When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-disease Connection

A less judgmental way to put this would be that the child perceived himself to be responsible for his mother’s emotional suffering.

Since there is no reliable way of deciding when treatment works, what are people who “survive” their prostate cancer really surviving—their treatment or their disease?

The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities.

“I knew boundaries, but my mother did not. That’s what most of our fights were about—about her inability to recognize where she ended and I began.”

In numerous studies of cancer, the most consistently identified risk factor is the inability to express emotion, particularly the feelings associated with anger. The repression of anger is not an abstract emotional trait that mysteriously leads to disease. It is a major risk factor because it increases physiological stress on the organism. It does

The physiological responses of the three groups were identical, but the melanoma group proved most likely to deny any awareness of being anxious or of being upset by the messages on the slides. “This study found that patients with malignant melanoma displayed coping reactions and tendencies that could be described as indicating ‘repressiveness.’

a statistically significant degree, were more likely to demonstrate the following traits: “the elements of denial and repression of anger and of other negative emotions . . . the external

Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits—otherwise known as coping styles—magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biologica

Consummatory behaviour—from the Latin consummare, “to complete”—is behaviour that removes the danger or relieves the tension caused by it. We recall that stress-inducing stimuli are not always objective external threats like predators or potential physical disasters but also include internal perceptions that something we consider essential is lacki