How our Emotions and Perceptions Affect our Health
In her book, Awakening Intuition, Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D. points out that trauma such as physical abuse, natural disasters, witnessing violence, military combat, etc. increases levels of disassociation. When this happens certain emotions are split off and lie in the body tissue or certain areas of the brain. If they are not properly addressed, they can create disease in the body. It’s not the memory of the event itself or the actual trauma of the past that causes our unpleasantness in the present. What the memory means to us or how we interpret the memory and the way we react to what that memory evokes is important.
Scientists have demonstrated this discovery. In one study women who were to have mammograms were questioned about events in their lives over the previous five to eight years. Researchers discovered that they were able to predict which women would be found to have cancer on the basis of the answers they gave to those questions. Those women who had experienced a severe life event – living through a natural disaster, or loss of a loved one or loss of a job – in the last five to eight years were consistently more likely to be diagnosed with cancer. Even if a woman had experienced trauma in her early life, it was not that event that triggered her problem. She did not come down with cancer because she had been a victim of incest and had never had the capacity to love. It was because of the way she reacted to the more recent crisis.
A famous study raised rats in boxes where they regularly received electric shocks from birth. This is the way it feels when many people grow up in an atmosphere of trauma. The rats grew up with the shocks, and after they became adults, they were allowed to leave their boxes and were given the opportunity to move to other boxes, where they would receive no electric shocks. Well, they all chose to return to their original boxes, and the memory of life with electric shocks.
The rats were happier reliving their known distress than trying out unknown possible future health. They had learned that helplessness was the only way of life. In their boxes with the electric shock, they were in control. This reflects some of the same ways many of us live all our lives with being overburdened at work or being unhappy in an unfulfilling relationship. We feel as though we can handle it because it’s familiar. The thought of changing jobs, going out on our own, or leaving the relationship and being alone is terrifying. It’s much easier staying where we are.
Unfortunately for the rats, however, their helplessness ultimately affected their immunity. They were use to the world feeling unsafe and they would continually experience shock. Even though they had learned to tolerate this emotionally, their bodies could not withstand it. Body intuition and body memories always win. Eventually our minds block out the number of shocks we feel. But the body keeps score. With each shock our white blood cells and immunity decreases. Over time, the rat’s immune systems broke down, becoming receptive to letting in all kinds of disease. The white blood cells became the physical incarnation of the rat’s belief that they were constantly vulnerable to attack from the outside world.
Like the rats, most of us tend to relive past trauma repeatedly. Past memories prepare us physically and emotionally for additional shocks. At the time of the trauma in the past, we secreted the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine. These prepare us for the next attack. As a result, we are more and more receptive and prepared for attack. When we find ourselves in an environment that evokes a traumatic memory, we interpret it as being just like the past. Our bodies experience it as if a real trauma were occurring, even though it’s only a memory. We’re only reliving a pattern, a pattern in which we will recreate traumas in the present and the future.
Memories and experiences and the emotions associated with them are not just in our brains but are encoded systematically in all the tissues and organs of our bodies. These memories and emotions speak to us through the symptoms and disease in our bodily organs. A substantial number of scientific studies have indicated that certain emotional and psychological patterns are associated with diseases in specific organs; other studies support the link between specific memories and emotions and certain organ-specific diseases, such as breast cancer, coronary heart disease and Parkinson's disease. Louise Hay, in her book, You Can Heal Your Life, gives a list of symptoms and the emotional cause of each.
