When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress Read Online Free

slightest physical discomfort in front of my mother.
    I had not thought about the
When the Body Says No
project in those terms. This was to be an intellectual quest, to explore an interesting theory that would help explain human health and illness. It was a path others had trod before me, but there was always more to be discovered. The counsellor’s challenge made me confront the issue of emotional repression in my own life. My hidden limp, I realized, was only one small example.
    Thus, in writing this book, I describe not only what I have learned from others or from professional journals but also what I have observed in myself. The dynamics of repression operate in all of us. We are all self-deniers and self-betrayers to one extent or another, most often in ways we are no more aware of than I was conscious of while “deciding” to disguise my limp. When it comes to health or illness, it is only a matterof degree and, too, a matter of the presence or absence of other factors—such as heredity or environmental hazards, for example—that also predispose to disease. So in demonstrating that repression is a major cause of stress and a significant contributor to illness, I do not point fingers at others for “making themselves sick.” My purpose in this book is to promote learning and healing, not to add to the quotient of blame and shame, both of which already exist in overabundance in our culture. Perhaps I am overly sensitized to the issue of blame, but then most people are. Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.
    Despite the best efforts of many physicians, Mary died in Vancouver Hospital eight years after her diagnosis, succumbing to the complications of scleroderma. To the end she retained her gentle smile, though her heart was weak and her breathing laboured. Every once in a while she would ask me to schedule long private visits, even in hospital during her final days. She just wanted to chat, about matters serious or trivial. “You are the only one who ever listened to me,” she once said.
    I have wondered at times how Mary’s life might have turned out if someone had been there to hear, see and understand her when she was a small child—abused, frightened, feeling responsible for her little sisters. Perhaps had someone been there consistently and dependably, she could have learned to value herself, to express her feelings, to assert her anger when people invaded her boundaries physically or emotionally. Had that been her fate, would she still be alive?

 2
The Little Girl Too Good to Be True
      I T WOULD BE AN UNDERSTATEMENT to say that the spring and summer of 1996 was a stressful time in Natalie’s life. In March her sixteen-year-old son was discharged from a six-month stay at a drug rehabilitation facility. He had used drugs and alcohol for the previous two years and was repeatedly expelled from school. “We were lucky we got him into the residential treatment program,” says the fifty-three-year-old former nurse. “He had only been home a short while when first my husband was diagnosed, and then me.” In July her husband, Bill, underwent surgery for a malignant bowel tumour. After the operation they were told the cancer had spread to his liver.
    Natalie had suffered fatigue, dizziness and ringing in her ears from time to time, but her symptoms were of short duration and resolved without treatment. In the year before her diagnosis she had felt more tired than usual. A bout of vertigo in June led to a CT scan, with negative results. Two months later an MRI of Natalie’s brain showed the characteristic abnormalities associated with multiple sclerosis: focal areas of inflammation where myelin, the fatty tissue lining nerve cells, was damaged and scarred.
    Multiple sclerosis (from the Greek, “to harden”) is the most common of the so-called demyelinating diseases