Hay Fever: It’s Not the Pollen

When I was a kid growing up in the state of Vermont in the USA, I had severe hay fever all the time. I didn’t breathe through my nose for the first 14 years of my life because my sinuses were backed up all the time, day and night, winter and summer.

On a good day, I’d be congested and breathing through my mouth, even when sleeping. On a bad day, I’d sneeze so continuously I could barely do anything else. I remember counting my sneezing episodes and having times where I sneezed over 30 times in a row, uncontrollably. My eyes would sometimes water and puff up and itch.

I have many memories of laying on a couch or bed with a cold washcloth over my eyes, head tilted back to try to drain my nose. I even had hay fever in the winter, when never-melting blankets of snow covered everything and it was usually below freezing temperatures. I would take antihistamines during the bad flare-ups, but I don’t recall them making a huge difference.

When I was a child, my mom took me in for an allergy test where many plant species were scratched into my back. I was allergic to all of them, and my mom used to say that during this test, my back had “lit up like fireworks”. My symptoms were so severe and continuous that my mom used to joke that I was “allergic to life”. My parents even considered getting a surgery that would widen my nasal passages to make more room. I guess the reasoning was that maybe my nasal passage was too narrow to handle my snot (spoiler: it isn’t).

Some of you will know I wrote a blog a while back on how my cat allergy has healed, which you can read by clicking here. I also had the cat (and horse) allergy during the time I had hay fever, but the cat allergy only flared up when I was around cats at other people’s houses; we never had a cat at ours. But the hay fever existed continuously outside of the cat allergy.

Me as a child in Vermont with our family dog

Unlike the cat allergy, my tendency towards hay fever has not fully healed, though it hasn’t been continuous for a long time like it was in my childhood.

In a number of Divine Truth videos, as well as personal chats I’ve had with Jesus and Mary, they’ve shared that the soul-based cause of hay fever is feeling resistive to crying about how emotionally oppressive a person finds their environment. I can’t remember which videos specifically have this info but a good place to start for any physical issue is the Soul Causes of Physical Illness video.

I am still working out exactly what it means to be “emotionally oppressed” and also what that specifically meant for me. My feelings on it at this point are that it has to do with feeling oppressed around expressing and feeling your own emotions, and also around being yourself in your real personality and nature, following your passions and all the important aspects that make up our soul.

My understanding from Divine Truth is that all of our physical problems are emotionally caused, including all allergies including animal allergies, food allergies, plant allergies and all other kinds of allergies. So in the case of hay fever, while the body can be reacting to a plant in an allergic manner, the question is why is the body reacting badly to that plant? If you’re allergic to ragweed, why is your body responding that way? If you’re allergic to mangos, why are you allergic to them? If you’re allergic to dogs, why?

There is a soul-based reason as to why the body is responding negatively to something (a plant, animal or natural food) that God created. It’s not logical that our bodies would be so incompatible with something else that God made which we are interacting with in a very natural way, like just breathing it in our environment or eating a fruit or being around one of God’s creatures.

Instead, something is going on in our souls emotionally to create an allergic reaction in our bodies, and theoretically we should be able to stop our bodies responding in an allergic manner if we work through the causal emotions.

Back to my story: after having had blocked sinuses and hay fever my whole childhood, and having assumed that is how the rest of my life would be, when I was 14 years old we moved from the state of Vermont to the state of Utah. My hay fever went away completely. For years after that, I chocked it up to the fact the flora and pollen in Utah is totally different than Vermont; their climates are very different. Vermont is a humid environment in the northeast of the country and Utah is a desert environment far more west. I thought, I must have been allergic to the flora in Vermont but not the flora in Utah. Or as an alternative, I thought, maybe I just grew out of the allergies.

Utah has a much drier climate.

I didn’t have any hay fever flare ups after that for about 15 years, and I thought I might never have them again. (I did have other health issues at times over those years indicating the repression of certain emotions, but not hay fever).

Then, almost 7 years ago, there were a couple times in that year where the hay fever came back, at times severely. This was odd to me as I thought I would never see it again. Upon learning the emotional cause of it, which is as I mentioned, resistance to crying about how emotionally oppressive you find your environment, I began analyzing.

It seemed that when I was in the company of people that my soul found oppressive, I would get hay fever. Often I wanted to think that the person wasn’t oppressive, so I had to do some deeper reflection on those relationships or who I was with. That being said, Jesus and Mary have mentioned to me that it can happen if I think I’ll be oppressed and start getting sort of stressed out. I’m not sure if that means it can happen with those who aren’t actually oppressive; that part I’m not clear on. I do find though, in retrospect, that most everyone I’ve had hay fever around were indeed oppressive.

In the last 7 years, the hay fever has been on and off. I’ve had it severely at times for weeks or months with people I’ve felt oppressed by, and then had long periods of many months with no hay fever or stuffiness at all. Both having hay fever and not having it has happened in multiple different countries (at least 3 continents, in fact) and many different climates, in different seasons.

Then, a few months ago came the opportunity for a very interesting test about my hay fever.

I decided to take a trip back to Vermont, where I had unbearable allergies every hour of my childhood. I didn’t go back to test my hay fever (haha), but rather to revisit the places of my childhood to access emotions generally, as I hadn’t been back for 20 years. So, I was going back to the same climate, plants and flora that I was supposedly completely allergic to as a child, as shown by my childhood medical allergy tests. I went in the late summer, when all the plants are still well in bloom in Vermont.

Because I knew Divine Truth now, I suspected that I would not have hay fever when I went back, because none of my family still live there; we all moved from the state 20 years prior. I would be there by myself and I thought my suspicions would likely be confirmed that hay fever and allergies have emotional causes, and so I wouldn’t have it. But still I wondered, considering how continuous and severe it was as a child. I also had it very recently in England before going to Vermont, so I obviously hadn’t grown out of it.

And so I went to Vermont. And as you might guess, I had no hay fever at any point over the full week that I was there. I sat on grass, I walked in the woods, I was outside most of the time. Even though I suspected as much, I was kind of blown away.

Back to Grand Isle, Vermont, after 20 years away.

Now, when I think back to why my hay fever went from being severe all day, every day in Vermont as a child, to being totally gone without so much as a sniffle after we moved to Utah, I think I can see why. When we lived in Vermont, while it was a gorgeous place in terms of the scenery of the countryside, we lived very rurally, on a large island in a town with a population of 2000 people and lots of farmland. I only had one friend within walking distance, and there was nowhere to go and hang out; it was one of those towns with one gas station and one school and one church. We didn’t even have a grocery store on the island.

But the bigger factor really was that my parents were quite possessive of me in my childhood; they always wanted me home so I always was home, and they were always home too. My mom was focused on raising my brothers and I and caretaking the home and doing cooking and cleaning, so she was always home. My dad worked full time but if he wasn’t at work, he was at home. My parents, particularly my mom, were very controlling of me in terms of my physical whereabouts and I was rarely allowed to even leave the house, even just to go on a walk. I was always inside with them.

They didn’t really socialize with others and we didn’t really have people over often, so it very much felt like this contained, claustrophobic environment that I couldn’t leave and where my parents always were too. If we left the house it was always as a unit: if one of my brothers had an event, we all had to go watch it whether I wanted to or not. If I had something, the whole family went. If one of our parents had something, we all went. It was all of us, always, together.

And this also meant there was no reprieve from my parent’s emotional oppression of me. Again, I’m still working out the question for myself, “What did being emotionally oppressed by my parents mean? What did that feel like?” And for me I connect with the fact that my parents never wanted any of my emotions; I was not allowed to feel feelings. I was also not allowed to really even speak up or talk or have any personality. My desires and passions were often shut down and ridiculed. In this blog have often shared how I think of myself in my childhood as a doll on a shelf. So really, every aspect of my soul was actively oppressed by both my parents. And because of their controlling nature and the isolation they created in my life in Vermont, it meant I was always receiving their projections.

When we moved to Utah at age 14, it was right in the transition between middle school and high school for me; a pretty big change for kids. We moved to a bigger town with a bigger residential population and a large ongoing tourist population. To me, it felt like I’d moved to a booming metropolis with tons of people!

Park City, Utah – a much bigger town than I was used to!

In high school there were lots of new opportunities that I took part in, including extra sports, art, and music. I suddenly had more activities to go to. I had places to go and things to do. I made more friends than I’d had in Vermont, and spent time with them. I went to my various activities related to school. There were places to hang out that weren’t home now; I could go hike mountains, go snowboarding, I could hang out with friends at local cafes or see a concert at the ski resorts nearby. Our new neighborhood was a more typical suburban development with lots of people you could walk to to visit.

My younger brothers’ worlds also opened up in moving to this new place and they had a lot more activities and friends now too. My parents began doing more things away from the house. My dad was away more, which now I know was a lot due to developing a double life, which I have lots of other feelings about, but when it came to oppression, the simple fact is he just wasn’t around as much, which was a relief in many ways. My mom was still a stay-at-home mom when we first moved, but her attention was now drawn in lots of different places with my brothers and her own activities, and so her distraction was also a relief for me.

My parents’ oppressive emotions hadn’t changed at all, but the change in their ability to keep me at home as much, as well as their increased distractedness with other things, meant I felt a lot less trapped than I did in Vermont. I felt so much more free. I think this is why the hay fever stopped. And it’s why I didn’t have any hay fever in returning to Vermont last year even though I’ve not grown out of the hay fever, because none of my family were there with me. I felt free being in Vermont for the first time.

I’m not sure exactly how hay fever and allergies work in the sense of, there must be something in me that is the reason it still reoccurs when I’m in situations I feel oppressed, and perhaps when I work through that, I won’t get hay fever even around oppressive people. I suppose it must be the resistance to crying about the oppression; it must mean that I’ve not yet resolved those childhood emotions fully.

But I write this blog to help others who may struggle with allergies and hay fever to see that it is not the pollen or the flora that is the real cause of our suffering. Rather, there are emotions in us and dynamics happening in our relationships with others, which need to be looked at. These emotions are what cause our body to have allergic reactions to any of God’s creations: any plants, foods, or animals. Rather than getting all caught up with which plants you need to avoid, worrying about medications and natural strategies for allergy relief, or choosing even the location that you live based on minimizing allergies, we can refocus our attention on the real root causes, which are emotional.

So, if you do have allergies, I wish you all the best in getting to your sadness about emotional oppression, and looking at your relationships, past and present. I’m doing the same.

All the best,

Courtney

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Photo 1 of dandelion by Artem Beliaikin via Unsplash.com

Vermont photos by me

Photo 2 of Utah by Dakota Corbin via Unsplash

Photo 3 of Park City by Olivia Hutcherson via Unsplash