When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (36 page)

As an artist and avid reader, Iris is highly intellectual. About ten years ago, at the age of forty-two, she was diagnosed with SLE (lupus). Iris grew up in Europe, immigrating with her family to the United States in her early twenties. Her father was tyrannical and unpredictable, and her mother, she reports, “did not exist separately from my father.”

“I’ve thought about this theory of the body saying no when your mind can’t,” Iris says. “I’ve heard it before, and I have agreed with the principle before. I just don’t like thinking of it in terms of me.”

“Why not?” I ask her.

“It means you aren’t strong enough … you’re not capable of doing whatever it was to be strong enough.” These words brought to mind an ovarian cancer patient who disliked my theory because, she said, it made her look like a “wimp.”

“What if one truly isn’t ‘strong enough’?” I say. “If I tried to lift a ten-thousand-pound weight and somebody said, ‘You’re not strong enough for that,’ I’d agree.”

“Under those circumstances, I’d say, ‘What are you, an idiot?’”

“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.

Iris quickly conceded that when her friends call her with their problems, she does not judge them or accuse them of being weak. They are comfortable relying on her and see her as empathic and supportive. It was clear that her double standard—higher expectations of herself than of others—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.

Shizuko is forty-nine, the mother of two grown children. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at twenty-one, shortly after arriving in Canada as a foreign student. Her birth mother died when she was four, after which her father married her aunt, her mother’s sister. “My stepmother liked business more than she liked children,” she says. Her father indulged all her material needs and desires but he was most often away from home.

Shizuko divorced her emotionally distant husband five years ago. “My marriage was terrible. When I was living with my husband, I was tired all the time, raising the kids. [Fatigue is a common symptom in the rheumatic diseases.] Before 3:00 p.m. I would lie on the couch, and my husband always complained, ‘You did nothing, nothing.’ He said I was using him to be a free meal ticket.”

“Did you ever feel angry?”

“Yes, I was angry at him all the time.”

“Did you express the anger?”

“No … The way my stepmother raised me, I think I am not supposed to be angry.”

Alan, with cancer of the esophagus, has been unhappy in his marriage. The reader may recall his perception that his wife was unable to be “romantic, intimate and all the things that I need.”

“How would you express your dissatisfaction? Do you ever get angry about it? Do you ever
feel
angry about it?”

“It’s hard to relate because now I get angry all the time. We talk about it a lot more now.”

“What happened to the anger before you were diagnosed with cancer?”

“I don’t know. I see what you’re getting at, and it’s probably true.”

“Where did you learn to repress anger?”

“That’s a good one—I don’t think I’ve analyzed this quite enough. I think it comes from a desire to be liked. If you’re angry, people don’t like you.”

Leslie, a fifty-five-year-old social worker, also attributes his illness—in his case, ulcerative colitis—to the stresses of a relationship. “It began during my first marriage. There was a lot of stress, and that’s when it was the worst. It hasn’t been bad in a long time. Now I sometimes have some bleeding, but it is very limited.

“My relationship with my first wife was always up and down. I think she didn’t want to be involved. It was never a partnership. I had to think for her. It got real crazy making, because I would have to think about what we could do together. She would never tell me what she wanted to do. I would have to come up with a movie that I thought we both would like, one we both could go, and be happy with.”

“Didn’t it upset you to play that role?”

“For sure.”

“What did you do with that anger?”

“Swallowed it—no question. I couldn’t fight because then she would say, ‘ You see, this is a bad marriage.’ Conflict with her was considered an indicator that the relationship was bad.

“I had to be very, very careful. When I started going out with Eva, who is now my wife, and we would have a fight, I would start smiling. I told her I was enjoying that we could actually fight and be different, and she was not going to go away. I definitely had fears of people leaving, of abandonment.”

It took Leslie several months after the initial onset of his symptoms to seek medical help. “I wasn’t ready to accept my vulnerability in having problems. It had a lot to do with my perfectionism, wanting to be perfectly all right, to have nothing wrong with me.”

When Leslie was nine years old, his father died suddenly of a heart attack, and two years later he witnessed the sudden death of his brother from a brain aneurysm. “After that, I had an obsessive ritual every night, a routine to make sure people would not die. ‘Don’t die, don’t die … ’ It was my way of controlling people not dying in my life.

“One day, I was talking with my psychiatrist. I said, ‘I gave up that ritual and I don’t know where it went.’ It was like an ‘aha’ experience—all of a sudden it came to me: ‘I know where it went. I became a social worker, and now I’m trying to save the world!’

“It caused me a lot of stress when I was trying to save the world and wasn’t succeeding. I was on stress leave two or three years ago. I finally recognized that I can’t save the world. I even have a mantra that the psychiatrist and I came up with: ‘I should be a guide, not a God.’ It works for me.”

“So you thought this entire unholy mess of a world out there was your fault?”

“At one point I believed that whether or not it was my fault, I was going to be the one to fix it.”

“How did that manifest itself in your work?”

“Well, if my parents, I mean clients, were not doing well, I felt I didn’t have enough knowledge. I needed to know more and have better skills. I needed to find the right solution, work harder, read more, go to workshops.”

One did not have to search far for the meaning of Leslie’s Freudian substitution of
parents
for
clients
. Not only did he become his mother’s chief companion and solace after the deaths of his father and older brother, but it also turns out that he had been in that role from birth.

“My mom did want me to be happy. She was always concerned that I should be happy. That was something that I was always trying to do. I tried to be happy in my childhood. I didn’t know what depression was; I didn’t even know what sad feelings were.

“My mom used say I was such a good-natured child, which my brother wasn’t. I was such a good-natured baby that she could wake me up in the middle of the night, play with me for a while and put me back, and I’d go back to sleep.”

“Why on earth would she do that?”

“I guess she was lonely or needing some attention.”

“So you had to work … from infancy.”

“My mom’s marriage with my father was terrible. They’d fight—it was bad before he died. It was my job to make her happy.”

Don, a fifty-five-year-old civil servant, had part of his colon removed for bowel cancer. Among his chronic stresses has been his compulsion to be hyperconscientious in his professional life. “Workload issues can make me angry,” he says. “I don’t know if
anger
is the right word, just
frustrated
. Not being able to handle just how much work I had on my desk at the time.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I tensed up and calmed down by going for a walk, then came back and plunged back into the work and got it done.”

“What about going to whoever is assigning the work and pointing out that it is too much for any one person to handle?”

“Never done that. I can handle anything, that’s why. My determination was to be the one in the branch who handled the most files, in the best way.”

“Why?”

“For a couple of reasons. One, competitive instincts. Two, I’m getting paid well, therefore I should do the best job. The approach I always took
was, you give me the work and I’ll do it. If you give me more work, I’ll do more, and if you give me less work, I’ll do less work.”

“And when they cut back on staff and fewer people have to do the same amount of work?”

“I’d do more. In fact, what I’d often do is go to other people who were complaining about their workload and take work from them. There would always be a level of guilt that I could have done a better job on this or that file. There was always a little more I could do.

“I prided myself in presenting this image that I could do more than anyone else, in less time than anyone else.”

“Any connections in that to your childhood?”

“Part of that was my mother. If I brought home a report card with three A’s and three B’s, it would be, ‘Why not six A’s?’ Nothing I ever did was good enough. She always automatically assumed that I would become a professional of some sort. It was a big disappointment to my mother that I began my working life as a construction labourer.”

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 doesn’t want me to exist
[her italics].”

Joyce, the university professor with asthma, talked about her terrifying sense of emptiness when she was not busy doing something. I asked her what she meant by that.

“The emptiness is about this terror that if I don’t fulfill things, demands, I won’t really exist. As a child I was not part of the whole equation. All the tensions that were happening with my father and mother, and my father and brother, I was not part of. I was eight years younger, the daughter; I was the perfect little girl. All these things were going on. The feeling was that you don’t exist unless you do something in the world.”

Angela was diagnosed two years ago with cancer of the uterus, at age forty-five. Prior to that, she had struggled with alcoholism, anorexia-bulimia, depression, and fibromyalgia. At one point she underwent intestinal bypass surgery for weight loss. She lost 150 pounds within a year but soon gained it back, since neither her stress levels nor her eating habits had changed. I interviewed Angela at Hope House, a counselling and support centre in Vancouver for people with malignancy and other types of chronic disease.

“I feel like the cancer was a gift to me, because it got me out of Revenue Canada. I was an auditor for the past twelve years and I hated the job. Ever since childhood I’ve been unable not to take it personally when there is confrontation and conflict. People get upset when they are audited, and they project all their hate of government and taxes onto you. And I took it on.”

“Why did it take cancer to get you out of a job that you hated and was bad for you?”

“I was depressed most of the time, and I felt like I had no choice. I’ve been working since I was seventeen. I knew that in other types of jobs, it would not be accepted to be sick so much. I was sick a lot. In the government, you’re like a cog in the wheel. There are a hundred other people who do the same kind of thing that you do, so that if your work doesn’t get done, they can shunt it off on someone else. That’s the reason that I stayed there, out of fear.”

“How did the cancer get you out of there?”

“After the cancer diagnosis, I began coming to Hope House and talking with the counsellors here. I was encouraged to take a look at my
feelings and my life. I found out I’ve been trying to fit into something that I’m not really truly meant to be in.”

“Did they tell you the title of my book?”

“Well, my body said no. I had major bleeding actually for two years, and they kept testing. They did two biopsies—on the second one they found cancer cells.

“When the doctor said the word
cancer
to me, my intuition, in a split millisecond, said Revenue Canada. It was pretty obvious to me. I’ve been having that message for the past twelve years, and I’ve been ignoring it.”

“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.