What "When The Body Says No" Teaches Us About Autoimmune Diseases (part 4 - final)
Why negative thinking is liberating and the seven A's of healing
Hello lovelies,
I hope you had a wonderful week. Let’s pick up where we left off.
The concept of resilience is about adaptiveness. It means the capacity to respond to external stressors without rigidity, with flexibility and creativity, without excessive anxiety and being overwhelmed by emotion.
Highly adaptive people, on average, have fewer physical illnesses, which tend to be mild to moderate sensations.
If we recall one of the quotes of the last post, “In our family you don’t talk about difficult issues. You hide them,” we can partially highlight modern life as the force that undermines the family structure. The first point is it tears connections and a sense of belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults and modern people enjoy less interpersonal contact.
One good example of this contact scarcity is sensory deprivation. By having fewer invested relationships, modern people suffer from the fewer people to resort to have bonding touch, which can significantly lower our stress levels. For those who enjoy physical touch as their preferred coping mechanism, which does not imply sexual connection at all, rather, more in a friendship or family sense, they will suffer to find fewer people to hug or hold hands with.
The second point about the quote above that sends a chilling realisation is by burying issues, someone will by default be lied to. Being lied to means being cut off from the other person. It engenders the anxiety of exclusion and rejection. A good dosage of honesty is always preferred as constructive conversations can be built upon it to improve the relationship, rather than a fake measure of harmony.
Mirroring physical illnesses, psychological resilience can withstand several acute situations. However, if the dysfunctional family continues to operate that way, our adaptive energy continues to suffer from erosion.
Ageing is a normal process through which the adaptation energy becomes depleted. It’s no coincidence that chronic illnesses become exacerbated as an individual grows older. The cells suffer from cumulative external stressors coming from environmental and psychological challenges.
The Liberating Power of Negative Thinking
The book also discusses toxic positivity, which means the tendency to be positive at the cost of sweeping the issues under the rug. Instead of this toxicity, we are encouraged to embrace the negative thinking to acknowledge reality and meet it where we are. The key points are presented below in the bullet points for easier reading.
Healing is a phenomenon of finding balance and harmony.
The word healing derives from an ancient origin meaning whole.
Less than whole because the internal harmony is so perturbed that the parts no longer work together.
For instance, stress is a disturbance of the body’s internal balance in response to perceived threats, e.g. need for warmth.
“I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” — Negative thinking profoundly helps more than the positive. It echoes the deliberate ignorance about the crises mentioned above.
The confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth is what helps us, not the toxic positivity masking the dismissal of the situation.
Dr Michael Kerr, a psychiatrist who’s often quoted in the book, also points out that this unhealthy positivity is the coping mechanism of the hurt child. When they turn into an adult, this behaviour is ingrained because the child was never aware of it. Thus, it is never corrected.
Negative thinking is the willingness to face reality with such questions as what is not working, what is not in balance, what have I ignored.
Compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop diseases and less likely to survive. However, genuine positive being empowers us.
Emotional competence is the capacity that enables us to stand in a responsible, non-victimised, and non-self-harming relationship with our environment. Hence, the 7 A’s.
The last chapter of the book presents the Seven A’s of healing.
The Seven A’s of Healing
1. ACCEPTANCE
It’s intentional that the first A in the 7 A’s of healing is acceptance. This is the first step of healing. Acceptance means taking stock of where we are, pleasant or unpleasant. It is accepting that we have both blessings and situations that can be improved. It permits negative thinking to inform us without defining the approach.
In short, please abandon the positive thinking mechanism, because compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it.
2. AWARENESS
The second step is being aware of what our body is telling us. This is the entire premise of the book. By giving it the title When The Body Says No, Dr Maté wants us to be more sensitive towards what our bodies tell us. The coping mechanisms are neutral in this case, since each of them can cultivate awareness or steer us away from it. When we choose to sit with our emotions and physical sensations, we pay attention to the signals sent by our cells. By acknowledging each sensation, we can either allow it to pass or act on it with genuine compassion, rather than whisk it away.
The mindset of “getting it over with” does more damage than healing because it simply tells our body that what we experience is a nuisance. It’s an expression of suppression like in the chapters with the interviewees who tried to see their problems were checklist to be solved because they didn’t want their daily lives to be interrupted by chronic illnesses.
Practise to know the signs of stress, such as a pounding heart, fatigue, sweating, headache, aches, emotional signs, and so on.
3. ANGER
I dedicate an entire subsection about anger below because anger is the biggest impetus to healing.
4. AUTONOMY
Boundaries and autonomy are essential for health. Cultivating autonomy means putting into practice what you understand from Acceptance and Awareness. In the section expounding on Autonomy, Dr Maté gives an example of a patient who didn’t want to follow a healthy lifestyle because he wanted to be different and not live under someone else’s influence, whether it was for his own good.
On the other end of the spectrum, we also have those who chronically suppress their emotions by being less assertive lest compromise their idea of peace and harmony. Assertion is covered in one of the subsections below, but the point is without exercising healthy autonomy, how can we tell our cells that we matter and that we accept ourselves as how God created us?
5. ATTACHMENT
Healing happens in conjunction with our relationships with others. Healing doesn’t exist in a vacuum only aided by external medicines. It’s shown in the book, and we must have heard in our daily life as well that so-and-so receives great support from their family and loved ones in their healing journey resulting in complete reversal from a disease, or at least making everything bearable.
Health rests on three pillars: the body, the psyche, and the spiritual connection.
6. ASSERTION
This is about continuing to practise our boundary establishment. Throughout the book, the interviews unravel the deep problems of being a people-pleaser or a doormat. Suppressing everything within has proved destructive to our immune system. Our body perceives that the self can’t protect the boundaries and consequently sends signals for help. When we heed the warning and become more assertive, physical improvements can be achieved.
Saying no to activities that drain us more and speaking up for social situations that harm us can be done tactfully, calming down our innate conditioning of offending other people.
7. AFFIRMATION
Affirming ourselves can be achieved by exercising our creative outlets. Dr Maté writes: When I did not write, I suffocated in silence.
Also, it is to realise that we have a purpose on this earth. Hence, the connection to the higher power is essential. The interviewees found their faith stronger or even claimed a new faith despite the illnesses because they learned that the diseases led them to a path to discover this new profound understanding.
When I did not write, I suffocated in silence.
Dr Gabor Maté
. . . which also resonates with me and my Substack writer friends here.
A Special Section about Anger
Cancer and autoimmune are promoted by the internalisation of anger.
When healthy anger is to be experienced, nothing dramatic comes up. On the contrary, it’s the decrease of all muscle tension. The mouth is opening wider because the jaws are more relaxed. The voice is lower in pitch because the vocal cords are more relaxed, and the shoulders drop.
The healthy anger is a physiologic experience without acting out. It’s one surge of power going through our system with a mobilisation to attack. It consequently follows that the anxiety disappears.
The research by Dr Habib Davanloo presented in the book shows that one of his clients in the therapy displays the complete opposite of how we portray anger. The subject did feel the surge of power in the body but the outward appearance was a focused person, instead of the yelling and scalding words.
Rage and Anger are two different things. Rage: anxiety-induced. This is what we discussed in the previous post. Rage is characterised by the tightening of the voice, etc. It’s only about channelling it out.
Acting out in rage is a defence against anxiety. Anger triggers anxiety because it coexists with positive feelings. Anger towards a loved one, for instance, is incredibly anxiety-provoking.
The more the parents discourage the healthy expression of anger of a child, the more the intolerable buildup becomes the go-to coping mechanism. It masks the need to actually experience anger.
The interviewees reveal that instead of expressing their anger towards their loved ones, they idealise their relationship with their parents, suffer from a silent resentment towards their spouse, or redirect the anger at another party outside of the dysfunctional marriage.
To restore the healthy signalling process in our immunological defence, the signals must be altered by means of psychotherapy.
The key is not to suppress the anger experience. It also has cognitive value which provides essential information, such as whether our boundaries are being threatened or essential needs being unmet.
Express and experience your emotions. It’s common for people to have outlets for such expressions so the emotion (e-motion, energy in motion) can flow out of our system without harming others.
If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time. If a refusal saddles you with guilt while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt.
Resentment is soul suicide.
If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time. If a refusal saddles you with guilt while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt.
Resentment is soul suicide.
Conclusion
When The Body Says No is an excellent book to address the psychological part of the root cause of chronic illnesses. In line with the spirit of this newsletter, The Gentle Roadmap acknowledges the holistic thinking practice. Seeking advice from multiple angles is deeply encouraged, as practised in the points of strengthening our faith and creative power (Affirmation), addressing honesty and respect in integrity from our relationships (Attachment), and working with therapists to uncover and assist healing in emotional wounds (Anger). Those are necessary to support the usage of the medical prescription from the doctors.
Healing is never a targeted, lonely journey of only one malfunctioning organ. It’s systemic. Especially in the era of metabolic syndromes in modern life, the same lifestyle also weakens our psychological resilience. Therefore, as a patient or a carer, it’s always paying off to be curious and proactive in investigating the root cause.
And remember, our bodies are super smart as a product of intelligent design by God, the master designer. It’s recommended to stop seeing our bodies as broken organisms. Perhaps, the ongoing symptoms are just the way they silently scream at us. It’s their way, our bodies, to say no.
The List of the Posts About This Book
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The Gentle Roadmap is a publication centred on feminine values and a holistic healing journey. As a practising Catholic, the articles sometimes portray my layperson experience with the faith. Please consider a paid subscription to support a deeper view of my writing.
Until next time,
I like this clear breakdown of so many aspects of trauma and healing. Great job, Sekar! Healing is such a deep and complicated journey, it's so great you continue to move forward with such drive!