Warning: Difficult feelings and occurences are described in this post. It's not for the faint of heart, and some will assail me for being inappropriate or "oversharing". But I hope you will know exacly WHY I'm writing this...
The book is called When The Body Says No, by Gabor Mate
It's a deep, deeeeeep and exactingly researched work asserting that the repression of emotion can contriute to disease. Diseases like Parkinson's and cancer.
While I did skim over a lot of the physiology, one chapter struck me: the one on brain cancer. Many illnesses can be interpereted as physical metaphors for personal truth, and in this chapter he mentions commonality between people with brain cancer (most of whom are men) and the supression of reaction to percieved threat.
When I thought of Neil Peart, drummer for Rush, and John McCain, both of whom also had glio blastomas, I could easily see a reflection of this. Imagine you're an incredibly talented drummer and lyracist who's found just the right band to play with-BUT you're an introvert. Or (I'd rather not imagine) being held and tortured in prison camp, and then spending a lifetime battling in politics. Yes, I mentioned John McCain. Because brain cancer. Calm down.
But yours truly? Well, brace yourself for impertinence, or just skip the rest of this big paragraph, because you may need to calm yourself down if you're like many people I know who revolt when confronted by difficult truths....(if this is you, bail NOW).......I was attacked by a pedophile when I was seven; he'd cleverly cajoled me to climb a straight ladder to the second floor of the barn, where I felt trapped because I was terrfied of the ladder. Backwoods New England culture in the 60's was and pobably still is pretty violent, and as any asthmatic can tell you, when you can't run you have to stand your ground, so you get beat up a lot. At eighteen, after work as a security guard and delivering singing telegrams in the city of Boston I was unable to stay at the college of my choice and had to switch to U of Maine at Orono, where on "Gay Tolerance Day" (you signified tolerance by wearing jeans, so the majority of the population probably bought their first khakis that week) it was the practice to pie jeans wearers in the face. When a student lunged at me with a "pie" I was rescued by a friend, who spotted the fact that the whipped cream "pie" was in a heavy Pyrex pie plate. I worked for a stint as nightclub DJ, and in the 80's a female voice over the mic was both a novelty and a threat to The Manhood Of The Species. Although I was happy to begin working in local radio I had no concept of the shark tank I was jumping into, and had never encounterd so much toxic competition, not even in professional theater. I've also always wanted to be a decent fighter (getting beat up a lot as well as mugged when you're twenty-one will do that) so I studied Kung Fu, in which I injured my bad knee, then Tae Kwon Do, in which I got my 300.00 glasses smashed (some people notice when the sensei is looking away and cheat a little on the mat) and finally Ju Jitsu, in which I injured my GOOD knee.
While none of those is as extreme as being tortured in a prison camp, and you could argue that I brought a good amount of it on myself, it's still safe to say my life has not been without percieved threats.
But the problem is not in the threats or even the perception of them; it's not even in the emotional reaction to those percieved threats.
The problem is in repressing the emotional reactions to them.
I wsa recently called out by my friend Kim, who mentioned how the radiation and chemo were "aweful".
"It's not that bad," I said, automatically. I was comparing them to the parade of bureaucrats marching through the ICU firing insurance questions while my brain was still bleeding (Yes, I know I have to let this one go...give me time).
"No!" she said, "It is! It's bad! You get to say it sucks. You get to say it's bad."
And she's right that radiation and chemo are not mai tais on the beach.
Still, I automatically repress how bad it is. It's my problem, after all, no one else's. I have a list of "At least" excuses to justify why I feel compelled to minimize chemo and radiation; it begins with, "At least I'm not in a Turkish prison...."
Of course having a working amygdala, which can process emotion and perhaps even suppress it, can keep you alive if you've just had a traumatic event and need to take action (so often they tend to happen in tandem), so supression itself can be useful. Mate argues that suppression over a long period of time is unhealthy and that the evidence is clear from the studies. Mate contends that repression has a part in illness, and further that the evidence of such is being delibrately ignored by the people who study this stuff, because it's "impossible" to quantify in the same way as other elements, like genes and environment.
Repression, according to When The Body Says No, can contribute to killing you. Not on its own, of course. Cancer, according to the Cancer Cell International web site, is "...a complex disease that involves a sequence of gene-environment interactions in a progressive process that cannot occur without dysfunction in multiple systems, including DNA repair, apoptotic and immune functions." Humans love to simplify and oversimplify, so cancer is tough to get your brain around; but you might notice that the emotional element is not included in that list of causeations. Or should we say that element is suppressed?
But here's all I was trying to establish: In my experience, most people act as if emotions themselves will kill you. Gabor argues the opposite: that it's the repression of your feelings that contributes to that.
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