The Myth of Normal – How Strong is Our Mind-Body Connection, Really?
The Myth of Normal – How Strong is Our Mind-Body Connection, Really?

The Myth of Normal – How Strong is Our Mind-Body Connection, Really?

The next chapter depicts the very jarring correlation between certain personality traits we see as “favourable”, and diseases.

Women with breast cancer are more likely to repress emotions, rationalize, demonstrate altruistic behaviour, avoid conflict and behold a super-autonomous self-sufficiency. Patients with ALS are often described by their doctors as “Usually Nice Persons”. A survey conducted in the 60s showed the correlation with patients with rheumatoid arthritis and the following traits: “a compulsive and self-sacrificing doing for others, suppression of anger, and excessive concern about social acceptability”.

How often do you hear someone getting diagnosed with a deadly disease or illness, and everyone saying how “kind” and “selfless” they are, and how they don’t deserve it?

What is happening, is that as a result of being “nice” and “agreeable”, the individual loses their connection to their true feelings and gut reactions when it’s truly needed, and the built up stress propagates throughout the body. Left undealt with, the stress becomes a chronic disease. However, not all stress is unhealthy.

Why Stress is Healthy

“Stress can show up in two forms: as an immediate reaction to a threat or as a prolonged state induced by external pressures or internal emotional factors. Acute stress is a necessary reaction that helps maintain our physical and mental integrity. Chronic stress, ongoing and unrelieved, undermines both. Acute stress is healthy and promotes setting interpersonal boundaries”.

Therefore, if you are experiencing something unfavourable, such as someone yelling at you, you have two options. You can put your foot down and maintain a boundary with what you accept into your life, with the acute stress being the neurological reaction your body has to the stress (raising your voice to say “stop”, or gathering the courage to walk away). However, if you remain in this stressful situation and do not change anything about it, because you want to be “liked” or “not cause a scene”, you will continue to feel the effects long after the yelling is done.

How Far Can Stress Really Go?

Chronic stress is not only experienced in an enclosed setting. We see the effects of chronic stress through poverty, racism, and urban blight, which directly influence our genetic and molecular functioning. Chief Executive of the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, Virginia Ladd, said “The rapid increase in autoimmune diseases…clearly suggests that environmental factors are at play”.

Is There a Cure?

As of right now, medical professionals use symptom suppression or surgical repair as the best remedy to autoimmune diseases. But the truth is, we are really far from truly understanding how to deal with them, because we are not looking in the right place. What Dr. Maté suggests, is we need to look directly at childhood, and everything that comes before.

Looking Back to the Start

Childhood maltreatment is a strong and preventable risk factor for inflammation in adulthood. Because children are so vulnerable and dependent, they are thus attuned to the emotional states of their caregivers. For example, the inflammation of the child’s lungs (asthma) is directly affected by the mother’s or father’s emotions. To go even further: two individuals, even identical twins, could be the same age, “yet one may be biologically older than the other, depending on how much stress, adversity, or trauma they have endured.”

Conclusion

Given these facts, Dr. Gabor’s intention is not for us to immediately blame our parents for any trauma we have endured. “Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, social conditions, cultural conditioning, childhood trauma etc. It’s not all on the individual.” Therefore, we must continue to dig deeper, in our environment as a whole, to truly understand why we get triggered by certain things, and how we can overcome them.

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