced to wrestle with ourselves, with God, with belief systems and mental patterning that were previously unexamined, shaving away the identity in ways that look and feel like trauma or ego death.
For a long time I thought the self I and everyone around me knew was gone, and would never return. In a way, it’s partly true. This illness takes so much, but ultimately, much of what it takes was never that valuable to begin with.
Are the pathogens demonic? Possible. But they are intelligent organisms fighting for survival, just like every other organism on this planet. They are certainly not advocates for our wellbeing. And their presence inside the body mimics the dynamics of spiritual warfare, and often draws whatever demons we do have in the cavities of our psyche out of hiding, highlighting our underlying weakness and tendencies. Demons that likely would have remained hidden without forced reckoning.
What has become undeniably true is that even in the most desolate, hopeless trenches of sickness, the light of God never leaves no matter how dark and heavy the shadows become. It is there, waiting for us to rise again and meet it when the war is over. It is there, moving through the trenches even when we can’t feel it. It is there, just as richly in the suffering as it is the miracles, edging us towards a new horizon. And it is possible that it is there, in the demons that visit us, as it is the angels, using both to awaken something in our truth centre, and realign our compass in the direction of something more eternal than the afflictions of flesh.
In the midst of bartonella-induced despair, the thought that God had abandoned me, had abandoned all of humanity in this cursed place, became very seductive, because nothing made sense.
Faith won that battle. It is we who turn our backs.
But hey, I’m just a fantasy author. Perhaps this is all just fodder for my next novel…
