Thanks for your questions, Jessy.
It is very common for people to downplay their emotions; everyone does it to some degree. It’s a way to protect oneself and avoid dealing with painful emotions. Every parent has times of being very angry at their children. There is often no acceptable outlet for this anger, which is why we developed EAET! One way to show the connection between emotions and MBS symptoms is to tell stories from your own life or your patient’s lives; and another way is to talk about the emotions and see if some symptoms begin to emerge, such as neck or stomach tension. I had a patient who refused to believe that her rocky relationship with her daughter was one of the causes of her pain. One day, in a therapy session, her therapist forced her to face this issue and her pain got very high. Finally, she knew.
The same process is useful for people who hang onto their diagnosis and a structural issue. You can use provocative testing and the FIT criteria to prove that it is MBS. And, you can investigate their symptoms over time by probing for times of pain getting better or worse and looking for evidence of pain that shifts, moves, turns on and off, is triggered by innocuous stimuli, etc. Usually it will become obvious.
Best, Howard