When The Body Says No-Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection

[BeHea1thy]

By Gabor Mate, M.D. includes some great food for thought for people who believe that the mind influences the physical condition. This is relevant to me because I've had 4 skin cancer surgeries in 4 years; two of them on my face.

Chapter 9 Is there a "cancer personality"?

While we cannot say that any personality type causes cancer, certain personality features definitely increase the risk becuase they are more likely to generate physiological stress. Repression, the inability to say no and lack of awareness of one's anger make it much more likely that a person will find herself in situations where her emotions are unexpressed, her needs ignored and her gentleness is exploited. Those situations are stress inducing,whether or not the person is conscious of being stressed. Repeated and multipled over the years, they have the potential for harming homeostasis and the immune system. It is stress that undermines a body's physiological balance and immune defenses, predisposing it to disease or reducing the resistance to it.

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. ...Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when humans are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs-or fails to occur-during childhood. page 127