When the Body Says No 10-3-11

Anderson, South Carolina

A dear friend in British Columbia sent me a recommendation for a book written by a Canadian physician working in palliative care. The book makes a convincing argument for the idea that unresolved emotional issues will typically find release as physical disease, especially cancer and degenerative autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Reading this book gave me a near epiphany.

One of my great torments for a long time has been the exclusion I’ve always felt from family members. In part I think this derives from my unwillingness to keep family skeletons in the closet; the realities of drug addiction, alcoholism, and a universal pattern of marital failure across three generations. As we head into the holiday season once again I’m reminded of this reality.

In his book When the Body Says No, Gabon Mate cites the life of Betty Ford in her struggles with alcoholism and breast cancer. Mate makes astute observations about Betty Ford’s early life. He’s able to easily deduce from her autobiography an inclination to see her childhood through rose-colored glasses. He describes Betty as repressing her own feelings to preserve a sense of idyllic relationship with a parent. He suggests unresolved emotional issues were players in her future use of pain killers, tranquilizers, and alcohol.

Betty in her own words describes an ever-increasing existential crisis, losing sight of who she was as a person, despite being the First Lady. “I couldn’t accept that people liked me for myself ... I was measuring myself against impossible ideals – Martha or my mother – and coming up short. That’s a good recipe for alcoholism.” Mate makes the assertion that Betty was blind to emotional realities in her own life. “She does not see that surrendering herself to her husband’s needs and expectations – becoming a ‘doormat’ – resulted from childhood conditioning. The emotional repression, the harsh self-judgment and the perfectionism Betty Ford acquired as a child, through no fault of her own, are more than a ‘good recipe for alcoholism.’ They are also a ‘good recipe’ for cancer of the breast.”

In the past year both my brothers turned up with life-threatening cancers requiring urgent treatment of the highest order. Both my brothers have had at least two kinds of cancer show up in their lives. Despite being raised in an alcoholic drug-addicted environment my twin brother has often wondered what my adjustment problems are, citing a perfectly normal childhood. Attempts to get my siblings to merely own that childhood did not work for me has consistently invoked a defensive posturing tinged with anger in one case and emotional absence in the other. My twin clearly displays unconscious Level II emotional expressions of strong anger wrapped in defensiveness. My older brother simply has made himself quite inaccessible to me for more than four decades. Extreme wealth and distance has made this easy for him to accomplish. He needs nothing whatever from me, especially the message that childhood did not work and that it’s taking me a lifetime to clean up the mess. Such messengers don’t get invited to parties.

Years ago I embraced the blessed twelve steps of recovery for a variety of reasons. One of the greatest prizes to be had in recovery is the opportunity for authentic release of toxic emotions. In recovery rooms and with trusted friends and sponsors one is free to have true emotional ‘dumps’ and to ‘get it off one’s chest.’ The culture of recovery insists on honest expression of one’s feelings, especially negative ones, believing their expression leads to immediate relief, soon followed by true healing and growth. Such has been my repeated experience. I can’t but wonder in light of Mate’s observations if getting emotional burdens off one’s chest in a recovery room might not mitigate the need to engage a surgeon to get it off our chests in the case of breast cancer. Extensive research suggests our bodies finally do say no and will find ways to offload our emotional burdens in ways not necessarily to our liking.

My mother turned up with catastrophic breast cancer. She finally got her long standing resentments ‘off her chest’. My twin brother found many people to be a ‘pain in the butt’, even recently telling me he hated a class of people as much as Hitler hated Jews. A few months ago he had a good chunk of his colon resected for invasive cancer. My older brother may well have been ‘pissed off’ at our alcoholic mother and repressed his feelings. He turned up with aggressive prostate cancer. In recovery we are told resentments are the number one killer. Resentments are nothing more than fatal repressed emotions, a ‘luxury’ we can ill afford.

I can’t say for certain my mother and brothers turned up with cancer because of unresolved emotions but when researchers are able to use interview instruments with 96% accuracy to predict the advent of cancer in people with unresolved emotions, one does wonder. It’s not likely I will ever have the authentic communication with my brothers that I enjoy in recovery but I can certainly take their experiences as cautionary; being reminded resentments and unresolved emotions are not something I can afford.

Perhaps recovery has saved me from far more than the scourge of painkillers, tranquilizers and alcohol. So far I’ve not turned up with cancer. Colonoscopy and lab tests tell me I have a daily reprieve at present. This could change at any time. I don’t yet know if the God of my understanding in recovery has granted me deferral or complete pardon from the malignant consequences of unresolved emotions and resentments. Time will tell.

What time has told me is recovery has granted me at least a twenty-year deferral from the scourges of degenerative autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Twenty-two years ago I sat in front of a neurologist’s desk to be told I had MS. It also looked like I was headed into an early journey with arthritis, just like Mom. A leave of absence from my medical training and a radical life detour allowed me to explore the cesspools of resentment and unresolved emotional issues in my life. Twenty-two years later I have no evidence of MS or arthritis and the strongest drugs I take are fish oil and vitamins.

For certain, there’s no graduation from a life of recovery, only promotion. Also certain is the granting of a daily reprieve based on my spiritual condition. As long as I make an honest attempt to own my dark side and get it off my chest in a healthy manner; to avoid the emotional constipation deriving from harbored resentments, I might just find my body instead saying ‘Yes!” to the wonders of living a joyous good life.