Simona’s Reviews > When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection > Status Update

“…people suffer when their boundaries are blurred…. In the final analysis, disease itself is a boundary question. When we look at the research that predicts who is likely to become ill, we find that the people at greatest risk are those who experienced the most severe boundary invasions before they were able to construct an autonomous sense of self.”

“Illness not only has a history but also tells a history. It is a culmination of a lifelong history of struggle for self.”

“Do I live my life, according to my own deepest truths, or in order to fulfill someone else’s expectations? How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own and how much has been in service to a self-image I originally created in the belief it was necessary to please my parents?”

“What matters are the child’s unconscious perceptions, based on his innermost interpretations of his interactions with the world. Those interpretations, embedded at the cellular level, constitute the biology of belief that governs so much of what we feel, what we do and how we react to events. A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases…is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs.”

Where parenting fails to communicate unconditional acceptance to the child, it is because of the fact that the child receives the parents love not as the parent wishes, but as it is reflected through the parents personality. If the parent is stressed,harbors unresolved anxiety or is agitated by unmet emotional needs, the child is likely to find herself in situations of proximate abandonment regardless of intentions

“Even more universal is emotional deprivation… In other words, the angry child got into trouble and experienced rejection. The anger and the rejection had to be deflected inside, against the self, in order to preserve the attachment relationship with the parent. That, in turn, leads to the ‘strong feelings of inadequacy and a poor self-concept’ researchers have recognized in people with rheumatoid disease.”