After several recommendations and references, I have read Dr. Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says No. Even more than after reading The Wisdom of Your Body, I value the connection of mind, body, and spirit.

The two significant beliefs Mate drives are how deeply stress impacts the body and how counterintuitive emotional repression is to the health of any human.

Much of the stress Mate shares from his patient’s stories stem from their relationships.

The nature of stress is not always the usual stuff that people think of. It’s not the external stress of war or money loss or somebody dying; it is actually the internal stress of having to adjust oneself to somebody else. -Chapter 6, “You Are Part of This Too, Mom”

These stories include mostly family relationships. In chapter 15, “The Biology of Loss,” Mate reveals just how encompassing the consequences can be.

It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

Much of the research on major illnesses like cancer, ALS, Alzheimer’s, and autoimmune diseases, Mate says, reveals how destructive repressed emotion is. For example, here’s a note from chapter 7, “Stress, Hormones, Repression and Cancer”:

In numerous studies of cancer, the most consistently identified risk factor is the inability to express emotion, particularly the feelings associated with anger. The repression of anger is not an abstract emotional trait that mysteriously leads to disease. It is a major risk factor because it increases physiological stress on the organism. It does not act alone but in conjunction with other risk factors that are likely to accompany it, such as hopelessness and lack of social support.

When my father died from cancer at the age of 40, no one discussed these types of factors. The only ones my 12-year-old ears heard regarded eating and work habits. Makes me ask many questions that I’ll never know the answers.

Mate doesn’t have all the answers, of course, but he does offer some hope in the final three chapters, which I’ll share in a second post.