The Divided Mind by John E. Sarno

Author:John E. Sarno
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-12T18:15:00+00:00

The principles of the new paradigm are dramatically illustrated in the case of a patient I saw two or three years ago.

Jim, forty-four, was a tall, slim, very successful, and recently married African-American man. Jim had everything going for him, but was tragically diagnosed with incurable metastatic cancer. He was referred to me because he had recently developed moderately severe hypertension, even though he had lost thirty pounds, which if anything should have lowered his blood pressure. With no other apparent cause, it would seem logical to blame his hypertension on severe distress concerning his diagnosis and poor prognosis. However, and I will never forget his answer, when I asked him if he was very upset he responded, seriously and not sarcastically, “No, I’m not upset. Why should I be upset?” He truly was not upset!

This is a classic example of denial—denial of emotions that might be too painful to bear consciously. If Jim had been distraught, everyone adhering to the old mindbody paradigm would have readily attributed his hypertension to the anxiety. The old paradigm, however, does not make sense in this case. The new paradigm, which focuses on repression and lack of awareness of emotion, does. In fact, no other explanation, medical or psychological, can make sense of this case.

Jim’s case serves as a dramatic counterpoint to Susan’s case discussed earlier in the chapter. Susan coped very painfully with her son’s fatal cancer without any increase in her blood pressure. Jim was calm, but his blood pressure climbed and remained elevated. Together, these two examples illustrate the important reciprocal relationship I see repeatedly between the emotional and autonomic reactions to chronic stress.

People who tend to experience severe emotional distress in severely stressful life circumstances are much less likely to develop hypertension than people who repress the emotion and are not distressed.

Those who repress emotions related to overwhelming stress or trauma, past or present, often cope very well because they are not paralyzed by emotional distress. Repression enables us to move on and function in the aftermath of severe trauma. However, without sooner or later confronting the emotion consciously, we are more likely to ultimately suffer psychological consequences or physical consequence such as hypertension or other poorly understood psychosomatic conditions.

A very telling example that again illustrates the lack of relationship between emotional distress and hypertension, and is consistent with the opposite paradigm that links hypertension to repressed emotion, is the dramatic condition known as malignant essential hypertension. This severest form of essential hypertension, if left untreated, will result in stroke, kidney failure, or death within a year, even in people in their forties. Decades of studies have failed to uncover a cause.

If emotional distress caused hypertension, it would seem likely to be more evident in people with severe and unequivocal hypertension than in those with borderline or mild hypertension, yet the opposite seems evident. People with malignant essential hypertension almost invariably seem to be, and are, the nicest people one could hope to meet, regardless of the circumstances of their life.

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