When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

by Gabor Maté

Many of us live, if not alone, then in emotionally inadequate relationships that do not recognize or honour our deepest needs. Isolation and stress affect many who may believe their lives are quite satisfactory. How may stress be transmuted into illness?

Repression—dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm—disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.

In important areas of their lives, almost none of my patients with serious disease had ever learned to say no.

It is a sensitive matter to raise the possibility that the way people have been conditioned to live their lives may contribute to their illness.

links are harder to prove when it comes to emotions and the emergence of multiple sclerosis or cancer of the breast or

Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people’s lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary.

stress can be produced under deep anaesthesia in patients who are unconscious,

Cortisol also has powerful bone-thinning actions. Depressed people secrete high levels of cortisol, which is why stressed and depressed postmenopausal women are more likely to develop osteoporosis and hip fractures.

Oops best not get stressed or depressed !!

The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.

the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries;

a five-year study of more than two hundred women with breast cancer that aimed to determine whether a recurrence of cancer can be triggered by severe life events, such as divorce or the death of someone close.

The risk of lung cancer, Kissen found, was five times higher in men who lacked the ability to express emotion effectively.

Women who have been sexually abused, for example, are prone to constipation when the muscles in their pelvic floor are chronically tight, incapable of relaxing with defecation.

Characteristic of many persons with rheumatoid diseases is a stoicism carried to an extreme degree, a deeply ingrained reticence about seeking help. People