When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (38 page)

The repeated finding that people with happier, less troubled thought patterns can suffer more illness seems to defy common sense. The general belief is that positive emotions must be conducive to good health. While it is true that genuine joy and satisfaction enhance physical well-being, “positive” states of mind generated to tune out psychic discomfort lower resistance to illness.

The brain governs and integrates the activities of all organs and systems of the body, simultaneously coordinating our interactions with the environment. This regulating function depends on the clear recognition of negative influences, danger signals and signs of internal distress. In children whose environment chronically conveys mixed messages, an impairment occurs in the developing apparatus of the brain. The brain’s capacity to evaluate the environment is diminished, including its ability to distinguish what is nourishing from what is toxic. People wounded in this way, as Michelle was during her childhood, are more likely to make decisions that lead to further stress. The more they tune out their anxiety via “positive thoughts,” denial or daydreaming, the longer that stress will act on them and the more damaging it will be. When one lacks the capacity to feel heat, the risk of being burned increases.

Inevitably, negative thinking of the honest sort will lead into areas of pain and conflict we have shunned. It cannot be otherwise. The overwhelming need of the child to avoid pain and conflict is responsible for the personality trait or coping style that later predisposes the adult to disease.

Natalie, with multiple sclerosis, put up with her alcoholic and emotionally abusive husband. She faithfully nursed him through his convalescence from two cancer operations and tolerated his petulant demands. He betrayed her, but even years after his death she cannot say no to other people’s expectations. “Five years down the road and I still have not learned that I have to pace myself. My body says no to me frequently and I just keep going. I just don’t learn.” Natalie’s explanation? “The nurse in me won’t allow me to stop.” That is the story she tells herself, as if there really existed a powerful “nurse” within her that controlled her behaviour. When Natalie does not say no, she is likely to find herself feeling stressed and suffer a flare-up of her MS. But to free herself from such stress she would have to accept the painful reality that
only her own choices, based on childhood perceptions, render her incapable of asserting her needs.

Many people are blocked from self-knowledge and personal growth by the myth they feel compelled to hold on to, of having had a “happy childhood.” A little negative thinking would empower them to see through the self-delusion that helps keep them stuck in self-harming behavioural patterns.

Jean, a thirty-five-year-old legal secretary, was diagnosed at age twenty-four with multiple sclerosis, having suffered weakness, dizziness, fatigue, bladder problems and, finally, a temporary loss of vision. She spent nearly a year in medical institutions, at an acute-care hospital and then at a rehabilitation facility. The few recurrences since then have been much milder.

Jean was married at nineteen. Her first husband was an older man, controlling and abusive. “Mostly emotional, verbal, but at the end physical. He hit me. That’s when I left. He used to tape my phone conversations with my friends. I was working two jobs—playing music at night, daycare during the days. I handed over my paycheque. I didn’t like working in his band. Too much travelling. I was lonely.

“I also had an eating disorder much of my life. When I went into hospital I weighted eighty-nine pounds, and I’m five foot six. I was anorexic. I left my husband one day and ended up in hospital the next.”

“Your putting up for five years with an abusive older man could not have been accidental. I believe it says a lot about your family of origin.”

“I could not disagree more. My family was the furthest thing from abusive you could possibly get. I have an incredibly supportive family. I have two brothers and a sister and parents who have been happily married for forty-five years. I was never treated with anything except care and love and tenderness.”

“I didn’t use the word
abusive
about your family. I said your story tells me a lot about your family of origin.”

“Oh! [long pause] I don’t know. What does it tell you?”

“Let me ask you first of all if you were ever sexually abused as a child.”

“No, or … there was an episode of inappropriate touching when I was about eleven or so, by a fellow who worked with my dad somehow. We had a camp-out with people. I told my parents.
I didn’t tell them at the time, I told them years later
.

“We were at a campfire, and I had shorts on. He was telling me what a pretty girl I was, and I was flattered. He was running his hand up the inside of my leg. I think the whole thing went on for about half an hour, but when he started touching me, that’s when I made excuses and left. And I knew that I was upset about it.

“It’s very cloudy to me. I was almost doubting myself. Even as I’m telling you, it seems like it was no big deal. But it stands out in my mind. I remember the feeling surrounding it, the dirty, bleh, horrible feeling surrounding it.”

“If you had an eleven-year-old daughter and something like this happened to her, what would you like her to do?”

“Wow. I wouldn’t like her to wait a couple of years until she said something, that’s for sure.”

“Why not?”

“Because I would want to be able to discuss it with her for starters, and help her to understand all the feelings she was feeling.”

“And if she didn’t tell you?”

“I would think that she was afraid to tell me. I don’t know what I would think….” Jean was holding back tears but wanted to continue with the interview.

“You recall your childhood as a happy one.”

“Absolutely.”

“Tell me about your anorexia.”

“I think I was about fifteen. It never was labelled
anorexia
until later, when it developed into bulimia. I threw out my lunches and I never wanted my breakfast. I was so skinny. My parents worried a lot.”

“Do you know what was in your mind?”

“Most of it was the insecurity around body image all teenage girls go through. I don’t remember thinking that I was heavy—I never was. I just thought that I’d be more popular if I was skinnier. My self-worth was based on whether or not people liked me. I wanted everybody to like me.”

“How it works, I believe, is that self-worth originates from how valued one feels by one’s parents.”

“I felt as though if I didn’t get straight A’s they wouldn’t love me. I have an older sister who at that time was putting my parents through hell, and she was getting all the attention. My sister also had a bleeding
disorder, so when we were younger a lot of the focus was on her. She was hospitalized, and they thought she had leukemia for the longest time.”

“So let me run this past you again. You were a kid who unless she got A’s felt unloved by her parents, who at age eleven was subjected to an inappropriate sexual advance. She felt sick about it but didn’t tell her parents. At age fifteen you became anorexic.
And you had an absolutely happy childhood. What’s wrong with this picture?”

Jean laughs. “Well, because when I look back on my teenage years, it wasn’t hell. It just wasn’t. The eating disorder was just starting to assert itself…”

“Do you notice you’re avoiding my question?”

“What’s wrong with that picture? That doesn’t sound like a happy childhood to me. But I don’t think about having an unhappy childhood.”

Jean’s exclusion of darker memories from recollections of childhood is typical. One study compared the perceptions of multiple sclerosis patients with those of non-MS controls. Subjects were asked to rate their home lives in childhood as unhappy, moderately happy or very happy.
⁴
Over eighty per cent in both groups said their home lives had been either moderately happy or very happy. It appears the vast majority in both groups, in roughly comparable proportions, remembered having grown up in the Land of Oz. But when people open up about their emotions and their lives, as Jean does here, such idealized images of childhood rarely remain intact.

“The anorexia was my way of not feeling my feelings. But as to why I dealt with it that way, I don’t know.”

“Perhaps you saw your parents as suffering with your sister, and you felt like protecting them. You took on the role of caregiver. You are likely still taking care of people, even when you aren’t aware of it … your parents, your siblings or your husband.”

“Or all of them. With my husband, if he is angry or upset, my first thought is, How do I fix it? And it’s not even about me. It’s automatic for me. Right now I’m working on curing his prostate cancer for him.
^*
Aren’t I clever?”

“You’re not going to do it. But you might work yourself into a flare-up.”

“I did last year, when he was first diagnosed. And again, I had a flare-up when my husband’s mother was ill and then died—I was so worried for him that I neglected looking after myself. I didn’t eat right and I didn’t rest enough. And I still do it with my parents. I shield them from all kinds of things that I fear would hurt them if they knew. I’ve never talked with them about the whole eating disorder. I don’t always tell them if I have a flare-up of MS; I play it down because they worry so much.”

Frequently an adult’s recollections of life in her family of origin fail to take into account the hidden price the child had to pay for the parents’ approval and acceptance. Pamela Wallin, the Canadian journalist diagnosed in 2001 with bowel cancer, provides a prime illustration of this in her memoir,
Since You Asked
. We see in her writing the split between the adult’s recollections and the child’s emotional reality. She cautions the reader early, “I’m warning you now. What follows may read like a travelogue for a town or a paid advertisement for the family, but as far as I am concerned, it’s the truth. I feel I had a close-to-perfect childhood.” It is impossible to reconcile that idealized view with some of the scenes Ms. Wallin (currently Canadian high commissioner in New York) candidly describes.

In one passage Pamela recalls being chronically intimidated by her older sister. Her suppressed rage over that reached such a boiling pitch that once she vindictively wounded her sister on the arm. “Bonnie still carries the scar on her arm from a wound I inflicted deliberately just a day before a big date on which she was to wear a new sleeveless dress. She had to borrow a shawl to hide the unsightly act of revenge.” To this day, Ms. Wallin writes, she blames Bonnie for instilling in her a fear of the dark. To get rid of Pamela when her boyfriend was visiting, Bonnie chased her younger sibling into the bedroom, turned off the light switch and slammed the door. “She knew full well I would be too scared of potential monsters under the bed to make my way across the room in the dark and turn the light back on, so it all but guaranteed I would stay shuddering out of her way for the remainder of the evening.” The story is told with a touch of joviality.

At work here is a kind of “false memory syndrome” in reverse: on the conscious level, people often remember only the happy parts of
childhood. Even if troubling incidents are recalled, the emotional aspects of those events are suppressed. Parental love is legitimately remembered, but the child’s feelings of not being understood or supported emotionally are not. In this case, absent is any recollection of how a child might feel who lacks the safety of confessing to her parents her terror and rage at repeatedly being imprisoned alone in a dark room. This lack of safety was confirmed by a more painful episode that occurred in Pamela’s adolescence, when she did seek her mother’s help and intervention regarding a troubling situation in the classroom. Pamela’s mother was a teacher in the school her daughters attended. “Only once did she chastise me. One of our grade-school teachers was fondling our budding breasts during class, and Mom was reluctant to believe my charges against one of her respected colleagues. She said, and I suppose it reflected the times, that I should explain to the other girls that we should sit in such a way as to make his unwanted groping impossible. We did and simply waited for year’s end so we would move on to the next grade and out of his reach…. But we all seemed to survive the experience without emotional scars.” The problem is in the “seem[ing] to survive.” Emotional scars are most often invisible. But scars of any type are less strong and less resilient than the tissue they replace: they remain potential sites of future pain and disruption, unless they are recognized and tended to.

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.

Tuning out—by, say, daydreaming—enables the child to endure experiences that otherwise may trigger reactions that would land him in trouble. This kind of dissociation is in play when a person retains conscious recall for events in the past but not for their traumatic emotional resonance. It explains many “happy childhoods,” such as Iris with SLE insists she had, despite her father’s tyranny and the emotional absence of her mother.

“My father had a very short leash on his temper, and when he got angry, you never knew what was going to happen. Dishes could fly, somebody might get kicked.”

“Did you get kicked?”

“Never. I was my father’s favourite.”

“How did you achieve that status?”

“I
disappeared
. I developed that ability early in life.”

“Do you remember feeling unhappy as a child?”

“Unhappy? No.”

“Could a child in those circumstances not feel sad or unhappy about things?”

“You get numb, usually.”

“So you don’t really know if you felt unhappy or sad because you would have numbed it out.”