When the Body Says No

When the Body Says No provides numerous case studies of how repressed emotions contribute to chronic and difficult to treat illnesses via the stress response.  Actual stories are shared about people experiencing scleroderma, SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus), multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), cancer, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome and other pathologies.  The book is poignantly but tenderly written, using case studies and physiological concepts - written in layperson’s terms to avoid being prohibitively academic- to tie together the causal relationship between emotional repression and disease.

How is stress transmuted into illness?  “Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli.”  Maté further elaborates, "Disease is disharmony.  More accurately, it is an expression of an internal disharmony".  The new science of psycho-neuro-immunonology (PNI) draws the relationship between distant and sometimes unconscious repressed feelings to physiological manifestations of disease.
 
Medical texts maintain a biological cause of illness, despite extensive research implicating emotions in the causation of many diseases.  Auto immune disorders are a type of civil war, ravaging the body’s own tissues.  In one case Mate shares “Perhaps her body was doing what her mind could not: throwing off the relentless expectation that had been first imposed on the child and now was self-imposed in the adult—placing others above herself”.

To punctuate his point, Maté states, “When we have been prevented from learning how to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us.”

Gabor Maté M.D. is a Vancouver-based physician, author, seminar leader and acclaimed public speaker. His four books, all bestsellers in Canada, range in topic from Attention Deficit Disorder (Scattered Minds), to the mind/body unity and the influence of stress in health and illness (When The Body Says No), to the perilous loss of parental influence in
today’s culture (Hold On To Your Kids). His most recent book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, explores the biological and psychosocial roots of addiction. His books have been translated into twelve languages on five continents. His next book, to be published in 2010, will be The Making and Unmaking of Bullies and
Victims: A New Look at a Contemporary Malaise, co-written with developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld. He is also a former medical columnist for The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail.

Dr. Maté had a family practice for twenty years, during seven of which he also served as Medical Coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital. For the past twelve years he has worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV. In 2008, in addition to his many other speaking engagements, Dr. Maté was a guest lecturer at Washington State University and a visiting professor at McGill
University’s Faculty of Medicine. He was recently honoured with an Outstanding Alumnus Award from British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University.