When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (39 page)

“That’s right. I don’t remember huge blocks of my childhood.”

“Why would someone have to numb out? Why couldn’t you just go to somebody and talk about it? What about your mom?”

“Well, no, I couldn’t talk to my mother because I didn’t want her to know I was unhappy, for one thing. For another, she didn’t really exist as a separate entity apart from my father. She was a neutral person.

“A child has very little language. I was numb, but on the other hand I was quite happy in my numbness.”

“Oh?”

“I played with dolls … okay, never mind about that … I was going to say I
chewed
dolls!”

“What do you mean you chewed them?”

“They were made out of plastic, and I’d chew their fingers and toes!”

“You were mutilating them, in your suppressed rage. Consider this—when do we have to numb things out?”

“When you’re in pain …”

“Eventually when you numb it out enough, you can imagine that you’re happy. You are only happy because you numbed out a huge part of your reality. Which is to say that you’re not really living life to the fullest at all.”

“Agreed.”

____

Finally, I come back to Darlene, the insurance broker whose ovarian cancer was diagnosed inadvertently, during an infertility investigation. Nothing in her history could be described as even remotely painful. The only negative experience in her life, as she recounted it, has been her ovarian cancer and its unexpected recurrence despite diagnosis and treatment at a very early stage. The initial prognosis, she said, had been “celebratory,” the recurrence “devastating.”

“I’ve always wanted to be in control of my life, have always taken care of myself. I eat well, exercise, I’m in great shape. I’ve never had any bad habits.” The one risk factor she did have was infertility. Darlene describes her life in terms that, to my ears, sound too good to be true. In all her childhood she cannot recall one single unhappy incident, not one moment of fear, anger, anxiety or sorrow.

“I’m the oldest of three girls. The three of us are incredibly close, as are my mom and dad, who are still living and very healthy. On top of that, my husband’s family and I are very close. I have been blessed with family and have also been blessed with really good, deep friends—some that I’ve had since I was five years old. My friends and family have been a huge source of inspiration. I think I’ve been very lucky in that respect.”

Darlene’s cancerous right ovary was removed in 1991. She retained her left one, hoping to become pregnant in the future. She did successfully conceive a year later.

“We all talk about that five-year mark, and I made it through that. It was about five and a half years after my oophorectomy, and my son was four, when I had what I considered very innocuous symptoms: I was tired, I had lost a little bit of weight—but only five pounds, nothing major. I had a toddler, a career and a busy household. My lower back was sore, but again I thought I was struggling with a toddler, trying to get him in and out of snowsuits.

“When I was diagnosed again in 1996, and it had metastasized, we were obviously devastated—and the prognosis was very, very different, with spread to the other ovary, the uterus and spots in the lower abdomen.”

“I’m curious, given the past history of ovarian cancer, why these symptoms did not alarm you sooner. What might you have advised a friend with your history and your symptoms?”

“Oh, well. When it comes to my friends, if they have an ingrown toenail, I send them to a gynecologist.”

“This difference in how you treat yourself and how you treat others is one of the hints you’ve given me that not all in your life may have been as you picture it. Another is when you said, ‘I think I’ve been very lucky,’ in describing your relationships. The
I think
is a qualifier—to me it indicates uncertainty; it reflects an internal debate. Perhaps what you think is not what you feel; otherwise, you simply would have asserted that you feel fortunate.

“I also note that you smile when you talk about your pains and aches, as if you’re trying to soften the impact of your words. How and why might you have learned to do that? The reflex of smiling when people talk about physical pain, or about painful events or incidents or thoughts I see all the time. Yet when infants are born, they have no capacity to hide feelings whatsoever. If an infant is uncomfortable or unhappy, she’ll cry, show sadness, show anger. Anything that we do to hide pain or sadness is an acquired response. It may make sense to hide negative emotion in some circumstances, but so many of us do it all the time, and we do it automatically.

“Somehow people are trained—some more than others—into unknowingly taking care of other people’s emotional needs and minimizing their own. They hide their pain and sadness, even from themselves.”

Darlene listened thoughtfully. She neither agreed nor disagreed. “It’s an interesting perspective. We should definitely bring it up in my ovarian cancer support group. I don’t know how to respond to it right now, and I don’t believe you really need an immediate response. It is intuitive and very thought-provoking. I thank you for that.”

Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously. Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. 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.

“The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key.

It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease. For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support.

There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life.

As we have seen,
it is not others’ expectations and intentions but the perception we have of them that serves as the
stressor. Jean, with MS, was driven into a flare-up by worrying about her husband’s prostate cancer and assuming responsibility for his seeking the proper medical care. Ed resented Jean’s “controlling” him but was unable to communicate his feelings to her. Jean’s belief that she needed to be responsible for Ed—and Ed’s belief that she was out to control him—were perceptions based on relationship templates each constructed as young children.

“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness—the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of. A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many
people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony. “I can handle anything” was how Don, with bowel cancer, described his pre-illness stance. “I couldn’t try to help all the women with ovarian cancer,” Gilda Radner realized after her recurrence, “and I couldn’t read every letter I received because it was tearing me apart.”

If we learn to think negatively, we stop minimizing our emotions of loss. Many times in the interviews for this book people qualified their hurts and stresses by words and phrases such as “just a little bit” or “maybe” or “might have.” Recall Véronique, with multiple sclerosis, who dismissed the cumulative stresses of a breakup with an alcoholic boyfriend, financial destitution and other difficult life events as “not necessarily bad.”

Do I live my life according to my own deepest truths, or in order to fulfill someone else’s expectations? How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own and how much has been in service to a self-image I originally created in the belief it was necessary to please my parents? Magda, with severe abdominal pain, became a physician against her own inclinations—not because her mother and father overtly demanded or even requested it, but because she had made their beliefs into her own. And she did this long before she was old enough to decide what to do with her life. “Almost all my accomplishments were in one way or another connected not to
my
aspirations, but to the aspirations of my father,” wrote Dennis Kaye, dying of ALS.

“[I am] not half the woman my mother had been,” wrote former U.S. first lady Betty Ford. “My mother was a wonderful woman, strong and kind and principled, and never let me down. She was also a perfectionist, and tried to program her children for perfection.”
⁵
The strength to think negatively would have allowed Mrs. Ford to ask herself how kind it really is to try to “program” a child for perfection. Instead of fleeing from her self-judgments into alcoholism and a lifetime of stress that culminated in breast cancer, had she been armed with some negative thinking, Betty would have rejected the impossible standards of perfectionism. “I am not half the woman my mother had been,” she might have said with glee, “and I don’t even want to be a quarter of the woman she was. I just want to be myself.”

Laura, with ALS, felt guilty because she did not want bed-and-breakfast guests while her housekeeper was on vacation. She took on the task of hosting because her fear of guilt was greater than her fear of the stress of looking after guests while disabled.

“I try to help people all the time,” said Ed, with prostate cancer. And if not? “I feel bad about it. Guilty.” For many people,
guilt is a signal that they have chosen to do something for themselves
. I advise most people with serious medical conditions that there is probably something out of balance if they do
not
feel guilty. They are still putting their own needs, emotions, interests last. The power of negative thinking could permit people to
welcome
their guilt rather than shun it. “I feel guilty?” Ed could say. “Wonderful. Hallelujah! It means I must have done something right, acted on my own behalf for a change.”

“The biggest thing is the control factor,” Ed said about his wife Jean’s solicitous mothering of him. “I’m resentful.” And how does he deal with it? “I hide it. “The power of negative thinking could enable Ed to accept the guilt of asserting himself against his wife’s interference with his personal decisions, no matter how well meant. 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.

Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work. We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking—or, more deeply, positive
being
—empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth.

“Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.”
⁶

Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing. We look at them in our final chapter.

  B
OTH THE ONSET OF MALIGNANT MELANOMA
and the body’s ability to survive it involve the immune system. Despite the potentially fatal prognosis, there are many recorded cases of spontaneous remission in this disease—the cancer disappears without medical treatment. Although it accounts for only 1 per cent of all cancers, malignant melanoma provides for 11 per cent of spontaneous cancer remissions.
¹

The journal
Cancer
reported a case of spontaneous healing in a seventy-four-year-old man. His cancer was found in a suspicious-looking mole removed from his chest wall in 1965; he experienced a recurrence seven years later, also on his chest, in the form of numerous small moles. The new lesions resulted from local spread of his original melanoma. However, this time the patient refused all further treatment. Eight months later a follow-up visit showed that the small tumours that had seeded the area were flatter and lighter in colour. The patient permitted a small biopsy to be performed; there was pigmentation at the site but no cancer. The following year further clinical signs of healing were present.

The immunologic findings were illuminating. Three things happened: first, lymphocytes had attacked the tumour; then, larger cells called macrophages literally helped to eat up the melanoma; finally, there was an influx of antibodies that also participated in destroying the
malignancy. This man’s body had mobilized formidable immune resources to defeat the cancer.