When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Arctic with a man nine years her senior, an artist whom she now describes as mentally unstable. Later he was hospitalized for manic-depressive illness. “I idolized him,” she recalls. “He was very talented, and I felt I didn’t know anything. Maybe I was a little afraid of him.”
    Lois found life in the Arctic extremely difficult. “For a sheltered West Coast girl, it was like moving to Timbuctoo. I saw a psychologist years afterwards, and he said, ‘You were lucky to get out of there alive.’ There was a lot of drinking, death and murder, isolation. There’s no road in there. I was physically afraid of my partner, of his judgment and his anger. It was a summer romance that should have lasted a few months, but it lasted a couple of years. I tried to hang on as hard as I could, but eventually he kicked me out.”
    The living conditions were bad. “We had an outhouse, and in −40 or −50 degree weather, that’s awful. Then he conceded and got a honey bucket, as they called it, that I could pee into at night because women have to pee more than men, right?”
    “That was a concession?” I inquire.
    “Yes, right. We had to cart it away to dump it, and he didn’t want to do that. One night he chucked it out in the snow and told me to use the outhouse. I also had to carry the water—we had no running water. There was no option. If I wanted to stay with him, I had to put up with that.
    “I remember saying the main thing I wanted from him was respect. I don’t know why, but that was the big thing for me. I wanted that so badly I was willing to put up with a lot.”
    Lois says that a desperate need for approval had characterized her earlier life as well, especially her relationship with her mother. “I transferred to him my mother always being in control of my life … telling me whatto wear and decorating my room and telling me what I should do from the beginning. I was the little girl too good to be true. It means that you subjugate your own wants or needs in order to get approval. I was always trying to be who my parents wanted me to be.”
    Barbara, a psychotherapist—by reputation, a highly effective one—treats many people with chronic illness. She herself has multiple sclerosis. She strenuously objects to the suggestion that repression originating in her childhood experience has anything to do with the plaques of inflammation and scarring at the root of her MS symptoms.
    Barbara’s multiple sclerosis presented eighteen years ago. The first symptoms erupted shortly after she invited a sociopathic man she had worked with at a correctional facility into her home for a two-week stay. “He had done a lot of therapy,” she says, “and the idea was to give him a fresh chance.” Instead, the client caused havoc and disruption in her home and her marriage. I ask Barbara if she does not see this invitation to a seriously troubled person as having represented a major boundary problem on her part.
    “Well, yes and no. I thought it was fine, because it was a two-week deal. But I would never do it again, obviously. I’m so good on boundaries now that I have one client who calls me the boundary queen—and she is another therapist, so we joke about it. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way. Sometimes I think that my MS was a punishment for my foolishness.”
    This reference to disease as punishment raises a key issue, since people with chronic illness are frequently accused, or may accuse themselves, of somehow deserving their misfortune. If the repression/stress perspective truly did imply that disease was punishment, I would agree with Barbara’s rejection of it. But a search for scientific understanding is incompatible with moralizing and judgment. To say that an ill-advised decision to invite a potentially harmful person into one’s home was a source of stress and played a role in the onset of illness is simply to point out a relationship between stress and disease. It is to discuss a possible