There is a prevalent belief in our society that through no fault of our own, we will get sick at some point in time; we may have accidents and may require surgery. Getting ill or staying well is regarded as a matter of chance, misfortune or luck. The concept of disease is so deeply rooted in our belief system as inevitable and out of our control that in treating disease we usually look only at the symptoms. Yet, beneath the symptoms is a vast network of interrelated causes and factors contributing to the disease. Yet, except in the most enlightened medical practices, and in alternative methods of healing, they are ignored.
Where does disease start?
Our basic needs which were unmet or met unsatisfactorily when we were a child and which we knew we were powerless to meet ourselves, confirm our need to adapt to survive. As a helpless child, we decide that some of our needs must be modified to meet the requirements of our parents. This guarantees continuing care. To adjust to our environment and our needs met, as a 'powerless' child, we can get Mum's attention by being sick, having accidents. Some of these decisions lead to illness.
You have been accustomed to illness as a child and you will continue to use it as an adult, that is, if you were sick as a child, you will probably be sick as an adult. In human beings, real change and maturity is no more spectacular than in the area of illness and wellness. Being ill or well is the mirror of the soul. Some people blossom from humble beginnings, others decay when they appear to have been given a head start. And so it is with disease. People will get ill to get what they want, and people do not get what they want, so they get ill.
We like to think we are the victims of disease and that we can neither cause nor cure disease from the experiences we had in childhood. After all, that's when our first interpretations are made of how the world works and our first decisions taken on how to make it work to adapt to our needs. As a child, we lack power and therefore make prudent decisions given our limited range of options. Children are not responsible for themselves. Our parents are clearly responsible for keeping us alive in the first few years of life. During this time, we come to rely upon a powerful person who is capable of solving problems and meeting our needs. Many of our beliefs about ourselves are created in the first few years of life. The belief that we are not solely responsible for ourselves is one of them. When we become adult, this belief may be expressed by becoming ill. Our investment lies in reinforcing our belief that some things are beyond our control, and illness is accepted by society as being beyond the control of the individual.
There are drivers that we hear as a child, an oft repeated statement that influences the way we behave, and the way we will be received. 'Be perfect' is a driver. Such people will strive for success until eventually they do themselves physical and psychological harm.
Illness is a physical and psychological consequence of the script and subscript that we have received as children.
The injunctions: 'don't feel emotions/sensations' may lead you to fail to spontaneously express anger, fear, sadness or joy, and this in time affects your body's physiology. The injunction may only cover some of the emotions. Some parents are very happy to have children express joy but not anger. It is interesting that in acupuncture, it has been identified that suppressed anger results in kidney malfunction.
Illness is an option. It's a perfectly sensible option arising from the perceived danger of withdrawal of parental support. It enables us to continue to function without the continual fear that our existence is in jeopardy, which is intolerable. It's something we create to allay our greatest fears. It reveals we are prepared to undergo physical discomfort in exchange for psychological security. In being sick, we guarantee the love, attention and caring we crave from our parent. We avoid school, get warm chicken soup, and Mother -usually- fans over us and pampers to our needs while we are sick.
It is therefore a very attractive proposition that if we become ill, it is not 'my fault'. This would carry feelings of guilt and shame. We give ourselves illnesses in order to 'take care of ourselves' psychologically. Our quest for less pain, less anxiety, and greater happiness is only admirable. If we give ourselves illnesses, that must be a legitimate way of taking account of greater needs.
When the advantages of an illness are established, options can be worked out to cater for the needs previously catered for by the disease. When we no longer need the disease, we can stop having it.
It is no wonder that we feel afraid when faced with the prospect of being totally responsible for ourselves. As a young child, such a prospect would have terrified us because it would have meant certain death. The depth of this fear can be seen in the fact that we will give ourselves life-threatening diseases rather than face the fact that we are responsible for ourselves. Some people kill themselves by disease rather than face their own power to live or die.
Disease which afflicts us 'out of the blue' exonerates us from taking responsibility for who we are and for what we're doing with our bodies and our lives. we know full well where our lives are wrong and not working. But we choose to avoid the issue and continue as if nothing was wrong, rather than make painful or difficult decisions. By maintaining that we are the victims of disease, we reinforce our belief that we are not in control of our own lives and destinies. If we did accept responsibility for every single event in our lives, including our state of health, how would we feel? And who would we have to be?
The lack of energy that you complain about is not the result of insufficient sleep, excessive work, poor diet or lack of exercise, but a consequence of needing to keep the mind and body hyperactive so as to avoid unwanted thoughts and feelings.
We take care of ourselves by ignoring, selectively suppressing or simply not noticing those things in ourselves and others which challenge our views of ourselves.
We keep ourselves safe not only at an unconscious level but also by being unaware of things that we are simply not prepared to do. We know we could benefit considerably from a change of lifestyle, diet, and although we know this, we choose to continue with our current living habits and are prepared to accept responsibility for our decision. Clearly we view the disease we are suffering from as less of a problem than changing some other aspects of our lives.
After all, when the medical practitioner tells you to stop smoking, to lay off the carbonated drink, to exercise and to eat more fruit and vegetable, you are hardly surprised. You have heard all of this before.It's not rocket science. You hear it all around you. But you believe it's more satisfying to have one more Coke, one more hamburger, one more donught and your ego screams out that you deserve it anyway, that you work hard enough, and you have to put up with this and that in your life, so have one more slice of cheesecake. You are just not prepared to face your life, your lack of discipline, and to accept that you are slowly kiling yourself and shortening your life span by decades with each cigarette you put in your mouth, and each helping of startch and refined sugars.
Grace can take the form of a single thought: 'Maybe I should quit.'
It is not the smoking alone that causes lung cancer, but fear and smoking together. Fear coupled with guilt can most certainly increase the mental chaos from which cancer arises. Cancer is a manifestation of chaos. Perhaps a serious illness is destiny at work, and nothing can be said about it. Perhaps mistakes we have made in the past are producing an inner sense of guilt than can emerge in the manifested world years later as a form of illness.
We stand continuously between what we call life and what we call death. For those who find a reality in chasing after endless physical pleasures, wealth and possessions, the very thought of the death of the physical body is put so far back into the subconscious that they miss the chance of being free in life. The trouble is that you take experience for granted and do not see that each experience is a stepping-stone toward freedom. If you could only accept whatever comes in gratefulness, you would know freedom.
Everything is provided as soon as we ask the question. Jesus said: Seek and ye shall find.
Our recognition that we are asleep, unawake, and thus unconscious of what is really going on serves as an impetus for us to begin to find out what it could mean to be truly conscious, living human beings, not half-human creatures swayed by every outside force, everyone else's moods, and even the changes in the weather.
You have to realize that every disease you give yourself has advantages. The advantages lie in helping you to maintain a belief system about yourself, others and the world, which although damaging to you in some way, effectively masks more deep-seated and fundamental fears. By becoming ill, you spare yourself the trauma of examining those aspects of yourself you have chosen to suppress.
If illness saves us from doing things that we find even more scary or unpleasant, like asking our wife if she loves us, or walking to and from work among threatening people, noise and traffic, then we are benefiting from it. It may be the direct psychological consequence of years of unresolved fear, sadness, or anger left over from childhood. It may be that we chose to stop taking responsibility for ourselves and keep ourselves under the umbrella of parental care. The old parent may be replaced by a surrogate parent, like a doctor, lover or spouse. Illness is a way to obtain love, or to get out of work. It confirms the world as slightly unhappy or downright miserable, and it confirms our belief in fate, it provides a reason for being less successful than we had hoped, or it provides a drive for success. We chose all of the uses for illness as children without realizing it, in order to make ourselves feel safe in the world.
Taking responsibility
The option representing the total cure of the disease means dropping all of the old damaging childhood conditioning, retaining the helpful parental messages, accepting yourself, forgiving those against whom you have maintained anger and rejoicing in taking total responsibility for yourself. Some people come to realise the way they have been using their illness through self-discovery, and decide to remove it. Most people who make significant changes to their lives do so without the intervention of professionals.
Why do the majority of the people become angry when confronted with the part they play in the development of their own illnesses? Presumably, the idea that we cause our own illnesses must disturb some very fundamental beliefs we hold about ourselves and our bodies and a challenge to that belief causes great fear.
Early childhood experiences shape our long-term health. There are many factors in considering why people do not take responsibility for their own health, preferring instead to believe that if they become ill they are victims of bad luck. When confronted with the idea that we in fact give ourselves illnesses, many people react with great hostility, pointing to a wide and varied number of examples from their own lives which are intended to prove that illness is beyond the control of the individual.
If you believe that you are powerless to influence the course of your own life, you will hardly be receptive to the notion that you cause you illnesses. It's better to believe that you catch cold because people give you germs, or the pollutants in the air, the food and water are so bad that you just can't resist them. "There's cancer in my family, so I guess I'll just catch it as well." In addition, you will most likely have a high degree of anxiety as a consequence of your early childhood fear of not getting what you want and not surviving. This in turn will raise your adrenalin levels, increase your blood pressure, predispose you to ulcers and increase your susceptibility to both colds and 'accidents'. If you believe you are incapable of withstanding these stresses, you sabotage your defense mechanisms and succumb to disease.
Argue for your limitations and they are yours. This saying from Richard Back takes a whole new meaning suddenly when you apply it to illness.
There is the view that a component of the disease, small or large, is a consequence of our own actions. This is good thing, as that part of the illness is available for us to cure. Do not hand over the burden of responsibility for your illness.
Getting well
When we drop our old fears, our minds instruct our bodies to function harmoniously and beautifully. Before we drop the fear, we aim to have our habitual patterns reinforced and it is in that frame of mind that we go to the doctor.
There are 2 features of becoming or remaining well that between them provide a balance approach to whole-person health: the willingness to take responsibility for our own safety and the willingness to risk.
- Awareness: this is how I make myself ill
- Expression: Damn you, Mum
- Forgiveness: I accept the burden of raising 6 kids in the Depression must have been
- And Acceptance: I love me, and I love others.
This means dropping the old belief system we adopted as a child and taking full responsibility without fear, and without guilt for who we are.
The frequency and severity of illness in childhood will reflect parental attitude to illness as well as genetic predisposition, birth trauma, environment, and family diet, etc. This can also give you an indication of what to look for in your adult life and how the pattern may have gotten started. Is it chronic sore throat, is it asthma, a sore back, an angry stomach, migraines?
Example: the skin reflects our emotional state quickly and accurately. The skin of the face shows both chronic emotions and acute ones, such as blushing. The overall impression of the skin as a significant part of the personality will be obvious. If the skin is suffering from acne, dermatitis, or excessive oil, you can be sure it's important to your body image. If you haven't liked yourself much in the past, you'll often advertise the fact in your face. You reaffirm the world as a lousy place and You make sure they never face your fears.
People whose skin is perfect will often be suffering from more serious ailments but soldiering on bravely. They may need to appear perfect to the world although suffering both mentally and physically in private. Intestinal problems are common in this group. In chronic fear and sadness, the skin on the side of the nose is scaly and inflamed. Anger will often produce a tight, muscular body with little fluidity; while sadness is evident in stooped shoulders and irregular breathing. Someone who is afraid will rarely look at you directly, with darting eye movements and breathes in a shallow, rapid manner.
Premature greying or balding may indicate chronic tension and underlying high blood pressure. A person who suppresses anger usually speaks with the mouth partially closed, for fear of exposing wrath. The upper lip is narrow from lack of exercise. When sadness predominates, the voice will be weak and often breathless. The voice of a person who is chronically afraid will be wavering, struggling to even get heard, and the speech may begin and end abruptly. Scared people hunch their shoulders to hide their chest from view. They don't trust life, and don't trust themselves to stay well.
The anatomy of your illness can be accurately described by examining the triggers, mediators and risk factors that provoke the disease. The disease itself has no reality independent of the person who is sick and the web of relationships of which he is part. Disease results from the body's own efforts to preserve itself.
It incorporates your entire mode of living: the relationship between rest and exercise, sleep and waking, the choice and quantity of food, cleanliness and patterns of excretion. Hypocrates said that hundreds of years ago.
Disease is both self-created and self-cured. The delightful thing about such a concept is that you can assume control over both your disease and your destiny. Once you accept your investment in developing diseases, you will see that you alone can decide whether to maintain a disease process, allow it to progress or to end it. Anyway, not even the best physician in the world can cure you. Only you can cure you. Think about it.
When you are prepared to understand why you have made yourself ill, you will have taken that first giant leap towards the resolution of your problem. You learn to make use of your symptoms for they are the physical expression of our problems.
Touching, stroking and sexual stimulation all energize and regulate the function of the liver, spleen, kidneys, lungs, intestines, heart, gallbladder, pancreas and the thermal and chemical regulators of the body. If you do not get touched, you are inviting physical disease. Even if you are single and live on your own, a simple cure is to get a massage regularly. Or join a dance class. Or a karate class.
Where rage is suppressed, there may be a chronic elevation of adrenalin, leading to hypertension, a flushed face and cardio-vascular pathology. Sinusitis is an example of a condition which is often caused by people -usually men- refusing to cry. The resultant swollen chronically-inflamed mucous membranes would return to normal if the person shed tears at the moment of sadness. If emotions were spontaneously and totally expressed, then body physiology would be temporarily exercised and could rapidly return to a state of equilibrium.
Traditional medicine
It is clear that if the doctor attempts to instruct the patient in the true nature of the disease, in most cases, the patient will become scared, and will resist and redefine the information. In fact, the patient doesn't want to be rid of the disease. For a system of medicine to contribute to the healing process and support the body in curing itself from within, it must not be too disruptive of body physiology in its efforts to provide symptom relief. Many of the alternative healing arts are ideal. It now appears that the orthodox treatment is like working on a piece of fine jewellery with a pick-axe. The healing abilities of the body work extra hard in an attempt to eliminate the antibiotics, antihistamines, analgesics, diuretics and tranquilizers administered by doctors who are uninformed and frightened. The patient is too intent on instant symptom relief to consider probing in to why you chose to make yourself ill in the first place. While the body is dealing with these artificially introduced agents, it must continue to heal itself.
And listen to the language doctors use: 'the patient'. You are expected to patiently endure the doctor's ministrations and stumbling. You are expected to patiently endure the disease.
Psychologically, the consumption of drugs is synonymous with administering happiness. But drugs in the long term make things worse. If you wish to be well, you must look after yourself. You can be sorry that a parent won't look after you for the rest of your life, sorry that your parents did not do it perfectly when they had the chance. By taking pills, you are assuming the inventor, discoverer, manufacturer, prescriber and dispenser know more about you than you do and that in their collective wisdom, they will care for you. Taking the drug is like taking happiness. It represents the parents you had hoped for, who would make you feel secure, loved and happy. This crisis consists of both danger and opportunity. The danger is of deciding to remain loveless, helpless, hopeless and ill and the opportunity is to take full responsibility for yourself and to harness the power within.
The frequency and the nature of the remedies you take can help you understand how much you have relied upon remedies to keep yourself well. The medication is an integral part of your belief system. You will be able to wean yourself of the medication once you have established ways of caring for yourself.
You will find that behind most illness, there is the fear of taking full responsibility for who you are.
Some people who have decided to get well may in the early stages require the permission of a parent figure they regard as powerful, namely the doctor, to oversee their recovery. Placing themselves under the umbrella of a practitioner reduces the fear they experience when they start to take responsibility for themselves. In effect, they are using the authority status and protection of the doctor to override their own parent's messages.
The problem you run into there, unfortunately, is that modern general practitioners are little acquainted with the causes of illness and indeed it would be financially disastrous for them to regard disease as 'self-created and self-cured'.
An increasing number of clients are choosing to use the doctor as a resource centre, the healing arts as a means of understanding their illness and contract themselves to remove their illness when it no longer suits them to have it, that is when they no longer need it. In assuming responsibility for their disease, they assume the power to remove it.
Some people believe that their problem is the result of bungling on the part of the medical profession. Yet, why did you choose a medical practitioner that is dangerous? You have considerable intuition and if you repeatedly consult a person who proves unworthy, then you aren't looking after yourself. Your role in choosing an incompetent practitioner is established.
Forgiveness of both self and parents or 'dropping the past' cures more illnesses than antibiotics ever will. Nobody can cure anybody else, especially is that person had declared themselves incurable. When your attitude to your illness is established, a program can be used to establish the needs being met by the illness and safer ways worked out to satisfy those needs. The particular illness you decided upon will suit your purposes exactly and at a later time will provide much insight into your specific needs.
Diseases which are really a consequence of the collective family mentality are often thought as genetically inherited. However, in the first place, they are behavioural.
In "Getting Well Again", J Creighton in 1980, indicated that in the 18 months preceding the onset of cancer, a significant life event often occurred. This event was traumatic in some way and initiated or promoted the cancer. The death of a loved one, are the immediate circumstances used in the precipitating event which is just one of a long string of events which have confirmed the decision taken in childhood about what sort of place the world is. If a child decided that death was always an option if he became too miserable or lonely, then may contract cancer and die when his wife leaves him.
In the most general terms, if you have a happy personal life, are financially secure, and have achieved a level of spiritual grace, you are unlikely to be very ill, especially if you are about to take a holiday yachting about the Caribbean. On the other hand, someone who has come into a patch of 'bad luck' -his business has gone bankrupt, his relationship is stormy and he's working too hard or not at all- is more likely to be seen looking and feeling ill. When a client says that everything in his life is wonderful and couldn't be better, and that the only thing bugging him is his recurrent bronchitis, a doctor will have a hard time to believe him. If he's convincing about being very happy, then why does he need the pleasures of life to be interrupted by pain. Very often there will be a family background of achievement but an atmosphere of anxiety.
The child becomes less afraid when the situation is anxious (Mum and Dad fighting) because that's what he is used to and he know the rules. When things go right for him, he becomes scared. He may have no information on which to fall back in those good times, and that is anxiety-provoking. In order to make himself feel safer he makes himself ill, not seriously, and not something that will interrupt his world too much, but some niggly little thing like an intermittent chest infection. Hence the bronchitis. Awareness of the game will often be enough to change the behaviour, although this may not happen immediately and may be punctuated by remissions or return to the old pattern. On the other hand, someone who says that everything in his life is perfect is easy to distrust, seeing the agony on his face, and you may ask about his need to be seen to be functioning perfectly when he is not.
Your past history is a record of early life decisions translated by the body into physical complaints. Usually, you will have constructed life events which appear to correspond to the physical complaints, so that to the undiscerning, the illness appears to have been triggered by external events beyond your control. But most things that happen in life happen because we set them up. Often this is unconscious, reflecting a childhood decision about what we and the world are like.
Those decisions which resulted in a man being a street fighter rather than an astronomer, or a boxer rather than a beauty consultant, also determined that he suffers from heart disease instead of headaches, rheumatics rather than ruptures and venereal diseases rather than ethereal diseases. The frequency and severity of the diseases from which a person suffers tell whether the world has had its way with him, or he's had his way with the world. If he's been brought up with the clear instruction that he can take care of himself, then the latter will be the case. If he has no belief in his own power and is too frightened to use it, then he'll be suffering. He believes that the world is more powerful than he is and it can have its way with him. What he fails to realise is that the worlds can only have its way with him with his express permission. Usually he doesn't like to admit that permission has been given, and denies his power to even decide to be impotent.
Listening to every metaphor, family saying, social platitude and frivolous comment, usually passed off with a laugh, is invaluable in eliciting the reality of your disease. Developing awareness is the first step.
Telling yourself that in some way you created your disease will outrage you- because you are still protecting yourself. That's the best thing for you to do at this point, enjoy your outrage. In the future, you may feel safe enough to think about it.
Establishing the benefits, the secondary gains, if any, of the disease may or may not be helpful at this time. The pathology may be so longstanding as to be irreversible, but on the other hand, real gains can be made. The power exercised in the creation of the problem can be harnessed to remove it. This will be both frightening and exciting. The prize and the risk will always be balanced.
No one is a bigger authority on you than you. But you can still pick the brain of whoever makes himself available to help you. The reason why some people won't get well is because they prefer the illness to confronting certain of their fears.
Illness looks after uyou s well, though the pain may inconvenience you at times and make you downright miserable at others. When you decide to get the advantages of an illness for yourself in new ways, you can retain the old way of behaving until you have practiced the new way and are totally familiar with its operation.
The general consensus appears to be that one who eats a prudent diet, sleeps between 6 and 10 hours at night so as to awake refreshed, and takes an amount of exercise which will keep the heart and lungs active, is happiest and healthiest. Such a person will have a loving spouse, loving children, have interests outside the home, be intellectually stimulated and stimulating, have great sex at least 3 times a week and will be unafraid to masturbate or be known to masturbate. In life, there will be a fine balance of commitment, rest and recreation. Spiritually, you will be both surrendered and flexible, and interested in meditation. Others will notice your inner peace. You will be receptive to the political and social troubles of your times, have the strength to change the things you can, and the wisdom to accept those you can't. you will accept your own power to do as you wish, while both considering others and not accepting their burden as your own. Among your friends will be soulmates, perhaps one or two, up to 4 close friends and a number of acquaintances with whom you spend a little time. You have learned to live with paradox. And you are healthy.
As adults, children whose illness served the crucial function of ensuring care and a type of closeness often experience a worsening of the illness at times when they are stressed, out of control, and in need of emotional support. Their nervous system is conditioned to produce the illness in response to stress because, it in turns elicits the much-needed caring. You must find healthy ways to get your emotional needs met.
Accepted causes of illness
Common triggers to illness include trauma, exercise, microbes, drugs, toxins, allergens, foods, thoughts, images, memories, repetitive activities and social interactions. Triggers are often non-disease specific, but they tend to be specific to the individual.
Your prime task is to identify important triggers for your ailments and develop strategies for eliminating them or diminishing their virulence.For many there is a trigger so important that it deserves a separate status, it acts like a boundary in time. There might be a period of extreme stress, an acute infection, or exposure to some toxic substance.
