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

Perhaps I am overly sensitized to the issue of blame, but then most people are. Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.

Rage and anguish exist underneath the veneer of niceness, no matter how sincerely a person mistakes the facade for her true self.

“Now, I’m not saying it’s the mother’s fault. It has to do with the position of women in society and the relationships people get into. I’m talking only about the child’s experience. The child doesn’t know it, since you can’t miss what you’re not familiar with, but the child is actually experiencing abandonment by the mom. When you say ‘that wouldn

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

The so-called primary immune organs are the bone marrow and the thymus gland, located in the upper chest in front of the heart.

Repression of anger increases the risk for cancer for the very practical reason that it magnifies exposure to physiological stress. If people are not able to recognize intrusion, or are unable to assert themselves even when they do see a violation, they are likely to experience repeatedly the damage brought on by stress.

These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But

Tumour dormancy is affected by many hormonal and immunological influences, all of them functions of the PNI system and all of them highly susceptible to life stresses.

“The nature of stress is not always the usual stuff that people think of. It’s not the external stress of war or money loss or somebody dying, it is actually the internal stress of having to adjust oneself to somebody else.