Read Online When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gabor Maté
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speak emotional language. She simply had no vocabulary to express her feelings directly: any question related to emotion would be answered by thoughts, delivered in a hyperarticulate but confused fashion. She seemed to perceive the world through abstract ideas instead of felt experience. “All of the emotions seemed completely frozen,” confirms Neufeld.
What froze Alexa was her overwhelming fear of abandonment. Given up by her birth parents, she had never established a connection with her adoptive mother. “There was nothing in that relationship; it never worked,” says Dr. Neufeld, who came to know Alexa closely in her last three years of life. “The adoptive mother had another child whom she favoured, and there was nothing Alexa could do, try as she might. She became estranged as an adolescent, finally, because she gave up. Until then, she worked desperately to make a connection with her adoptive mother and couldn’t. It was a total vacuum. Alexa felt like there was a huge cavern where the sense of self should be.” Her first marriage quickly fell apart. She grew up believing she had to take care of everybody. “There was never any respite in her,” says Neufeld. “There was no internal resting place.”
In a 1970 research article, two psychiatrists at the Yale University School of Medicine, Walter Brown and Peter Mueller, recorded dramatically similar impressions of ALS patients. “They invariably evoked admiration and respect from all staff who came into contact with them,” wrote Drs. Brown and Mueller.
“Characteristic was their attempt to avoid asking for help.”
3 This Yale study of ten patients employedinterviews, clinical evaluations and self-administered psychological tests. The authors concluded that people with ALS seemed to have two lifelong patterns distinguishing them: rigidly competent behaviour—that is, the inability to ask for or receive help, and the chronic exclusion of so-called negative feelings. “Hard, steady work without recourse to help from others was pervasive,” the study notes. There seemed to have been a “habitual denial, suppression or isolation of … fear, anxiety, and sadness…. Most expressed the necessity to be cheerful…. [Some] spoke casually of their deterioration or did so with engaging smiles.” The conclusions of this 1970 Yale paper were not confirmed by a study seven years later, at the Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. One might say the jury is out, except that the Yale study is consistent with everything that can possibly be read about ALS patients, observed about them, or told by clinicians working with them. Studies in psychology—an art trying desperately to dress itself up as a pure science—often find only what the particular researchers have the eyes to see.
“Why Are Patients with ALS So Nice?” was the title of an intriguing paper presented by neurologists from the Cleveland Clinic at an international symposium in Munich a few years ago. 4 It discussed the impression of many clinicians that people with Lou Gehrig’s disease nearly all seem to “cluster at the MOST PLEASANT end” of the personality spectrum, in contrast to persons with other diseases.
At the Cleveland Clinic, a major referral centre for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the protocol for suspected ALS patients begins with electrodiagnostic testing (EDX). By measuring electrical conductivity, EDX detects the viability or death of motor neurons, the nerve cells that act on muscle fibres. Niceness is commonly perceived by staff to be a feature of the ALS personality, reports Dr. Asa J. Wilbourn, senior author of the paper. His article noted: “This occurs so consistently that whenever the EDX technologists have completed their work and deliver the results … they usually accompany it with some comment [e.g., ‘This patient cannot have ALS, he (or she) is not nice enough…. ’] In spite of the briefness of their contact with the patients, and the obvious unscientific
What froze Alexa was her overwhelming fear of abandonment. Given up by her birth parents, she had never established a connection with her adoptive mother. “There was nothing in that relationship; it never worked,” says Dr. Neufeld, who came to know Alexa closely in her last three years of life. “The adoptive mother had another child whom she favoured, and there was nothing Alexa could do, try as she might. She became estranged as an adolescent, finally, because she gave up. Until then, she worked desperately to make a connection with her adoptive mother and couldn’t. It was a total vacuum. Alexa felt like there was a huge cavern where the sense of self should be.” Her first marriage quickly fell apart. She grew up believing she had to take care of everybody. “There was never any respite in her,” says Neufeld. “There was no internal resting place.”
In a 1970 research article, two psychiatrists at the Yale University School of Medicine, Walter Brown and Peter Mueller, recorded dramatically similar impressions of ALS patients. “They invariably evoked admiration and respect from all staff who came into contact with them,” wrote Drs. Brown and Mueller.
“Characteristic was their attempt to avoid asking for help.”
3 This Yale study of ten patients employedinterviews, clinical evaluations and self-administered psychological tests. The authors concluded that people with ALS seemed to have two lifelong patterns distinguishing them: rigidly competent behaviour—that is, the inability to ask for or receive help, and the chronic exclusion of so-called negative feelings. “Hard, steady work without recourse to help from others was pervasive,” the study notes. There seemed to have been a “habitual denial, suppression or isolation of … fear, anxiety, and sadness…. Most expressed the necessity to be cheerful…. [Some] spoke casually of their deterioration or did so with engaging smiles.” The conclusions of this 1970 Yale paper were not confirmed by a study seven years later, at the Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. One might say the jury is out, except that the Yale study is consistent with everything that can possibly be read about ALS patients, observed about them, or told by clinicians working with them. Studies in psychology—an art trying desperately to dress itself up as a pure science—often find only what the particular researchers have the eyes to see.
“Why Are Patients with ALS So Nice?” was the title of an intriguing paper presented by neurologists from the Cleveland Clinic at an international symposium in Munich a few years ago. 4 It discussed the impression of many clinicians that people with Lou Gehrig’s disease nearly all seem to “cluster at the MOST PLEASANT end” of the personality spectrum, in contrast to persons with other diseases.
At the Cleveland Clinic, a major referral centre for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the protocol for suspected ALS patients begins with electrodiagnostic testing (EDX). By measuring electrical conductivity, EDX detects the viability or death of motor neurons, the nerve cells that act on muscle fibres. Niceness is commonly perceived by staff to be a feature of the ALS personality, reports Dr. Asa J. Wilbourn, senior author of the paper. His article noted: “This occurs so consistently that whenever the EDX technologists have completed their work and deliver the results … they usually accompany it with some comment [e.g., ‘This patient cannot have ALS, he (or she) is not nice enough…. ’] In spite of the briefness of their contact with the patients, and the obvious unscientific
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