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

for not supporting him. I knew within forty-eight hours of being diagnosed with MS that Bill would not be there for me.”
    Returning from his golfing vacation, Bill experienced some months of physical vigour. He engaged in a relationship with another woman, a friend of the family. “I thought, Look what I’ve done for you,” says Natalie. “I’ve jeopardized my own health. I was there for you all summer. You were at death’s door, and I sat for seventy-two hours in that hospital waiting to see if you were going to die or recover. I looked after you when you came home, and this is how I get paid back. I get kicked in the teeth.”
    The idea that psychological stress increases the risk for multiple sclerosis is not new. The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot was first to give a full clinical description of multiple sclerosis. Patients, hereported in a lecture in 1868, connect “long continued grief or vexation” with the onset of symptoms. Five years later a British physician described a case also associated with stress: “Aetiologically it is important to mention another statement the poor creature made when giving a more confidential account to the nurse—that the cause of her disease was having caught her husband in bed with another woman.” 2
    For this book I interviewed nine people with MS, eight of them women. (About 60 per cent of those affected are women.) The emotional patterns illustrated in Natalie’s story are evident in each person, if not always as dramatically.
    The evidence gathered from my interviews is consistent with the published research. “Many students of this disease have voiced the clinical impression that emotional stress may be somehow implicated in the genesis of MS,” a research article noted in 1970. 3 Excessive emotional involvement with a parent, a lack of psychological independence, an overwhelming need for love and affection, and the inability to feel or express anger have long been identified by medical observers as possible factors in the natural development of the disease. A study in 1958 found that in nearly 90 per cent of cases, “before the onset of symptoms … patients experienced traumatic life events that had threatened their ‘security system.’” 4
    A study done in 1969 looked at the role of psychological processes in thirty-two patients from Israel and the United States. Eighty-five per cent of these MS patients experienced the emergence of symptoms that were subsequently diagnosed as multiple sclerosis in the wake of recent highly stressful events. The nature of the stressor varied considerably, from the death or illness of loved ones to a sudden threat of loss of livelihood or perhaps to a family event that caused permanent change in a person’s life and demanded a flexibility or adaptation beyond his ability to manage. Protracted marital conflict was one such source of stress, increased responsibility at work another. “The common characteristic …” write the authors of the study, “is the gradual realization of the inability to cope with a difficult situation … provoking feelings of inadequacy or failure.” 5 These stresses held across different cultures.
    Another study compared MS patients with a group of healthy “controls.” Severely threatening events were ten times more common, and marital conflict five times more frequent, in the MS group. 6
    Of the eight women with multiple sclerosis I spoke with, only one was still in her first long-term relationship; the others had separated or divorced. Four of the women had been abused physically or psychologically by their partners sometime before the onset of illness. In the remaining cases their partners had been emotionally distant and unavailable.
    Lois, a journalist, was twenty-four when she was diagnosed with MS in 1974. A brief episode of double vision was followed some months later by pins-and-needles sensations in her legs. She had lived the previous two years in a small Native settlement in