Five years ago, I was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with an old friend who said that a few months before he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I told him about my mother: she had cancer of the colon; fifteen years ago she had an operation and since then it feels fine.
WHAT KIND OF HELP REALLY HELPS?
Then I described various theories which have invented my sisters to explain why she got cancer. We had plenty of them, my favorite, perhaps, was the fact that she was the first wife of our father and too little on the other.
If she were not the wife of the breeder, we decided she could have a vegetarian food, without animal fats, which are believed to lead to bowel cancer.
I’m sure I was influenced that I had a disease…
Another theory was to ensure that her family always knew how to Express emotions, and this too could be the cause of the disease. The years passed and we felt more comfortable with our theories and stories about this difficult event.
My friend, who clearly thought a lot about cancer, he said words that just rocked me:
– Can’t you see what you’re doing? he asked. You treat your mother like a foreign object. Develop theories about it.
When others talk about the man, he perceives it as violence. I know that. When my friends come up with different ideas about why I developed cancer, I take that as a presumptuous intrusion into my business. I have a feeling that they are not motivated by concern for me and it is most definitely not wish to support me in difficult period of life.
Their “theory” is what they do to me, not what they are doing to help me. I guess the idea that I have cancer, so it scares them that they need to find the cause, explanation, meaning. They come up with theories to help not to me but to themselves, and these theories cause me great pain.
I was in shock. I never thought about the background of their theories, it never occurred to me, what feelings they evoke from my mother. Although none of us told her about our ideas, I’m sure she felt it: they were literally hanging in the air. And this atmosphere is not very conducive to confidence, intimacy, or requests for assistance. I suddenly realized that I had made myself completely useless for the mother during the hardest crisis in her life.
This case opened the door for me, it was the beginning of a change: I became more sympathetic to people suffering from some disease, got more respect their personal space, I became kinder to them and lost confidence in their theories.
I began to understand that only partly my theory is based on the desire to become a “judge” – the deeper they are based on the unspoken fear. Began to clear up their hidden meaning. Instead of saying: “I’m worried about you, what can I do to help?”, – actually I said, “What did you do wrong? What was your mistake? How come you lost?” And, of course, “How do I protect myself?”
I realized that I was driven by fear – the unspoken, underlying fear, and it makes me invent stories in which the world is too clear, and the man can drive anything…
Over the years I talked with many cancer patients, most diagnosed with it recently. At first I really didn’t know what to say. The easiest was for me to talk about their experiences of cancer patient, but I soon realized that often the person doesn’t want to hear about it.
It turned out that the person was the only way to listen to him. Only when I heard that they are trying to tell me, I understand what they need, what problems they face and what kind of help can really help them in this time.
Because people suffering from such a stubborn and unpredictable disease like cancer, there are many different stages, it is especially important to learn to listen to them and understand what they need.
Sometimes, especially when people are confronted with the need to make a decision about their desired treatment, they need information. They may want me to tell you about available treatment options and helped to understand their essence.
If they decided on the treatment plan, additional information to them, as a rule, not necessary, though, perhaps, it is the easiest and least scary of what I can offer them.
Now they need support. They do not have to listen about the dangers of radiation, chemotherapy, or Mexican hospital they have chosen, – choice in such situations becomes difficult and the result of much speculation.
At this point, new considerations about the healers, treatment methods, therapies can only again to plunge them into confusion. They may think that I doubt of the correctness of their choice, and it’s only inflame their self-doubt.
Decision about the treatment of his cancer that I took were not easy. I know that the decisions that have to be taken in such situations are among the most difficult in life. I have learned one truth: I never understand what decision would I take on the other person. And this truth has allowed me to genuinely support others.
My lovely friend, who helped me feel beautiful even when I lost my hair, recently said, “You chose not what I would choose, but it doesn’t matter”. I was grateful to her for what she told me then, in that period, which undoubtedly was the most difficult in my life. I said, “But you can’t know what would you choose really. I chose something you think you would not have chosen. But I chose what I thought I will never choose”.
I never would have thought that he would agree to chemotherapy. I have serious fears associated with the penetration of poisons into the body, fears about their long-term impact on the immune system. I have long resisted such treatment, but in the end decided that, despite all the drawbacks, chemotherapy was my best chance for a cure…
I’m sure I was influenced that I had a disease that the effect of it was unconscious and unintentional, and I know have a huge impact, this time conscious, to become healthy and maintain their health.
I try to focus on what you can do now; digging into the past too easily turns into self-incrimination, which does not facilitate, and complicates making the right, meaningful decisions in the present.
In addition, I am well aware that there are many other factors beyond my conscious or unconscious will. Thank God, we are all part of something much bigger. And I like to realize it, even though it means that I have in my hands less control.
In addition, we are all too closely linked with each other and with the surrounding world – such a wonderful life-a complicated thing, to be able to simply say: “You create your own reality”.
The belief that I control or create my own reality, in fact, tends to erase from my life all that rich, complex, mysterious and able to come to the aid ofs. In the name of the control that faith denies the whole network of relationships that nourish me and all of us.
The idea that we make our own reality (and hence their disease), the important and necessary because it amends the theory that we are completely dependent on higher powers, and disease come to us exclusively from the outside. But these amendments should not lead us too far. Often, they become inadequate reaction based on too much simplification.
I have a feeling that this installation is in its extreme form negate the good work that it is, and too often used selfishly and thoughtless, separates us from other people and carries a risk.
I believe that we are able to perceive those things more clearly. As Stephen Levine says, this installation is half – truth, dangerous because of its half-heartedness.
More correct to say that we affect our own reality.
It’s closer to the truth; it is a place for effective conscious effort, and for the full wonders of the mysterious outside world…
If someone asks me: “Why you decided to get cancer?”, – I often think that the source came from some Kingdom of the saints, from a world where all is good, while I bad. This issue does not involve constructive introspection. People who are more sensitive to the complexity of the situation, asking the questions: “How did you decide to use your cancer?”
I am glad this question: it helps me realize that I can do now, helps to feel your strength, support and involves the test in the positive sense of the word. Asking this question you see my cancer is not a punishment because I did something wrong, and difficult test, in which, besides other things, there is the potential for growth, and it helps me to look at his illness with the same point of view.
When I’m talking to a person who has recently been diagnosed with cancer, with a person who has a relapse, or a person who for many years got tired of fighting with cancer, I remind myself: to help it, I don’t have to give concrete ideas or advice.
Listen to – has help. To give something is already using.
I try to be emotionally open to them to overcome their fears and get in touch with their fears, to establish human contact. I think there are a lot of terrible what together we can laugh, if we allowed ourselves to get scared.
I try to resist the temptation to demand something from them, even that they fought for their lives, changed themselves or died, remaining conscious. I try not to push people in the direction where I would go myself (or I think that would go in their place). Try not to forget about their fears that one day can be in their place.
I have to constantly learn to be friends with sick people, and not to perceive sickness as a defeat. I try to use their failures, weakness and disease as the reason more compassionate to themselves and to others, and not to forget that serious things are not to be taken too seriously. I try to remember the possibilities of mental and spiritual healing that surrounds me in the face of real pain and real suffering, appealing to my sympathy.
Whether we are for their disease?
While I continued to work on the book. One of the chapters – “Health, wholeness and healing” – was published in the journal “new age” next to the article Treia, under the new title “are we ourselves bring on ourselves sickness?”. I won’t reproduce it entirely, just briefly outline the main provisions, because it represented the culmination of my thinking on the complex problem with which tray and I fought the last three years.
1. The fundamental assertion of the eternal philosophy is that Great Chain of Being is the basis of existence and men and women. This means that we have matter, body, mind, soul and spirit.
2. At any disease it is crucial to determine at which level or levels it originally arose – on a physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.
3. It is very important in every case to apply the treatments are equal in terms of the cause of the disease, as the primary (but not the only) treatment. When physical ailments physical therapy, emotional instability psychotherapy, with spiritual crises – methods of spiritual healing. If the reasons are mixed – to combine different methods.
4. This is so important because if you made a mistake in diagnosis, to link their disease with higher level, will give birth to a sense of guilt, and if lower – the feeling of hopelessness. In both cases, the treatment efficiency will be zero, and the side effect will be a sense of guilt or hopelessness, occurring solely because of an error in diagnosis.
For example, if you got hit by a car and broke his leg is a physical injury, requiring physical intervention: it is necessary to connect the broken part and put a cast on. This is the treatment adequate level. Don’t sit on the street and visualize how fused is your foot. This technique mental level, and it will be inefficient at the level of the physical.
Moreover, if others say that the accident caused only your thoughts and you have to know the power of thought to mend his leg, the only thing you will achieve is guilt and low self-esteem. Here is an example of complete mismatch of levels and methods of treatment.
On the other hand, if you suffer, for example, from low self-esteem because internally agreed with a life scenario in which you man a bad or defective, – it is a problem of mental level, which responds to the intervention at the same level, such as visualization and affirmation (that is, rewriting the script, which deals with cognitive therapy).
Treatment on a physical level (for example, the reception megavitamins or change of diet) will not produce much effect (except that this problem is caused by the vitamin imbalance). If you use only funds a lower level, in the end, you will find a sense of hopelessness due to the fact that the treatment is not helping.
In my opinion, the General scheme of treatment for any ailment is to start from the lowest level and move higher. In the first place – to check for physical causes. Check with the utmost care. Then move on to the possible emotional reasons. Then – mental and spiritual.
This is especially important because many diseases once considered diseases exclusively of spiritual or psychological origin, although we now know that the main role played by physical and genetic factors.
Previously it was believed that asthma is caused by excessive maternal care. Now it is known that the causes and development of this disease are associated primarily with biophysical factors.
The cause of tuberculosis was considered to be emotionalism, the cause of gout and moral depravity. There was a popular belief that people with a certain temperament are predisposed to arthritis, she just could not stand the test of time.
The only thing that brought these myths to the fact that patients were instilling a sense of guilt, and the treatment did not work, because it belonged to another level.
I don’t want to say that the methods of treatment of another level may not be useful as additional supporting means. Almost certainly can. In the simple example with a broken leg relaxation techniques, visualization, affirmations, and if necessary, and psychotherapy – all of them will help to create a more balanced atmosphere in which physical healing will flow easier and quite possibly faster.
But nothing good will happen if we, recognizing the importance of the psychological and spiritual aspects, let us say that the leg was broken due to some shortages in the psychological or emotional realm.
If people found that seriously ill, then it may begin to occur a significant, profound change, but this does not mean that the illness happened because of the fact that he needed this change.
This is about like saying if you got a cold and was cured by aspirin, it means that cause of a cold was that you don’t have enough aspirin.
Of course, most serious illnesses do not occur on a single isolated level. Everything that happens at the same level in the same plane, in varying degrees, affects others.
A state of emotional, mental or spiritual structures almost always affects physical illness and physical healing, just as physical illness can greatly affect higher levels.
A broken leg is likely to entail emotional and psychological effects. In systems theory this is called “upward causation” when the lower level becomes a cause of certain events at a higher. And there is a reverse trend of “downward causation”, when the higher level becomes a cause of or influence on what is happening on lower.
Thus, the question is, how much due to the “downward causality,” generates our thoughts and emotions the mind causes physical illness. The answer is: much stronger than previously thought, but not as much as I think.
A new scientific direction psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) has found convincing evidence that thoughts and emotions have a direct effect on the immune system. This effect is small but noticeable. Of course, it is quite natural, given the axiom that all levels have an impact, even the weakest, to other levels.
But since medicine was in its infancy as a science, focusing exclusively on the physical level, and ignored the impact of higher levels of physical illness (“Ghost in the machine”), STUMPS and made the necessary adjustments, providing a more balanced view. The mind affects the body; this effect is small, but hardly insignificant.
With this in mind to summarize: the psychological state plays a role in any disease. I fully agree that we should make maximum use of this component. If other factors are in balance, it can be enough to tip the balance toward health or disease, but the result is not only that.
Thus, as written by Steven Locke and Douglas Colligan in the “Inner healer” (“The Healer Within”), any disease ultimately has a psychological component, and a healing process is always influenced by psychology.
However, the authors continue, the problem is that people usually confuse the terms “psychosomatic”, which means that physical illness may be affected by psychosomatic factors, and “psychogenetic”, which means that the disease occurs only due to psychological factors.
The authors state: “the correct understanding of the term every disease should be recognized psychosomatic – maybe it’s time to abandon the concept of “psychosomatic”. As and the General public, and some physicians use the terms “psychosomatic” (meaning that the mind affects physical health) and “psychogenetic” (meaning that the mind can be the cause of disease) interchangeably.
Thus, the concept of “psychosomatic disease” loses its meaning. As pointed out by Robert Ader: “We’re not talking about the causes of disease and about the interaction between psychosocial processes of psychological adaptation and emerged earlier, biological factors.”
The authors themselves mention heredity, lifestyle, drug use, place of residence, occupation, age and personality. It is the interaction of these factors (I would add here more existential and spiritual), belonging to all levels, determine the causes and the course of the development of physical disease. To isolate one of them and ignore the rest – means to engage in an impermissible simplification.
But in this case, where did the notion that physical illness can be caused and cured only by the human mind? They say that it is rooted in the greatest of mystical, spiritual and transcendental world traditions. Here, in my opinion, the lawyers of the new age come on shaky ground. Jeanne Achterberg, author of “Imagination in healing” (“Imagery in Healing”), which I highly recommend, says that this view, historically, goes back to schools “new” or “metaphysical” thinking, emerged on the basis of (incorrect) interpretations of Emerson and Thoreau, the transcendentalists of New England, many of which were based on Eastern mysticism. Schools of “new thinking” (of which the most famous “Christian science”) confused the correct thesis that “Divinity does” thesis “Because I are one with God, I create all.”
This statement, in my opinion, leads to two erroneous conclusionsthat Emerson and Thoreau expressed sharp disagreement.
The first – that God is a progenitor of the universe, separate from herself, who continually intervenes in the course of things, instead of being the immediate Reality of this universe, its such-ness, or Condition.
Second – that our ego is integral with this “God-ancestor” and so can invade the surrounding universe and to dispose of it. I do not see in the mystical traditions there are no grounds for such opinion.
Lawyers themselves new age say that this statement is based on the principle of karma, which States that the circumstances of your present life are the result of your thoughts and actions from a past life. According to Hinduism and Buddhism, truth in this. But even if it were true (which, of course, not), then the adherents of the new age, I believe, overlooked one crucial fact: according to these traditions, the circumstances of the present life are really the result of thoughts and actions from a past life and your present thoughts and actions will have an impact – but not on present, and a future life, the new incarnation. In any case, your present thoughts does not create a current reality.
However, I don’t believe in karma in this sense. This rather primitive view, which is consistently specified (and largely rejected) the later schools of Buddhism, claiming that not everything that happens to you is the result of your past actions.
As explained by Namkhai Norbu, a Dzogchen master (which is considered the pinnacle of Buddhist teachings): “there Are diseases caused by karma or previous life circumstances. But there are illnesses generated by the energy emanating from others, from outside. There are also illnesses that are provoked by what we consume – food, or some other combination of factors. There are diseases caused by accidents. Finally, there are all kinds of diseases related to the environment”. I want to say that no karma in its primitive sense, no more complicated exercises do not give grounds for a conclusion, which makes the new age.
Where did this conclusion? Here I’m going to go a different way than the tray, and to Express their own theory about why people share these views. I’m not going to give sympathetic consideration to these views because they are the cause of many sufferings.
I’m going to put them on the shelves, to classify, to impose on the pin because I am sure that these ideas are dangerous, and should be pinned on the pin at least in order to not cause more pain.
My thoughts are not directed against the many people who believe in these ideas wholeheartedly, naively and without harm to others.
I mean national leaders of the movement – those who are satisfied with the seminars on which to create some kind of own reality; those who organize workshops where, for example, explain that cancer arises solely out of a sense of desperation; those who explained that poverty is a result of your own actions, and the reasons for any failures in you.
Perhaps these people are full of the best intentions, but, in my opinion, they are nevertheless dangerous because it diverts our attention from the real issues – physical, legal, ethical, socio-economic or environmental issues that really urgently require elaboration.
In my opinion, these views, especially the belief that you create your reality, are concepts of the second level.
They have all the hallmarks of infant and mythical worldview inherent in the narcissistic personality its disorders, including delusions of grandeur, narcissism and belief in its omnipotence.
Man does not distinguish between his inner world and external objects and believes that controlling your thoughts, it can magically completely control the external objects.
I am convinced that hyperindividualist American culture reached peak in the era of the “me”decade, has led to the degradation to magical and narcissistic levels. I (along with Robert bell and Dick Anthony) is convinced that the destruction of many of cementing the structures of society that took place at that time forced people to access their own resources, and this has also contributed to the revival of narcissistic tendencies.
And together with practicing psychologists, I am convinced that under the veil of narcissism hiding the irritation, which is most noticeable in the following statement (but not only there): “I don’t wish you harm; I love you. But if you’re going to contradict me, you will incur a disease that will kill you. Don’t argue with me, agree with what you yourself create your own reality, and then you’ll feel better, then you will survive.” This statement is based only on the narcissistic and borderline pathologies
