Emotioanl Resistance and Physical Health

Emotional Resistance to Physical Health

We know that stress can cause disease and that suppressed anger or fear can make us sick. Negative thoughts and emotions can depress us and affect our immune system.

So pain or illness can be seen as the manifestation of an embedded emotional conflict. We can respond to illness or use illness either to mobilize ourselves for further psychological growth and enhanced physical health or to mire ourselves more deeply into disease and a victim position.

Health problems most often are an indication of a needed change in our attitude towards ourselves and our lives. Illness can be a physical representation of forces in all of us that oppose our wholeness, victimize us, stop our progress, and render us powerless.

For example, the disease herpes can represent a part of ourselves that is entrenched in feeling defective, contaminated, unwanted, unlovable, and rejected. This disease often represents an expression of unconscious sexual conflicts and feelings of shame and lack of forgiveness pertaining to our sexual conduct and our sexual identity.

All of us in varying degrees have an unconscious resistance to growth. Emotionally, growth can even feel like loss, not gain. If we become healthy, there will be nothing left to struggle for. Many of us are addicted to struggle or to feeling pressured. I knew a lawyer who would always manage to become ill just before a trial. Naturally, this turned his outer trial into a major inner trial that was suffused with the prospect of looking bad and being seen as ineffective when he appeared in court.

This unconscious compulsion to sabotage ourselves often stems from a buried inner conviction that we really don't deserve health, success, or happiness. Health and happiness feel foreign to us because they do not correspond with our expectations or who we think we are. Loss, deprivation, and feelings of neglect are more familiar to us than prosperity or feeling loved. Even the good in our lives causes anxiety in some of us because we expect it will be lost or taken away. Not succeeding helps us to avoid the expectation of a painful loss.

Sickness is an indicator of the depth and magnitude of our self-hatred, self-negation, guilt, and lack of forgiveness towards ourselves and others. Here are some of the ways our negative emotions can be acted out through illness.

1) Sickness as a way to connect with others. The major attention I received from my mother came in the form of discussions about my problems, particularly my physical problems. Getting sick as a child is one way to get our parents' attention. It becomes a way to feel close to others. For some, being healthy brings up the emotional conviction that they will feel alone and abandoned.

2) Sickness to get back at a parent or spouse. I had a client who exhausted herself to the point of serious illness by overworking and striving for accomplishment in her field. We discovered she was acting out anger towards her husband and her mother. Her motivation was fueled by this hidden feeling: "Okay mother, you insist that I work hard and succeed. I'll do what you want, but I'll kill myself in the process and then you'll see what you've done." Her sickness was an attempt to induce guilt in her mother and husband for how she felt they treated her. But, in effect her illness became a way to maintain the feeling of being victimized and enslaved by her mother's and husband's control.

3) Sickness to be a victim of neglectful people. Some people, especially codependents or what I call emotional caterers, go out of their way to the detriment of their own health to satisfy other people's needs. In return, they can get sick and thereby intensify the feeling of being neglected or not supported. Their unconscious protest is: "You see how far I go to help you. I'm willing to sacrifice myself, even my health, to show you how much I care. If only you gave me one-tenth of the support I give you!" Illness makes them even more a victim of uncaring people.

They use sickness as a way to feel let down and disappointed when others do not cater to them or take care of them according to their high expectations. Through illness they try to put the other person in the role of neglectful parent, recreating their childhood experience of feeling hurt when others (parents) did not respond to them as expected.

4) Sickness as retaliation against someone close to you. If you feel neglected or hurt by a spouse or partner, you can retaliate by becoming sick and thus unavailable to them. This is particularly common among partners of alcoholics or drug addicts. Getting sick is also a common response to feelings of powerlessness against the behaviors or actions of some family member.

5) Sickness as a way to resist the control of others. The person who is sick is able to reverse a situation in which he feels controlled or helpless, and thereby place others at the mercy of the conditions or requirements of his sickness. Developing food disorders is an example.

6) Sickness as a way to express dependency. Here an individual shifts responsibility for himself onto others. Such individuals include chronic "dependees" who often rely on guilt to get others to do things for them. Through their illness, they set others up to be pseudo-parents.

7) Sickness as one's identity. Some people become heavily invested in their disease as the primary way in which they know and experience themselves. One of my clients had a mother who was perpetually sick. The mother told her, "Nobody knows what it feels like to be sick like I am." She was invested in having the greatest pain and being the sickest, which gave her a strange form of comfort because it was the only way she knew to get attention or validation from others.

8) Sickness as a way to avoid commitment. How many of us have used sickness as a way of getting out of something we really don't want to do? If we are incapacitated in some way, the belief goes, others will not expect anything from us. Some people even feel that if they become healthy or successful, others will make more demands on them. If we are healthy, it is felt, we have more obligations to fulfill and more people to take care of. So illness can be a way of saying no or a way of isolating.

by Sandra Michaelson