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My other purpose was to hold up a mirror to our stress-driven society so that we may recognize how, in myriad unconscious ways, we help generate the illnesses that plague us.
Her security lay in considering other people’s feelings, never her own.
Mary described herself as being incapable of saying no, compulsively taking responsibility for the needs of others. Her major concern continued to be her husband and her nearly adult children, even as her illness became more grave. Was the scleroderma her body’s way of finally rejecting this all-encompassing dutifulness?
Perhaps her body was doing what her mind could not: throwing off the relentless expectation that had been first imposed on the child and now was self-imposed in the adult—placing others above herself.
“Most people do not fully realize to what extent the spirit of scientific research and the lessons learned from it depend upon the personal viewpoints of the discoverers,”
In important areas of their lives, almost none of my patients with serious disease had ever learned to say no.
the underlying emotional repression was an ever-present factor.
While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting.
There is no true responsibility without awareness.
The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things.
No great powers of imagination are required to understand that in her state of mind, and under the inhuman stresses she was facing daily, my mother was rarely up to the tender smiles and undivided attention a developing infant requires to imprint a sense of security and unconditional love in his mind.
learned early that I had to work for attention, to burden my mother as little as possible and that my anxiety and pain were best suppressed.
In healthy mother-infant interactions, the mother is able to nourish without the infant’s having in any way to work for what he receives.
My mother was unable to provide that unconditional nourishing for me—and since she was neither saintly nor perfect, quite likely she would not have completely succeeded in doing so...
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What began as the automatic defensive coping of the infant soon hardened into a fixed personality pattern that, fifty-one years later, still caused me to hide even my slightest physical discomfort in front of my mother.
My purpose in this book is to promote learning and healing, not to add to the quotient of blame and shame, both of which already exist in overabundance in our culture. Perhaps I am overly sensitized to the issue of blame, but then most people
If the site of damage is somewhere in the spinal cord, the symptoms will be numbness, pain or other unpleasant sensations in the limbs or trunk. There may also be involuntary tightening of the muscles or weakness.
the gradual realization of the inability to cope with a difficult situation … provoking feelings of inadequacy
This reference to disease as punishment raises a key issue, since people with chronic illness are frequently accused, or may accuse themselves, of somehow deserving their misfortune.
It is to discuss a possible consequence—not as punishment but as physiological reality.
He ignores the abundant medical literature linking autoimmune processes themselves to stress and personality, a vital link to be explored more fully in later chapters.
To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided.
Selye’s analogies illustrate an important point: excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fulfill them.
The lining of the esophagus is not designed to withstand the corrosive bath of hydrochloric acid secreted in the stomach. A muscular valve between the two organs and complex neurological mechanisms ensure that food can move downward from throat to stomach without permitting acid to flow back upward. Chronic reflux can damage the surface of the lower esophagus, predisposing it to malignant change.
The experience of stress has three components. The first is the event, physical or emotional, that the organism interprets as threatening.
This is the stress stimulus, also called the stressor. The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain. The final constituent is the stress response, which consists of the various physiological and behavioural adjustments made as a reaction to a perceived threat.
We see immediately that the definition of a stressor depends on the processing system t...
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Equally important is the personality and current psychological state of the individual on whom the stressor is acting.
“that for man the most important stressors are emotional.”7
For some people, it is disease that finally shatters the illusion of control.
To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them.
The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive.
What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system.
The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awa...
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Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health.
The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.
Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations.
Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness.
Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions.
“emotional competence will be compromised.…The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.”
The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses.
Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness—for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom.
“involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.”
What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and
Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.
Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal.
We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.
She simply had no vocabulary to express her feelings directly: any question related to emotion would be answered by thoughts, delivered in a hyperarticulate but confused fashion. She seemed to perceive the world through abstract ideas instead of felt experience. “All of the emotions seemed completely frozen,” confirms Neufeld.
Studies in psychology—an art trying desperately to dress itself up as a pure science—often find only what the particular researchers have the eyes to see.
Emotional repression—in most cases expressed as niceness—can also be found on exploring the lives of famous persons with ALS, from the physicist Stephen Hawking, the baseball great Gehrig, to Morrie Schwartz, the professor whose television appearances on Ted Koppel’s show made him a much-admired figure in the last months of his life and whose story and wisdom form the subject of the best-seller Tuesdays with Morrie. In
