* Long post warning *
This is a gem of a book, published in 2003.
The concerning thing is that not much has changed since publication. Disease rates are increasing, not to mention the mental health crisis.
The concept of this book is not entirely new to me. I’ve known since first-year massage that chronic stress can kill you, but I didn’t realise that emotion suppression can too. Before reading this book, I wrote about my discovery of the impact of stress and anxiety on my asthma in the company of my family.
It’s then no wonder that illness/disease is on the rise. We are an emotionally suppressed society, and our cultural “norms” heavily contribute to this.
I’m grateful that I have time to read more books, especially ones that help me learn and grow and understand the hurt parts of myself. Not everyone has the time to read, so I’ve shared some of my favourite excerpts in this blog. (page numbers included if I recorded them).
The note to the reader:
“This is not a book of prescription, but I do hope it will serve its readers as a catalyst for personal transformation. Prescription comes from the outside; transformation occurs within. There are many books of simple prescriptions of one sort or another - physical, emotional, spiritual - that appear each year. It is not my intention to write yet one more. Prescriptions assume that something needs to be fixed; transformation brings forth the healing - the coming to integrity, to wholeness - of what is already there. While advice and prescriptions may be useful, even more valuable to us is the insight into ourselves and the workings of our minds and bodies. Insight, when inspired by the quest for truth, can promote transformation”.
“If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool.”
“ Selye’s analogies illustrate an important point: excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fulfil them. The rubber band snaps, the spring becomes deformed. The stress response can be set off by physical damage, either by infection or injury. It can also be triggered by emotional trauma or just by the threat of such trauma, even if purely imaginary. Physiological stress responses can be evoked when the threat is outside conscious awareness or even when the individual may believe themself to be stressed in a “good” way.” (pg 29)
Emotional competence requires:
The capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experience stress;
the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries;
the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists and
the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others.
“We need to foster emotional competence in our children as the best preventive medicine”.
“Under stress, people usually mobilise their existing resources and defences.”
“I believe there is at least indirect evidence that psychosocial factors do affect disease susceptibility and activity. The most likely mechanism for this to occur would be through psychoimmunological pathways.”
“Although induced by thought or emotion, the placebo effect is entirely physiological. It is the activation of neurological and chemical processes in the body that serve to reduce symptoms or to promote healing”.
“A key issue is the way that the nervous system senses, evaluates and interprets pain”. (pg 144)
“In people who have experienced chronic stress, the prefrontal cortex and related structures remain in a state of hypervigilance, on the lookout for danger. Profront activation is not a conscious decision by the individual; rather, it is the result of the automatic triggering of nerve pathways programmed long ago.” (pg 145)
“Pain is a powerful secondary mode of perception to alert us when our primary modes have shut down. It provides us with the data we ignore at our peril”. (pg 152)
“Avoiding the experience of emotion, in fact exposes people to greater and longer-lasting physiological stress. Because they are unaware of their own internal states, they are less able to protect themselves from the consequence of stress. Furthermore, the healthy expression of emotion is itself stress-reducing. Stress-induced chronic hormonal and immune changes prepare the physiologic ground for diseases like Alzheimer’s.” (Pg 166)
This following quote blew my mind because it was never mentioned in my education on autoimmune disease. We are fed “this disease has no known cause”.
“Published in 1892, William Osler suggested that rheumatoid arthritis has “in all probability, a nervous origin”. In present-day language, Osler was referring to psychoemotional stress.”
“Rheumatic diseases included rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, ankylosing spondylitis and system lupus erythematosus (SLE). In these disorders, and in many others, a disturbed immune system reacts against the body’s own tissues…”
“Characteristic of many persons with rheumatoid diseases is a stoicism carried to an extreme degree, a deeply ingrained reticence about seeking help”.
Maté links asthma and stress. “Asthma is one of the few diseases recognised by mainstream medicine to have a significant mind-body component”. (Pg 190)
“Emotions can play a major role in making a person susceptible, no matter what the immediate trigger may be - Aspirin, or cold air or anxiety. Chronic emotional stresses sensitise the immune system so that it becomes overly reactive to any number of triggers”. (pg 190)
Oh boy, do I feel seen or what!?
“We automatically attain emotional independence. At any age, our responses to potential stressors are deeply influenced by the degree to which our emotional functioning continues to be dominated by our attachment needs, fears and anxieties.” (Pg 194)
“Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.” (pg 198)
“For the adult, therefore, biological stress regulation depends on a delicate balance between social and relationship security on the one hand and genuine autonomy on the other. Whatever upsets that balance, whether or not the individual is consciously aware of it, is a source of stress.” (Pg 198)
I quite like Gabor speaking about parenting as a dance of the generations. “Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed onto the next.”
Lance Morrow described it as “The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box (I suspect but to not know), you would find another box with some such black, secret energy - stories within stories, receding in time.” (Pg 216)
This highlights the importance of families not sweeping their trauma under the rug, but so commonly do. This is why there is so much tension within my mother’s family. The difference between myself and the rest of the family is I have awareness.
“The Central issue is the unintentional transmission of stress and anxiety across the generations.”
“Cancer and autoimmune diseases of various sorts are, by and large, diseases of civilisation. While industrialised society organised along the capitalist model has solved many problems for many of its members - such as house, good supply and sanitation - it has also created numerous new pressures even for those who do not need to struggle for the basics of existence. We have come to take these stresses for granted as inevitable consequences of human life, as if human life existed in an abstract form separable from the human beings who live it.” (Pg 223)
“The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health”. (Pg 225)
“Recognising the multigeneration template for behaviour and for illness, and recognising, too, the social influences that shape families and human lives, we dispense with the unhelpful and unscientific attitude of blame. Disregarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility”. (Pg 225)
“No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified - such as biological, heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer - these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease…”
“A systems model recognises that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease, or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine.”
“To heal is to become whole. But how can we be more whole than we already are? Or how is it that we could ever be less than whole?”
“The onset of symptoms or the diagnosis of a disease should prompt a two-pronged inquiry: What is this illness saying about the past and present, and what will help in the future?
“In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism”. Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden”.
“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 recognised and tended to.”
Interestingly, I had only recently made the scar analogy when discussing emotional wounds with some friends. Skin wounds are not the same because the new tissue differs from the tissue it replaces. So why do we not expect emotional wounds to have the same impact?
“Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger” - Candace Pert, Molecular researcher.
Gabor then discusses the 7 A’s of healing: Acceptance, Awareness, Anger, Autonomy, Attachment, Assertion and Affirmation. You can read about the 7 A’s here.
“Health rests on three pillars: the body, the psyche and the spiritual connection. To ignore any one of them is to invite imbalance and disease.”
I’ve been stressing the importance of the biopsychosocial model replacing the medical model of health for a while now. It’s why I think people benefit so much from massage therapy. It may not be heavily backed by science, but our patients feel seen and heard, and these elements will increase the effectiveness of any treatment.
Indigenous culture also needs to be integrated more into our lives because the connection to self and country are strong community values that seem to be lacking in Western culture.
What are your thoughts on the quotes and information I have presented here?
This book made sense to me; I emailed Gabor to ask him more questions, mainly about the increase in neurodivergence and whether there is a link to trauma. He replied and suggested I read Scattered Minds as he felt my questions would be answered there. So that’ll be one of the next books I read.
Couldn’t agree more about the health impacts of too much stress, but no stress at all can be just as bad as a person who always avoids stress spends 100% of the time in their comfort zone. Which means they never grow or live.
Does Gabor talk about “habits for dealing with stress”? (Drinking, drugs, smoking, binge eating etc) I think that’s where stress causes the damage. Not from the actually stress itself, but from our response to it.
If we have healthy ways of dealing with stress (exercise, hobbies, community, journaling, meditation etc) we are able to do stressful things and be fine
Scattered Minds changed my life. So fucking cool that he replied!