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

consequence—not as punishment but as physiological reality.
    Barbara insists she had nothing but a mutually loving and healthy relationship with her parents. “My mother and I were great together. We were always very close.”
    “Boundaries are learned in our formative years,” I say. “So why did you have to learn boundaries later, the hard way?”
    “I knew boundaries, but my mother did not. That’s what most of our fights were about—about her inability to recognize where she ended and I began.”
    Barbara’s introduction of an unstable and dangerous man into her home would be defined in studies as a major stressor, but the chronic stress of poor boundaries that preceded it is not so easily identified. The blurring of psychological boundaries during childhood becomes a significant source of future physiological stress in the adult. There are ongoing negative effects on the body’s hormonal and immune systems, since people with indistinct personal boundaries live with stress; it is a permanent part of their daily experience to be encroached upon by others. However, that is a reality they have learned to exclude from direct awareness.
    “The cause, or causes, of multiple sclerosis remain unknown,” notes a respected textbook of internal medicine. 7 Most research refutes a contagious origin, although a virus may possibly be indicated. There are probably genetic influences, since a few racial groups do seem to be free of it—for example, the Inuit in North America and the Bantus of southern Africa. But genes do not explain who gets the disease or why. “While it is possible to inherit a genetic susceptibility to MS,
it is not possible to inherit the disease
,” writes the neurologist Louis J. Rosner, former head of the UCLA Multiple Sclerosis Clinic. “And even people who have all the necessary genes do not necessarily get MS. The disease, experts believe, must be triggered by environmental factors.” 8
    Complicating matters are MRI studies and autopsies that identify the characteristic signs of demyelination in the central nervous system of persons who never exhibited any overt signs or symptoms of the disease. Why is it that some people with these neuropathological findings escape the frank development of illness while others do not?
    What could be the “environmental factors” alluded to by Dr. Rosner?
    Dr. Rosner’s otherwise excellent primer on multiple sclerosis summarily dismisses exploration of emotional stress as contributing factor to the onset. Instead, he concludes that the disease is probably best explained by autoimmunity. “A person becomes allergic to his own tissue,” he explains, “and produces antibodies that attack healthy cells.” He ignoresthe abundant medical literature linking autoimmune processes themselves to stress and personality, a vital link to be explored more fully in later chapters.
    A 1994 study done in the Department of Neurology at the University of Chicago Hospital looked at nervous system–immune system interactions and their potential role in multiple sclerosis. 9 Rats were used to demonstrate that artificially induced autoimmune disease would worsen when the flight-or-fight response was blocked. Had it not been interfered with, the animals’ ability to respond normally to stress would have protected them.
    The MS patients described in the stress literature, and all the ones I interviewed, have been placed in positions akin to that of the unfortunate laboratory animals in the Chicago study: they were exposed to acute and chronic stress by their childhood conditioning, and their ability to engage in the necessary flight-or-fight behaviour was impaired. The fundamental problem is not the external stress, such as the life events quoted in the studies, but an environmentally conditioned helplessness that permits neither of the normal responses of fight or flight. The resulting internal stress becomes repressed and therefore invisible. Eventually, having unmet needs