100 Perks of Having Cancer: Plus 100 Health Tips for Surviving It (62 page)

Perk #63

Cancer Forced Me

to Forgive

L
ong before my diagnosis, I read a book that changed my life:
You Can

Heal Your Life,
by Louise Hay. She believes that all dis-ease/disease in the

body has an underlying emotional cause. In the case of cancer, the under-

lying cause is holding on to resentment, which eats away at the spirit as

cancer eats away at the body. In order to free oneself of resentment, it is

first necessary to forgive.

I believe in a holistic view of healing. I have taken a firm hand to healing

my body, through my treatments, diet, exercise, and supplements. I realized,

however, that true healing would not happen unless I also addressed the

needs of mind and my spirit. I had some forgiving to do!

Every day for more than a month, I would visualize the people who have

hurt me, and I would say in my mind, “I forgive you and I wish you well.”

Sometimes a little voice in my head would jump in and say,
“I forgive you

and I wish you well—you bitch!”
But eventually I came to feel the truth of my

words, and I was truly able to forgive. It does not matter that these people

do not know that they are forgiven. Some of them may not even know that

they have hurt me. This exercise was not about freeing them, but about free-

ing myself, since the only person I was hurting by holding on to resentment

was me. Once I was able to release that energy, I opened a space in my spirit

for true healing.

Although I was diligent in practicing this exercise, I still had a nagging

feeling that I was forgetting to forgive someone.
Hmm
. . . my exes? Check.

Friends? Check. Family members? Check. Coworkers? Check.

Then, one day, while waiting for a radiation treatment, I was mentally

practicing my daily affirmation:
“I love and approve of myself just as I am,”

when that little voice in my head spoke up once again.

It said,
“How can you possibly approve of yourself just as you are? You are far

from perfect. You are bossy, stubborn, and prone to anxiety.”

I 257 J

258

100 Perks of Having Cancer

I then realized that the person I was forgetting to forgive was myself. I

had never really forgiven myself for a failed marriage, and I harbored guilt

for having hurt other people. I was also having trouble forgiving myself for

Ben’s autism. Deep inside I blamed myself for not creating him “perfect.”

So I was then forced to forgive the one person most in need of my forgive-

ness: me. Now when I say my affirmation, “I love and approve of myself

just as I am,” I really mean it, warts and all.

Repeat after me:

I love and approve of myself just as I am.

HEALTH TIP #63

I’ll Take My Forgiveness in Pill Form, Please

I
couldn’t help wondering how I, a forty-one-year-old, exercising, optimal

weighing, nonsmoking, low-fat eating, nonalcohol drinking, no family

history, health-conscious woman could get stage-3 breast cancer. This same

statement can be made for anyone with any illness. Why did I develop this

disease, when the person next to me didn’t?

I was aware of the mind-body relationship and the use of relaxation

techniques to help with general health even before I was diagnosed. How-

ever, it wasn’t until recently that I realized the vast amounts of clinical evi-

dence that exists to support this idea.

Dr. Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born medical doctor who resides in Canada,

has written many books on the subject of linking mental stress to physical

illness and addiction. His book,
When the Body Says No—Understanding the

Stress-Disease Connection,
explains in detail how thoughts directly influence

the nervous system, the immune system, and hormones. Just like the heart

is a part of the circulatory system, your thoughts and feelings are part of the

psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology system, or PNI system for short. “Mental

stress is a major contributing factor to physical illness that we must under-

stand in the prevention and treatment of disease,” he wrote.

Perk #63: Cancer Forced Me to Forgive

259

In the chapter entitled “Stress, Hormones, Repression, and Cancer,” Dr.

Maté points out the fact that if smoking caused lung cancer, then everyone

who smokes would have lung cancer. But there are factors that come into

play that allow the cancer cells, when exposed to cigarettes, to grow in

some, and die in others. He states that your thoughts, feelings, and percep-

tions are a very real part of all the other systems responsible for keeping

us illness-free. In explaining how all the systems of the body are linked and

all “talk to” each other, he writes, “The PNI system is like a giant switch-

board, always alight with coordinated messages coming in from all direc-

tions and going out to all directions at the same time. It follows, too, that

whatever short-term or chronic stimulus acts on any one part of the PNI

system, it has the potential to affect the other parts as well” (pages 88–89).

“In numerous studies of cancer,” he goes on to say, “the most consistently

identified risk factor is the inability to express emotion, particularly the

feeling associated with anger. . . . The person who does not feel or express

‘negative’ emotion will be isolated even if surrounded by friends because

his real self is not seen. The sense of hopelessness follows . . . and hope-

lessness leads to helplessness, since nothing one can do is perceived as

making any difference” (page 99).

Of course it’s not as simple as “thinking” yourself well, and I do believe

that environmental factors, diet, and lifestyle play a role in cancer diagnoses,

too. However, there seems to be a missing piece to the puzzle to explain

the rampant rise of this disease in younger and younger people, and this

could provide that piece.

Women with families, in general (I am speaking generally here, with

assumed exceptions), are the “pleasers” and caregivers in their family’s lives.

They make sure the ship is on course and everyone has their life jackets.

They are responsible for seeing that everyone has what they need to be

happy, often neglecting their own needs and expression of emotion in the

process. In today’s society, the stress of a working mom is multiplied tenfold

with demands from two different directions, which leaves her very little

downtime and, as a result, very little self-expression.

Women are often peacemakers, skilled at avoiding conflict and trying

to make amends, sometimes for things she is not even guilty of. Today’s

“modern women” are taught by society to “hold things in” and keep things

260

100 Perks of Having Cancer

together without expressing too much emotion lest they be labeled “hys-

terical” (a term derived from the Latin word for “woman”).

This repression wreaks havoc on the immune system!

Could this be one of the reasons why the incidence of breast cancer in

this country has increased dramatically from 1 in 20 in the 1960s to 1 in

less than 8 recently? It certainly seems possible. Some of the documented

studies indicating this are as follows:

●
Extreme suppression of anger was the most commonly identified char-

acteristic of 160 breast cancer patients who were given a detailed psycho-

logical interview and self-administered questionnaire. Repressing anger

magnified exposure to physiological stress, thereby increasing the risk of

cancer. —
Journal of Psychosomatic Research

●
“(Holding a grudge over time) creates a state of chronic anxiety, and

chronic anxiety has a predictable impact on a wide range of bodily func-

tions, including the reproductive system, the digestive system, and the

immune system,” says Dr. Michael Barry, PhD, Cancer Treatment Centers

of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “For example, stress hormones,

including cortisol and adrenalin, have been shown to reduce the produc-

tion of natural killer cells—the “foot soldiers” in the fight against cancer.”

(
The Forgiveness Project
by Dr. Michael Barry)

●
“When you hold onto the bitterness for years, it stops you from living

your life fully. As it turns out, it wears out your immune system and hurts

your heart.” —Stanford University Center for Research in Disease Preven-

tion. (They even host workshops on forgiveness!)

●
“I have collected 57 extremely well documented so-called cancer miracles.

At a certain particular moment in time they decided that the anger and

the depression were probably not the best way to go, since they had such

little time left. And so they went from that to being loving, caring, no

longer angry, no longer depressed, and able to talk to the people they

loved. These 57 people had the same pattern. They gave up, totally, their

anger, and they gave up, totally, their depression, by specifically a decision

to do so. And at that point the tumors started to shrink.” —Dr. Bernie

Siegel, Clinical Professor of Surgery, Yale Medical School

Perk #63: Cancer Forced Me to Forgive

261

●
A study was done looking at 5-year survival and relapse incidences of

women with breast cancer. It was found that those women who scored

high in the “helplessness/hopelessness” category had increased incidence

of relapse and death. —
The Lancet,
1999

●
A 2012 study at the University of Miami’s Center for Psycho-Oncology

Research has shown that a stress management program tailored to women

with breast cancer can alter tumor-promoting processes at the molecular

level. “The results suggest that the stress management intervention miti-

gates the influence of the stress of cancer treatment and promotes recovery

over the first year.” —
Journal of Psychological Biology

There are hundreds of other examples of this kind of mind-body con-

nection. So why doesn’t the Western medical world recognize this and help

patients to understand their role in prevention and cure? My feeling is,

because there isn’t a pill for it. There’s no “forgiveness” pill. There is no

“anger release” pill. There is no “empowerment” pill. It

cannot be bought or sold. It has to be lived, learned, and

Examine your life and try

practiced and is something we “Westerners” aren’t

to identify anger as well

exposed to. I want to be very clear on this: Finding

as helpless and hopeless

repressed anger or uncovering unresolved issues does not

feelings, and then try to

mean
you
were to blame for getting cancer. But uncover-

chip away at them with

ing these feelings and dealing with them can influence

professional help, stress-

your current state of mind and, in turn, can improve your

reducing techniques,

current health.

or lifestyle changes.

For more information on the mind-body connec-

tion, check these out:

When The Body Says No—Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection
by

Gabor Maté, MD, and
Miss Diagnosed: Unraveling Chronic Stress
by Erin Bell.

For an extraordinary story of forgiveness and healing, read
Left to Tell
by

Immaculee Ilibagiza.