The Somero Saga: When The Body Says No- Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, book review

This book was absolutely intriguing, although I must add that with all books I read, I take what's applicable to me and ignore the rest. Doesn't mean I believe or agree with everything in it, just means I'm doing a review to help me remember what I've read.

Dr. Gabor Maté was a hospice M.D. in Vancouver, BC (he's now retired) who has taken a deeper look into his hospice patients. What he noticed after talking to them (actually mostly listening to them!) deeper over the many years, was that they all had something in common. They had never learned to express healthy anger or to say no (described more thoroughly later on), which interestingly is learned when we are yet babies and toddlers (before age 3).

He goes into various diseases such as ALS, MS, and cancer as well as autoimmune diseases too. During a study of women with breast cancer, "our principal finding was a significant association between the diagnosis of breast cancer and a behavior pattern throughout adult life, of abnormal release of emotions. This abnormality was, in most cases, extreme suppression of anger and, in patients over 40, extreme suppression of other feelings." Also "an inability to discharge or deal appropriately with anger, aggressiveness or hostility (which in turn was masked by a façade of pleasantness)". The unresolved conflict was "manifested through denial and unrealistic self-sacrificing behaviors". Hereditary/genetic factors (genes) pale in comparison to these factors recorded. Stress (internal from external) is the biggest factor in developing cancer. He goes through breast, prostate, uterine/ovarian, melanoma, leukemias and lymphomas and lung cancers specifically, but other cancers fall in here too likely. There's an extreme sense of duty, and an unbalanced inability to ask for help or receive help themselves. This often starts as small children who sense their parent's pain and needs because they can see the stress their parents are under and try to ease it by being a "good boy/good girl". (Kids are amazingly perceptive to parent's emotions for good and bad). As they grow older, this repression of their own anger tends to accompany loneliness and a lack of social support because the lack of negative emotion (repressed) is never seen by others (due to lack of vulnerability). These people cannot be true to themselves even on the deepest level.

What may be looked at as a character flaw in ourselves or others, is often actually a coping mechanism that the person acquired young in childhood. This is a response to environment, not inborn genetic weakness. For example, "controlling" people may actually be exhibiting extreme anxiety because of high levels of fear for whatever reason started the process long, long ago. He says that no one who he interviewed for the book could answer yes to the question~ "When you were a child, and you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone who you could talk to about it?" Everyone one of them said no, that there was no one, that they learned to deal with it on their own. Sometimes parents were too busy, too stressed themselves, or just didn't know what to do with negative emotion (tried to cheer them up or talk them out of their negative feelings saying things like "cheer up" "suck it up" "brush it off" "quit making a big deal" "be thankful you aren't ..." etc, etc).

Interestingly, in the chapter on autoimmune disease, specifically rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis (the ones he mentions), there were studies done on the emotional state of the patients. There was found a high percentage of people who had an inhibition of anger and a high concern about the social acceptability of behaviors. They also scored high on "compliance, shyness, conscientiousness, religiosity and moralism." These traits combined with stress (internal or external) can lead to autoimmune disorders much more readily than those without.

He then has a chapter on cortisol, and he goes into asthma and eczema. How these are very much mind-body connections to stress. How an impaired HPA axis promotes inflammation, and thus asthma and eczema (and others). He tells of studies done with stressful situations, and the asthmatic children's responses to either their parent's voices or the voices of a stranger, and the children responded contrary to what they thought. The parent's voices increased abnormal breathing, while the stranger's did not. This indicated an emotional response likely due to past interactions and habits already formed. It was concluded that highly sensitive children pick up the emotional cues from their parents, and that these families often have enmeshment/codependency, overprotectiveness (controlling), rigidity and lack of conflict resolution skills in it. (Boundaries!) One word that was new to me here was differentiation. This is defined as "the ability to be in emotional contact with others yet still autonomous in one's own emotional functioning". A poorly differentiated person lacks emotional boundaries between himself and others, that prevents his thinking process from being overwhelmed by his emotional feeling process. He automatically absorbs others' feelings which creates anxiety within himself. A well differentiated person responds to their own emotions which are not tailored to suit other people's expectations. They neither suppress theirs nor act out on their own.

These habits become programmed into our cells at a molecular level, so healing them can be challenging. As in the "It Didn't Start With You" book, these are often generations old. They are the reactions of the stressors on our operating systems. Do we even recognize them? Do we magnify or minimize our potential threats? Do we believe we have to work to be loved? All these questions either keep us in defensive mode, or we can heal and be open to growth and health.

Some commonly held misperceptions are these~

I have to be strong (we don't want to be vulnerable because we fear rejection)
It's not right for me to be angry (we have learned that it isn't acceptable)
If I'm angry, I'm unlovable (people won't like me if I show anger)
I'm responsible for the whole world (it's my job to "make people happy")
I can handle anything (there's always more I can do to improve things)
I'm not wanted, I'm not lovable (unspoken words, but deeply felt for various reasons)
I don't exist unless I do something, I must justify my existence (a sense of emptiness when not busy)
I have to be very ill to deserve being taken care of (we don't deserve what others deserve, or what we will do for others)

Dr. Gabor Maté was born during the Holocaust to Jewish parents. If anyone understands what stress does to the body, his family did. His dad was put in a work camp, his grandparents were killed in Auschwitz when he was 5 months old, and he and his mother were alone living in a Budapest ghetto for the first year of his life. When he was an infant, he wouldn't stop crying and his mother finally took him to a doctor. The doctor just said, "all my Jewish babies are crying right now". The parent's stress becomes the children's. This is not to place blame, but to call it what it is as reality.

One important thing he notes about disease, is that the common terminology is to "fight it". You hear about "being a warrior" with cancer or whatever similar terminology is used. He disagrees with this. Disease is then viewed as a battle, which isn't helpful physiologically nor psychologically. Disease is a push-pull force of input and output, of your body trying to find balance and harmony and flow. Some of these things we can control, some we can't. But what disease isn't is a hostile force that we need to "kill" or "defeat". Instead it is a sign of disharmony inside ourselves, screaming for harmony. This includes our physical, emotional, and spiritual body. What might not be in balance? What is being ignored? Why is my body reacting this way? are better questions to ask. We have to muster up the strength to think negatively (accept reality).

Thinking positively only keeps us in denial (rose colored glasses?) For women with recurrent breast cancer, "Patients who reported little in the way of [psychological] stress...and who were rated by others as 'well-adjusted', were more likely to be dead at the one year follow-up." The more that people tune out their anxiety by "positive thoughts", denial or daydreaming; the longer that stress will act on them and the more damaging it will be. When one doesn't feel the heat, they are more likely to be burned. Many people are blocked from personal growth by the myth that they felt compelled to hold onto, of having "a happy childhood". A little negative thinking would empower them to see themselves stuck in self-harming behavior patterns to cling to the good and ignore the bad. When people start opening up about their childhood emotions, the "happy childhood" rarely stands. We all have had both, the happy and the unhappy parts. Owning them both is essential. The point of this (again!) is not to place blame, but to enable us to discard any beliefs that are dangerous to our health. Taking off the rose colored glasses helps us take responsibility for our own relationships. We actually can't place blame anymore, and we can examine all our relationships in the light of recognizing our emotional needs (to love and be loved, connection, etc) and to act with compassion and assertion in making those known. We must accept that we aren't as impenetrable or independent as we may have portrayed, or that our strong self-image is due to our fragility not our actual strength. We have to let go of the guilt of "not doing enough" and learning to say "no" (no more people pleasing). Allowing negative thinking also allows us to unflinchingly call things what they are. What is working and what is not. What is hurtful, what is helpful. And on and on.

Now on to healing...I'm just going to paste this off his actual website.

1) Acceptance is simply the willingness to recognize and accept how things are. It is the courage to permit “negative thinking” to inform our understanding, without allowing it to define our approach to the future. (this is not "doom and gloom", it's actually hope)

2) Awareness means that we regain our lost capacity to perceive emotional reality and that we are ready to let go of the paralyzing belief that we are not strong enough to face the truth about our lives. Awareness also means learning what the signs of stress are in our own bodies, how our bodies telegraph us when our minds have missed the cues.

3) Anger is a physiological process to be experienced. In addition, it has cognitive value – it provides essential information. Depending on circumstances, we may choose to manifest the anger, let go of it or simply contemplate what may have triggered it. The key is to not suppress the experience of anger. The repression of anger and the unregulated acting-out of it are both examples of the abnormal release of emotions that is at the root of disease. Both repression and rage represent a fear of the genuine experience of anger. When healthy anger is experienced, nothing overly dramatic happens. What does happen is a decrease of all muscle tension. (**What most people think of as anger is actually rage and/or anxiety from lack of expressing anger healthily)

4) Autonomy We experience life through our bodies. If we are not able to articulate our life experience, our bodies speak what our minds and mouths cannot. A personal boundary is an energetic experience of one’s self or the other person. We not only communicate boundaries verbally, but we have an energetic expression that is non-verbal. “Boundaries are invisible, the result of a conscious, internal felt sense defining who I am. Asking yourself, ‘In my life and relationships, what do I desire, want more of, or less of, or what don’t I want, what are my stated limits?’ begins the process…. In this self-definition, we define what we value and what in life at this particular time from a place of internal self-reference; the locus of control is from inside ourselves.” – Dr. Joann Peterson: Anger, Boundaries, and Safety.

Compassionate curiosity about the self, means that we look at ourselves with the same non-judgmental acceptance we would wish to accord anyone else who suffered and who needed help. Boundaries and autonomy are essential for health. Healthy anger leaves the individual (not the unbridled emotion) in charge. Autonomy is the development of that internal center of control.

5) Attachment is our connection with the world. Connection is also vital to healing. We sometimes find it easier to feel bitterness or rage than to allow ourselves to experience that aching desire for contact. Behind all our anger lies a deeply frustrated need for truly intimate contact. Healing both requires and implies regaining the vulnerability that made us shut down emotionally in the first place. We are no longer helpless dependent children; we no longer need to fear emotional vulnerability. We can permit ourselves to honour the universally reciprocal human need for connection and to challenge the ingrained belief that unconsciously burdens so many people with chronic illness: that we are not lovable.

6) Assertion. In our fear we falsely equate reality with tumult, being with activity, meaning with achievement. It is the statement of our being, a positive valuation of ourselves independent of our history, personality, abilities or the world’s perceptions of us. Assertion challenges the core belief that we must somehow justify our existence.

7) Affirmation When we affirm, we make a positive statement; we move toward something of value. Everyone has an urge to create, and we must honour this urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. The second great affirmation is of the universe itself – our connection with all that is. Health rests on three pillars: the body, the psyche/mind/emotions and the spiritual connection. To ignore any one of them is to invite imbalance and dis-ease. Seeking connections is a necessity for healing. Assertion is the declaration to ourselves and to the world that we are and that we are who we are.