When The Body Says No - The Hidden Cost of Stress

CANADIAN PRESS
April 13, 2003

B.C. writers study effects of negative emotions on business, health

by Amy Carmichael

There's one in every office. A person who picks up the pieces after a water-cooler clash, offers encouragement after a dressing down by the boss or buys drinks when someone else is awarded the promotion.

These people don't have titles and the vital role they play in keeping companies chugging along is barely acknowledged. But if Peter Frost could print them business cards he would use the super-heroish title: Toxic handlers.

"These people, they could be managers, human resource personnel, co-workers, are being sent into battle with a plastic fork for a weapon," says Frost, author of Toxic Emotions At Work and a commerce professor at the University of British Columbia.

He argues they aren't given to tools to deal with the emotions they are cushioning, which he says are contagious and harmful to their health.

The attack of the mind on the body and the connection between brains and hearts is the subject of another book just released by Gabor Maté. The charismatic doctor has written for the Globe and Mail, headed palliative care unit at Vancouver General hospital and works with addicts on the skid row Downtown Eastside.

A woman who introduced his recent reading of When the Body Says No at the Central Library was shocked to see the hall fill up and throngs turned away because all the seats were taken.

"I haven't seen so many hundreds turn out since our lecture on tantric sex," she says.

Maté explained to the audience, many of whom suffered from diseases and were looking for answers, about the dark side of emotions and the havoc they wreak on body chemistry.

Working family practice, Maté said he began to notice a pattern of emotional repression among people with diseases from cancer to ALS and multiple sclerosis. They were like Frost's toxic handlers, too nice, constantly putting others needs before their own. They didn't know how to say no, weren't able to express anger in a healthy way.

"Noticing these things on my own, I just thought I was a solitary genius. Which I am," Maté deadpanned. "But it turns out, not as solitary as I thought.

"The same observations have been made by dozens of other doctors for decades, not to mention those by Ayurvedic (traditional Hindu medicine) and tribal medicine over thousands of years, and the research has been done."

Mostly though, Frost and Maté illustrate their points with people's stories. Frost has met numerous chief executives who feel their cancers and heart diseases were due in part to constantly dealing with office conflict.

Maté describes past patients and famous people from Pamela Wallin to Gilda Radner and Jacqueline du Pre. All, he said, suppressed their own feelings and desires to please others. The culmination of that process was a serious disease, he said.

His theory is that emotional repression induces stress reactions in their bodies, hiking hormones like cortisol, enlarging adrenal glands and eventually affecting our immune system's ability to ward off illness.

This is not an argument the mainstream medical profession gives much credence. But audience members pumped their heads up and down, nodding in agreement at his theories like they had experienced the very same thing.

But the Canadian Cancer Society said people have to be careful with theories like Frost's and Maté's because not enough studies have been done to prove stress can cause illness.

"It's kind of like reading a horoscope. Who doesn't have stress in their lives?" said Barbara Kaminsky, a director of the Canadian Cancer Society.

A woman listening to Maté's reading agreed.

"He's coming very close to saying 'you brought this on yourself,' " said Sandra Konkin, a Vancouver teacher who suffers from MS. "A lot of people have boundary issues and difficulty saying no."

"But at the same time, it's common sense. Our problems take a toll and dealing with them will make us happier and healthier. I've got a lot to work through."

Kaminsky she said there is certainly a movement in the health care industry "largely directed by patients," to take the body-mind connection into consideration when treating disease.

"Certainly we will see more of that as the baby-boom generation ages," she said. "They have been able to travel and the Internet and TV has broadened their world and introduced them to a much broader range of approached to health care."

The cancer society supports integrated care facilities where alternative therapies, from yoga to meditation, are practised alongside conventional medicine.

BACK

Now comes Gabor Maté , an insightful, no-nonsense, and thoroughly compassionate physician who provides an overview of all these perspectives and comes to the marvelously humane conclusion that ADD/ADHD is neither nature (genetics) nor nurture (parenting/environment) but, rather, the result of the collision of a predisposing nature with an ADD-hostile life situation, family, school, or job. How refreshing!

-Thom Hartman, author of ADD: A Different Perception and many other books about ADD