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Another way of saying it: chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.
Whichever the case, we could rightly call this a toxic culture—unsuitable for the creatures it is meant to support.
“Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed,”
“the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about.”
If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances,
Healing is not guaranteed, but it is available.
preventing me from inhabiting the present moment, is one of the imprints of trauma,
how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.
the memory of one particular event comes to taint, and dominate, all other experiences, spoiling an appreciation of the present moment.”[2] Levine calls this “the tyranny of the past.”
Responsibility can and must be taken.
“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”
When a wound doesn’t mend on its own, one of two things will happen: it can either remain raw or, more commonly, be replaced by a thick layer of scar tissue. As an open sore, it is an ongoing source of pain and a place where we can be hurt over and over again by even the slightest stimulus. It compels us to be ever vigilant—always
Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be.
capital-T trauma occurs when things happen to vulnerable people that should not have happened,
by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.
They both represent a fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world.
It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—“You
We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others.
This suppression would seem to be akin to the freeze response that creatures often display when fight and flight are both impossible.
that its not affecting me, that was its effect.
I allow myself to feel them until they pass; in effect, I choose vulnerability over victimhood.
response flexibility: the ability to choose how we address life’s inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges.
This man’s impulse to protect his mother was not a defense against anything I had said or implied but against his own unacknowledged anger. Stored away in deep-freeze and finding no healthy outlet, the emotion had turned against him in the form of self-hatred.
Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.
Some people encase themselves in an armored coat of grandiosity and denial of any shortcomings so as not to feel that enervating shame.
the world we believe in becomes the world we live in.
Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building.
One may also come to dismiss painful realities by habitually lying to oneself and others.
The act of blaming herself, its gravitational center planted permanently in the past, would only divert her from showing up for her loved one in the here and now.
If we treat trauma as an external event, something that happens to or around us, then it becomes a piece of history we can never dislodge. If, on the other hand, trauma is what took place inside us as a result of what happened, in the sense of wounding or disconnection, then healing and reconnection become tangible possibilities.
fashioning from it a rock-hard identity—whether the attitude is defiance, cynicism, or self-pity—is to miss both the point and the opportunity of healing,
Interpersonal biology also accounts for why loneliness can kill, especially in older people separated from pleasures, social connections, or support.
Experience, in other words, determines how our genetic potential expresses itself in the end.
“Genes do not change in such a short period of time,” Virginia Ladd, chief executive of the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, told Medical News Today in 2012. “The rapid increase in autoimmune diseases . . . clearly suggests that environmental factors are at play.”[6]
the relation between stress and the onset of their disease, and how great a role trauma, psychological and physical, plays in their disease.”
patients in turn lack the confidence to insist that their intuitions and insights about themselves contribute to the process, much less guide it.
a positive, can-do persona that not only kept her from experiencing her despair and impelled her to ignore her own needs, but also helped her achieve success beyond what she really believed was her due.
What we call the personality traits, in addition to reflecting genuine inborn temperaments and qualities, also express the ways that people, as children, had to accommodate their emotional environment.
rheumatoid arthritis–prone individuals of an array of self-abnegating traits: a “compulsive and self-sacrificing doing for others, suppression of anger, and excessive concern about social acceptability.”
the interflow of psychology and physiology in humans, and of the role of emotions in illness.
No person is their disease, and no one did it to themselves—not in any conscious, deliberate, or culpable sense.
We can take our rightful place as active participants in the process, rather than remain its victims, helpless but for our reliance on medical miracle workers.
Stress cannot “cause” cancer, for the simple reason that our bodies naturally harbor potentially malignant cells at all times.
He explored cancer as process: not a disease of individual cells gone rogue but a manifestation of an imbalanced environment,
blame is inappropriate, unmerited, and cruel;
disease is not to lay blame. It is to understand the bigger picture for the purposes of prevention and healing—and ultimately for the sake of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.
stress of self-suppression, may disturb our physiology,
the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed. It struck me that these patients had a higher likelihood of cancer and poorer prognoses.
repression disarms one’s ability to protect oneself from stress.
they had pushed their emotions below conscious awareness.
