Gabor Maté is an international bestseller and renowned speaker. He’s a family doctor, palliative care practitioner, and psychiatrist. You might have heard of him from doing THAT interview with Prince Harry earlier in the year (which he has since said he regrets agreeing to the associated paywall).
I initially picked up his book, “When the body says no: The cost of hidden stress” at the airport after hearing Maté speak on the Diary of a CEO podcast with Steve Bartlett where he piqued my interest in his approach to understanding stress and trauma.
In this book, Maté brings countless client histories and academic research to provide insight on how stress and repressed emotions manifest in common physical symptoms and illnesses including arthritis, cancer, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, endometriosis, fibromyalgia, heart disease, irritable bowel disease, migraines, multiple sclerosis, and other immune disorders and skin conditions.
Importantly (and thankfully), he also offers guidance on what we can do ourselves to support healing.
Maté invites us to view this information as an opportunity for “awareness and responsibility” as opposed to blame or shame which helps ease discomfort that many a reader may feel when getting on board with the concept that links cancers and illnesses to stress and emotional repression.
Maté brings the reader closer to his perspective by first explaining how emotions interact with functioning:
“Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical, and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence – and are influenced by – the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and…substances that help govern the body’s physical states”.
Secondly, he explains how emotions can be transmuted into illness:
“Repression – dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm – disorganises and confuses our physiological defences…becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors”.
Maté doesn’t just consider the mind and body to be linked as this description creates a sense of two entities. Instead, he offers “mindbody” (adopted here throughout) and references Plato’s dialogue to drive his point that mind and body are together as one:
“This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole”.
Here Maté shows us that he isn’t presenting a new finding, that actually the struggle in curing illness was identified thousands of years ago as being the lack of understanding of the mindbody experience.
Maté points out that associated research was conducted over the centuries, but which seemed to get lost in a “Bermuda Triangle”.
Fortunately, perspectives are finally beginning to return to this concept and there’s a whole field dedicated to studying “the ways in which psyche – the mind and its content of emotions – profoundly interacts with the body’s nervous system and how both…form an essential link with our immune defences”. This field is called psychoneuroimmunology.
We hear a lot about stress in today’s climate, but do we really know what it is? Maté breaks it down into 3 components:
- Stressor: the event or stimulus
- Interpretation: processing of meaning completed by nervous system and brain
- Response: physiological and behavioural reactions
What this means is that no one event is “stressful”. When a particular event occurs, one person might become highly stressed, another might be slightly stressed, another might not be stressed at all. It depends on how that event is interpreted by the individual, the physiological reaction, and what they do to process it.
Maté also helps us understand the difference between healthy and problematic stress i.e., acute stress and chronic stress.
- Acute stress (short-term stress):
Something we all experience from time-to-time. It’s short in nature and causes a spike in cortisol and adrenalin with survival being the aim of the game. For example, if you have a fight with your spouse, your stress response is activated which causes you take action to resolve the conflict and return to homeostasis. So, we need our stress response in order to function within our lives and relationships.
- Chronic stress (long-term stress):
Not everyone experiences this. As it is long-term, there is sustained activation of chemicals and hormones in the mindbody – high cortisol destroys tissue and high adrenalin raises blood pressure and destroys the heart. This sends our mindbody into chaos and our immune system becomes susceptible to threat.
For example, people who haven’t been taught how to express their needs or boundaries, to say no, or who have lived through traumatic events can live in a constant and chronic stress-state.
Maté skilfully normalises the emergence of disorders and diseases by explaining that people have a “normal response to abnormal circumstances”. That is, if you’ve never been taught how to process and express thoughts and feelings, or there was an extended period of time it wasn’t safe for you to do so, then of course your mindbody reacts with symptoms. Your mindbody is attempting to call to your attention that which is unresolved.
A final excerpt that I want to highlight can be found in the final pages:
“Emotional competence is the capacity that enables us to stand in a responsible, non-victimised, and non-self-harming relationship with our environment. It is the required internal ground for facing life’s inevitable stresses, for avoiding the creation of unnecessary ones, and for furthering the healing process”.
Quite often I see clients in my practice who are unaware of their feelings or are fearful that expressing their emotions will result in calamity, conflating assertive communication with conflict, and remaining stuck in a stressed state. The reality is that processing and expressing emotions is the key to unlocking experience and building confidence in coping abilities, which is what we work on in a safe way in therapy.
There are so many concepts that Maté explores: from attachment to autonomy development in childhood, attunement and proximate separation (when a parent is physically there but is for whatever reason not in tune with, or not meeting, the needs of the child even despite their best effort), the power of negative thinking and why being overly positive can actually prevent our healing, internal beliefs, and emotional shutdown and freezing.
The contents of this book really struck a chord and chimed with my holistic approach to health and wellbeing. Many of us will be familiar with physical symptoms of our emotions: feeling sick with nerves, excited butterflies in the stomach, heart lurching with fright.
The language we use illustrates that we’re already familiar with our mindbody experiences. Common physical-emotional phrases include “she was red with rage”, “he was shaking like a leaf”, “they got weak at the knees”. We also refer to “gut feelings”, “thinking with my head or heart”, and “knowing it in my bones”.
You may yourself be someone or know someone who often gets colds and flus or can be floored with viruses and infections. This is commonly the case for those who are chronically anxious or stressed because the immune system is already working very hard to maintain daily functioning and so viruses and infections can quite easily overwhelm the already taxed immune system.
Running with these familiar concepts, Maté explains how, if we’re in a chronic state of stress and repressed emotions and living out of alignment, our body says what we feel incapable of saying; our body says no by incapacitating us through illness.
A clear, actionable takeaway from this book is: in what areas of your life are you out of alignment and what could you do to change this?
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I absolutely recommend this book. Particularly for all you people-pleasers and perfectionists out there, those who have experienced trauma, those who are living with chronic stress, and those who may be disconnected from emotions and mindbody awareness.
I feel it only right to provide a slight caution for any of you who are unfamiliar with Gabor Maté’s style: he is very clear and concise and although he is not graphic in his descriptions, he is talking about illnesses, diseases, and disorders. I say this not to deter but just for you to be aware as you pick up the book.
Read this book (RRP £12.99), listen to Maté online (free), and work with a therapist if possible.
Don’t wait until your body says no.
Therapy with Kirsty 