When the Body Says No

The idea that people’s emotional coping style can be a factor in scleroderma or other chronic conditions is anathema to some physicians.

excess of painful, unmetabolized emotion.

like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.

It was evident that he found the prospect of Alexa’s death unbearably frightening, and also that she appeared to deny the diagnosis m

Hans Selye in The Stress of Life.1

For anger to be deployed appropriately, the organism has to distinguish between threat and non-threat. The fundamental differentiation to be made is between self and non-self. If I don’t know where my own boundaries begin and end, I cannot know when something potentially dangerous is intruding on them

Celia’s rigid belief that she could get through everything by herself was a coping mechanism, a compensation for emotional needs ignored in childhood. A child in her situation survives by pretending to herself, and to the world, that she has no needs she cannot take care of herself

Such instances do not indicate that the person has no emotions; someone truly lacking attachment could at least pretend to possess some fellow feeling. On the contrary, the emotions can be too overwhelming to be experienced consciously—but they are physiologically all the more active. Once more we witness that avoiding the experience of emotion in fact exposes people to greater and longer-lasting physiological stress

An emotional shutdown, a tuning-out of reality, is his brain’s most readily available defence

While a young child may not be cognitively aware of family disgrace, emotionally he is absorbing all the negative psychic vibrations of the stressed family system