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The more specialized doctors become, the more they know about a body part or organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides.
psychoneuroimmunology
but many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. 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.
the underlying emotional repression was an ever-present factor.
Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. 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
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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.
In people with a weak sense of self, there is often an unhealthy fusion with others.
“Extreme suppression of anger” was the most commonly identified characteristic of breast cancer patients in a 1974 British study.
The straightforward connection between childhood experience and adult stress has been missed by so many researchers over so many years that one almost begins to wonder if the oversight is deliberate. Adults with a history of troubled childhoods may not encounter more serious losses than others do, but their ability to cope will have been impaired by their upbringing. Stress does not occur in a vacuum. The same external event will have greatly varied physiological impact, depending on who is experiencing it. The death of a family member will be processed in a markedly different way by someone
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becoming a “doormat”—resulted from childhood conditioning. The emotional repression, the harsh self-judgment and the perfectionism Betty Ford acquired as a child, through no fault of her own, are more than a “good recipe for alcoholism.” They are also a “good recipe” for cancer of the breast.
Habitual repression of emotion leaves a person in a situation of chronic stress, and chronic stress creates an unnatural biochemical milieu in the body.
In June 1999 the U.S. Postal Service planned to issue a stamp urging “annual checkups and tests” for cancer of the prostate. the New England Journal of Medicine warned against such foolishness, pointing out that the message was “inconsistent with current scientific evidence and thinking within the medical community.”17 Second, we would not subject tens of thousands of men to invasive and potentially harmful surgery and other equally unproven interventions without fully informing them of the uncertainty that shrouds the treatment of prostate cancer.
“Whatever I do now, it is definitely not to please anyone else,” he says. “What is going to make me happy? Is this what I want to do? I’ve tried it the other way in the past, and it didn’t work out for me.”
Cancer patients, to a statistically significant degree, were more likely to demonstrate the following traits: “the elements of denial and repression of anger and of other negative emotions . . . the external appearance of a ‘nice’ or ‘good’ person, a suppression of reactions which may offend others, and the avoidance of conflict. . . . The risk of colorectal cancer with respect to this model was independent of the previously found risk factors of diet, beer intake, and family history.”5 Self-reported childhood or adult unhappiness was also more common
Crohn’s disease,
the emotions can be too overwhelming to be experienced consciously—but they are physiologically all the more active. Once
fear of one’s own angry impulses, denial of hostility and strong feelings of inadequacy.
When our psychological capacity to distinguish the self from non-self is disabled, the impairment is bound to extend to our physiology as well. Repressed anger will lead to disordered immunity. The inability to process and express feelings effectively, and the tendency to serve the needs of others before even considering one’s own, are common patterns in people who develop chronic illness. These coping styles represent a blurring of boundaries, a confusion of self and non-self on the psychological level. The same confusion will follow on the level of cells, tissues and body organs. The immune
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Children and infant animals have virtually no capacity for biological self-regulation; their internal biological states—heart rates, hormone levels, nervous system activity—depend completely on their relationships with caregiving grown-ups. Emotions such as love, fear or anger serve the needs of protecting the self while maintaining essential relationships with parents and other caregivers. Psychological stress is whatever threatens the young creature’s perception of a safe relationship with the adults, because any disruption in the relationship will cause turbulence in the internal milieu.
Under such circumstances, having to justify her existence became second nature to Rachel—it is nobody’s first nature. Her fundamental expectation is that she will be abandoned. “I believe if anybody got to know me, they would leave me for sure,” she says. She was astounded when over the last holiday season she received several invitations from people just to visit. That anyone would want her without expecting anything is well nigh impossible for her to fathom.
Yet instead of stating calmly that her decisions are her own to make, Rachel argued and pleaded for her mother’s understanding. The rancorous exchange induced a week of anorexia, her mode of self-directed rage.
in short, that one learns love not by instruction, but by being loved.”
Vital for the healthy development of the neurobiology of self-regulation in the child is a relationship with the parent in which the latter sees and understands the child’s feelings and can respond with attuned empathy to the child’s emotional cues. Emotions
For the satisfaction of attachment needs in human beings, more than physical proximity and touching is required. Equally essential is a nourishing emotional connection, in particular the quality of attunement. Attunement, a process in which the parent is “tuned in” to the child’s emotional needs, is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive but easily subverted when the parent is stressed or distracted emotionally, financially or for any other reason. Attunement may also be absent if the parent never received it in his or her childhood.
Where parenting fails to communicate unconditional acceptance to the child, it is because of the fact that the child receives the parent’s love not as the parent wishes but as it is refracted through the parent’s personality. If the parent is stressed, harbours unresolved anxiety or is agitated by unmet emotional needs, the child is likely to find herself in situations of proximate abandonment regardless of the parent’s intentions.
Lance Morrow, a journalist and writer, succinctly expressed the multigenerational nature of stress in his book Heart, a wrenching and beautiful account of his encounters with mortality, thrust upon him by near-fatal heart disease: “The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box (I suspect but do not know), you would find another box with some such black, secret energy—stories within stories, receding in time.”
He was highly critical of Caitlin, the elder of the two children. “It seemed to me that she felt that when her parents conceived her, it was a great inconvenience. That she had come too soon and they really didn’t want her.”
Such lies, however innocently intended, never protect a child from pain. There is something in us that knows when we are lied to, even if that awareness never reaches consciousness. Being lied to means being cut off from the other person. It engenders the anxiety of exclusion and of rejection. In Caitlin it could only have reinforced the perception of not being wanted that flowed from her father’s harshness and her mother’s emotional absence.
the human nervous system, operating under the influence of the brain’s emotional centres. The biology of belief inculcated in that processing apparatus early in life crucially influences our stress responses throughout our lives. Do we recognize stressors? Do we magnify or minimize potential threats to our well-being? Do we perceive ourselves as alone? As helpless? As never needing help? As never deserving help? As being loved? As having to work to deserve love? As hopelessly unlovable? These are unconscious beliefs, embedded at the cellular level. They “control” our behaviours no matter what
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“That’s the whole point. Sometimes the problem is not that we lack strength but that the demands we make on ourselves are impossible. So what’s wrong with not being strong enough?”
The core belief in having to be strong enough, characteristic of many people who develop chronic illness, is a defence. The child who perceives that her parents cannot support her emotionally had better develop an attitude of “I can handle everything myself.” Otherwise, she may feel rejected. One way not to feel rejected is never to ask for help, never to admit “weakness”—to believe that I am strong enough to withstand all my vicissitudes alone.
had nothing to do with strength. It had to do with a lack of power, as experienced by the child. A child can be stronger than he should have to be, because he doesn’t have power.
6. I’m not wanted—I’m not lovable Gilda Radner had a lifelong perception of not being wanted. An indication of the depth of Gilda’s psychic despair came in some notes her husband, Gene Wilder, found after her death. In one, titled “Right-Hand Questions—Left-Hand Answers,” the questions were written out in Gilda’s right hand, the answers with the left. The technique and the title are especially significant: it is the right side of our brain, the holistic and emotional side, that controls the left hand. One right-hand question asks: “Is cancer your mother inside you?” The left-hand answer: “She
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7. I don’t exist unless I do something. I must justify my existence
“That’s what I’m asking. Why did it take the cancer for you to do that?” “Because it was something real. I’ve got this whole thing in my head that mood disorders are not enough. Bulimia is not enough. Everybody looks at disorders of the mind as, well, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s a lot of judgment around.” “But there’s a brain in there; it’s a physical organ. Mood disorder is just as physiological as uterine cancer is.” “I agree with you. But that was my own judgment of it, because I believed what I had been conditioned to believe by my family and by society.
Most parents feel unconditional love for their children, and that is what they hope to get across to them. That is important to know, but it is not what matters. What matters are the child’s unconscious perceptions, based on his innermost interpretations of his interactions with the world. Those interpretations, embedded at the cellular level, constitute the biology of belief that governs so much of what we feel, what we do and how we react to events.
The potential for wholeness, for health, resides in all of us, as does the potential for illness and disharmony. Disease is disharmony. More accurately, it is an expression of an internal disharmony. If illness is seen as foreign and external, we may end up waging war against ourselves.
The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking. Too many times in the course of palliative care work I sat with dejected people who expressed their bewilderment at having developed cancer. “I have always been a positive thinker,” one man in his late forties told me. “I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking. “Tongue in cheek, of course,” I quickly add. “What I really believe in is the power of thinking.” As soon
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Yes!
In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden. Even more fundamentally, not posing those questions is itself a source of stress. First, “positive thinking” is based on an unconscious belief that we are not strong enough to handle reality. Allowing this
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Fuck, yes!
An oblique remark in her book that “kids often find it impossible to talk to their parents openly” is Pamela’s only reference to not having been heard as a child. There is no depiction of the frustration a child feels when the significant adults do not know how to listen. In general, she insists that she had no “personal demons to exorcise,” a remark exemplifying the denial of anxiety, anger and negative emotion that the studies on cancer patients have consistently reported.
Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health.
Do I live my life according to my own deepest truths, or in order to fulfill someone else’s expectations? How
A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide.
1. Acceptance
2. Awareness
3. Anger
“Anger is the energy Mother Nature gives us as little kids to stand forward on our own behalf and say I matter,” says the therapist Joann Peterson, who conducts workshops on Gabriola Island, in British Columbia. “The difference between the healthy energy of anger and the hurtful energy of emotional and physical violence is that anger respects boundaries. Standing forward on your own behalf does not invade anyone else’s boundaries.”
Mind and spirit can survive grievous physical injury, but time and again we see that the physical body begins to succumb when psychic integrity and freedom are jeopardized.
Assertion challenges the core belief that we must somehow justify our existence. It demands neither acting nor reacting. It is being, irrespective of action. Thus, assertion may be the very oppositive of action, not only in the narrow sense of refusing to do something we do not wish to do but letting go of the very need to act.
“My beloved is God, and that’s why I stay strong. I go to church, and I take Communion; I know that I am beloved of God. I serve at the altar. The first time I did it, I held the crucifix and two candles, and the priest said to me, ‘You are the altar.’ I’ve been saying that to myself, especially when I feel really awful: I’m the altar. And the priest said to me, ‘If you’re the altar of God there in the cathedral, you are the altar of God all the time. You are . . . beloved.’”
