Do you have trouble saying NO? Please read on.
Do you always put others first? Please read on.
Do you dismiss this behaviour as “I’ve always done it” or “That’s just what I was tort”? Please read on.
Have you ever felt stress and/or anxiety trying to do everything and please everyone?
Have you ever wondered or even thought, can stress be transmuted into illness?
Stress is more often than not passed off as “normal”, “need it to survive”, or “part of life”. But there are stressors in our lives that we ignore, justify and then suppress the causes or reach for distractions such as alcohol, sex, gaming, overworking etc.
People pleasing, being a rescuer, putting others first, and constantly ignoring ourselves for everything and everyone else is a behaviour most often created in our childhood. It can be an unconscious decision made at an early age to gain validation or attention or to try and stop unwanted abuse or to stay under the radar etc. The habit is well myelinated and perfected by the time people become adults. Then, it can, not always, lead to dysfunctional relationships in various areas of life.
In Dr Gabor Mate’s book When the body say’s NO, he states he found in his research “almost none of my patients with serious disease had ever learned to say no.” He went on to say:
“Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence and are influenced by -the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body’s physical states. When emotions are repressed, as Mary had to do in her childhood search for security, this inhibition disarms the body’s defenses against illness.
Repression- dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm- disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.
During the seven years I was medical coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, I saw many patients with chronic
Illness whose emotional histories resembled Mary’s. Similar dynamics and ways of coping were present in the people who came to us for palliation with cancers or degenerative neurological processes like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis……..In my private family practice, I observed these same patterns in people I treated for multiple sclerosis, inflammatory ailments of the bowel such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, migraine, skin discordant ways of coping were present in the people who came to us for palliation with cancers or degenerative neurological processes like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…….In my private family practice, I observed these same patterns in people I treated for multiple sclerosis, inflammatory ailments of the bowel such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, migraine, skin disorders, endometriosis and many other conditions. In important areas of their lives, almost none of my patients with serious disease had ever learned to say no.
Dr Gabor Mate’
Awareness is the key to change. When we change our habits, we can change the trajectory of our life, our health and our mindset.
