by gabor mate
Please Note: Each book review is intended to provide an overview of the content and it’s main benefit to the reader. Though I recommend reading a book alongside following The Roadmap, I am in no way connected to the author or publisher or them to me or this website.
key elements
– The majority of illnesses are caused by a combination of environmental factors and how we process our emotional world.
– The book is a comprehensive overview of the mind body connection in medicine and covers many illnesses.
– Personality & upbringing & views are at the heart of why people get sick and even which illness they develop.
– Through self-examination you can learn to process your past and your emotions so that you can give yourself the best chance to stay healthy.
why this book is worth reading
Gabor Mate worked as a family physician and palliative care doctor for over twenty years. His experience from that time and a research into the link between physical illness and our mental states and what influences these sates are combined in this book.
This book is a vital read on the road to finding who you are as a person and how this influences your own health. Importantly, in the final chapter Mate outlines a prescription of sorts for maintaining good health in your mind and body.
Mind & Body
As with Sarno & Rediger, Gabor Mate sees the Mind & Body as inextricably linked in the causation of illness. There is not one cause of most illness be it genes, diet or environment, or personality traits and stress on their own. Even behaviors such as smoking cannot on their own cause lung cancer as Mate discusses at the beginning of chapter seven otherwise everyone who smoked would get lung cancer and this isn’t the case.
That the emotions are heavily involved in the workings of our immune systems is now part of a new scientific study termed psychoneuroimmunology. The link then between stress, emotional repression and disease is not a difficult leap to make and Mate develops the role of stress in chronic autoimmune conditions and the kind of personality traits often associated with stress in the first three chapters as well as elsewhere in the book.
In chapters thirteen we see that traits such as stoicism can also have a potentially detrimental effect on the body, forcing people into living beyond their limits and doing more for others than they would for themselves. This kind of behavior is often observed in people with rheumatoid conditions.
Personality & Emotion
There are numerous case studies throughout this book and diseases of all types are shown to have potentially emotional causative factors. Cancers of the prostrate, lung, breast, skin and others; autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, asthma; and diseases with no known cause – ALS and Alzheimer’s among others.
In all case studies Mate finds commonalities of suffers doing too much for others, or being perfectionist, or acting in some way that puts their own needs behind others. Emotional repression is often present.
Mate asks the question in chapter nine- is there a “Cancer Personality,” but the answer is much more complex than a simple yes or no and worth an extended quote, “While we cannot say that any personality type causes cancer, certain personality features definitely increase the risk because they are more likely to generate physiological stress. Repression, the inability to say no and a lack of awareness of one’s anger make it much more likely that a person will find herself in situations where her emotions are unexpressed, her needs are ignored and her gentleness is exploited. Those situations are stress inducing, whether or not the person is conscious of being stressed”
It is this ongoing stress than can lead to illness and for me you could swap cancer for illness in this passage. There certainly seems to be personality features and coping styles that increase the likelihood of developing illness and chief among these is repression of anger. Sarno’s prescription, when pain strikes, to “Think psychological not physical” applies to all illness. Ask yourself this question – what am I angry about? And be honest with your answer!
Belief & Strength
The power of belief, discussed in depth by Rediger in Cured is also covered by Mate but also on a different level belief can be seen on the cellular level. How we view the world, as either a safe place or a fearful place, can effect our hormones and chemical messengers. Bruce Lipton’s work is referenced here and his The Biology of Belief is an excellent introduction to how the environment and our emotional/psychological world effects or cells.
Other beliefs we hold, some of which are lauded by society can have hidden unwanted consequences. Strength can be a great quality, but it can also be developed as Mate suggests in childhood as a defence mechanism – I must be strong because my parents are out of control. This taking on of parental responsibility means a pushing away of childhood fun and just the basic fact that we can all struggle under the weight of living.
Other beliefs (explored in chapter seventeen) that can lead to us taking on too heavy a burden to carry are – It’s not right for me to be angry; I am responsible for the whole world; I can handle anything; I’m not lovable; I must justify my existence; I have to be ill to be taken care of; All of us I think will have had at least some of these thoughts or continue to think in these ways.
Positivity
In chapter eighteen the power of positive thinking is under the microscope – if we are thinking positively all the time then what room is there for the realities of accepting life is tough at times. The danger here is repression of our own anger and anxiety.
Difficult, unloving or even abusive childhoods are often not seen for what they are. So many of us talk about having a happy childhood, like Jean in chapter eighteen who felt unloved unless she got straight A’s. The truth is, with a harder look, Jean is still making excuses for the parents who only loved her conditionally.
To heal, Mate argues, we must see the negative as well as the positive. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. When we see clearly and accept what we don’t like as well as saying yes to what we do like we learn more about ourselves and live more courageous, fulfilling lives. This in turn can mean at least this part of the jigsaw of health is being connected.
And it is important to stress that all authors on health including Mate, Rediger and Sarno don’t attach any blame to the fact of your upbringing leading potentially to problems with health. Your parents were more often acting out their own childhood wounds. This doesn’t absolve them off their actions, this is not a nobody is responsible gig, but rather the action becomes understandable. Even if it is a monstrous action, it is just no help to call anyone a monster, we are all people, though some of us just don’t know how, or haven’t learned how, to act with humanity.
The Seven A's of healing
Mate’s writing is a challenging read at times, especially if you have lost someone to one of the illnesses discussed or are currently in the position of losing someone. Or, if you have been or are ill yourself. His approach can feel like a hammering home, illness after illness, about how medicine needs to change, how we all need to change our views on illness. Because he worked in palliative care, looking after people in their last days, a lot of the personal examples do not have happy endings. This makes this book a very different read to Cured.
Persevere. In the final chapter Gabor Mate points us towards the way to heal ourselves and to maintain our health. This chapter is gold. Mate breaks down his principles of health into the seven A’s of healing – acceptance, awareness, anger, autonomy, attachment, assertion & affirmation.
These aspects of how you relate to yourself and others and your life in general shows you how to seek authenticity in each of these areas. Living authentically means no part of yourself is pushed down and closed away, left to fester as an illness in your body or mind.
I look in detail at the seven aspects of healing, adding my own 8th aspect in the article ALIIGNED.
Further Reading
This book and the previous two guides, Healing Back Pain & Cured are only the tip of a growing field of authors trying to change the landscape of medicine. I cover this topic futher in the article Mind Body Healing, with links there to further resources, but two books in particular are to be explored – Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin and The Great Pain Deception by Steven Ray Ozanich
In Mind Over Medicine, Rankin, a doctor herself explores similar ground to Rediger, showing through her own experience and research and her patients direct accounts how the mind helps heal the body. It is a posiitive and uplifting book.
In The Great Pain Deception Ozanich explores his own traumatic personal journey from a debilitating life of pain to full health. He derives his methods from Sarno at first then develops this further into a full exploration of his inner life & a critique of how the current medical model approaches pain and ill health.
where i see this book in the roadmap
Like Healing Back Pain and Cured this book wants you to shake up your thinking on how scientific inquiry progresses, or doesn’t, as we are still firmly wedded to the biology is king model of illness. Suggest to most people that cancer could have anything to do with the way you feel about yourself and you will likely receive a baffled response. But the examples of healing using inner development and personality development are too numerous to discount this approach forever.
As such When The Body Says No is part of the learning required in stages 2, 3 & 4. To see the cause of illness in all its aspects is to see how we take on our childhood learning as real information, how we take on societies desires as our own tickets to freedom from the dark.
Like Healing Back Pain and Cured, When The Body Says No could save your life and keep you healthy. To confront illness from the perspective of your personal experiences, and beliefs and emotions is to understand your world self at a deeper level. To stay healthy by accepting all parts of yourself is to find a connection to your universal infinite self and fast forward yourself to true freedom.