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

or having to meet the needs of others is no longer experienced as stressful. It feels normal. One is disarmed.
    Véronique is thirty-three; she was diagnosed with MS three years ago. “I had a major episode,” she relates, “which I didn’t know was an episode … pain in my feet, numbness and tingling going all the way up to about the upper chest and then back down, over about three days. I thought it was cool—I was poking myself and couldn’t feel anything! I didn’t say anything to anybody.” A friend finally convinced her to seek medical help.
    “You had numbness and pain from your feet to your upper chest and you didn’t tell anybody? Why is that?”
    “I didn’t think it was worth telling anybody. And if I told somebody like my parents, they would be upset.”
    “But if someone else had numbness and pain from the feet up to the mid-chest, would you ignore it?”
    “No, I would rush him to the doctor.”
    “Why were you treating yourself worse than you would another person? Any idea?”
    “No.”
    Most instructive is Véronique’s response to the question about any possibly stressful experiences prior to the onset of her multiple sclerosis. “Not necessarily bad things,” she says.
    “I’m an adopted child. Finally, after fifteen years of pressure from my adoptive mom, I looked up my biological family, which I didn’t want to do. But it’s always easier to give in to my mom’s demands than argue about it—always!
    “I found them and met them, and my very first impression was, Ugh, we can’t possibly be related. It was stressful for me to find out about my family history because I didn’t need to know that I was possibly a child of incestuous rape. That’s how it appears; nobody’s telling the whole story, and my biological mother won’t say anything.
    “Also at that time I was unemployed, waiting for EI, on welfare. And I’d kicked out my boyfriend a few months before this, because he was an alcoholic and I couldn’t handle that any more either. It wasn’t worth my sanity.”
    Such are the stresses this young woman describes as not necessarily bad: ongoing pressure from her adoptive mother, who ignored Véronique’s own wishes, to find and reunite with her dysfunctional biological family; discovering that her conception may have been the result of incestuous rape (by a cousin; Véronique’s biological mother was sixteen at the time); financial destitution; her break with an alcoholic boyfriend.
    Véronique identifies with her adoptive father. “He’s my hero,” she says. “He was always there for me.”
    “So why didn’t you go to him for help when you felt pressured by your mother?”
    “I could never get him alone. I always had to go through her to get to him.”
    “And what did your father do with all this?”
    “He just stood by. But I could tell he didn’t like it.”
    “I’m glad you feel close to your dad. But you may wish to find yourself a new hero—one who can model some self-assertion. In order to heal, you may wish to become your own hero.”
    ____
    The gifted British cellist Jacqueline du Pré died in 1987, at the age of forty-two, from complications of multiple sclerosis. When her sister, Hilary, wondered later whether stress might have brought on Jackie’s illness, the neurologists firmly assured her that stress was not implicated.
    Orthodox medical opinion has shifted very little since then. “Stress does not cause multiple sclerosis,” a pamphlet recently issued by the University of Toronto’s MS clinic advised patients, “although people with MS are well advised to avoid stress.” The statement is misleading. Of course stress does not
cause
multiple sclerosis—no single factor does. The emergence of MS no doubt depends on a number of interacting influences. But is it true to say that stress does not make a major contribution to the onset of this disease? Research studies and the lives of the persons we have looked at strongly suggest that it does.