by Michael A. Jawer and Marc S. Micozzi
October 9, 2012
from PreventDisease Website
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It affects more than just your outlook on life; it can affect your very well-being. Many chronic ailments are not the result of germs or genes but are rooted in our emotional biology.
The link between
emotional type and health explains why modern medicine - which views
treatment as "one size fits all" - often fails to successfully treat
chronic pain and illness.
Explaining the emotional ties behind the 12 most common chronic illnesses,
...the authors have created an easy assessment survey that allows you to identify your emotional type as well as the ailments you are susceptible to.
Extending this connection between mind and body, they assess 7 alternative healing therapies,
...indicate which methods
work best for each emotional type.
Just envision a time you became frustrated or angry and impulsively struck a wall or some piece of furniture. Or consider how drained one can become when worrying about a loved one if that person’s health takes a turn for the worse. Take the energy released from crying, or by a good belly laugh, or that liberated during sexual activity.
The amount of energy involved can be immense.
Such movement is characterized by actual changes in activity within our bodies.
Changes in the body's chemical profile... changes in the
organs... changes in the degree of muscle contractions... and changes
in our neural circuitry. In sum, change connotes movement, and
movement connotes energy.
The Hindus call embodied energy prana, the Chinese know it as qi. Freud found something he termed the libido and, around the same time as Freud, a French philosopher named Henri Bergson called it élan vitale, or "life force."
Whatever we choose to call it, it seems to
protect people from the debilitating effects of stress.
The Flow of Feeling
Picture any given feeling as a flow of clear, cold water, rippling through the body, in continuous motion.
In people whose boundaries are thinner, that flow is quicker and more direct. In people who have thicker boundaries, the flow is slower and less direct. Remember, though, that each one of us is psychosomatic - that is, our minds and our bodies are effectively one.
Given the differences inherent in boundary type, we can imagine that the stream of feeling will meander different places, and cause different effects, from person to person. In one person, it may pool in a particular locale or ripple over into a tributary. In another person, it may cascade freely. In a third person, the flow may be dammed up.
An especially thin boundary person will seem to be highly sensitive, reactive, even "flighty" because his or her feelings flow quickly through the organism. An especially thick boundary person will, in contrast, appear aloof, imperturbable, even "dull" because his or her feelings proceed more slowly.
And while
some feelings are wont to register in our awareness, others - the
more intensive or threatening kind - can be shunted aside,
repressed or denied.
THE BOUNDARY CONCEPT
Because we are bounded within our bodies, we are enabled to have distinct minds and personalities.
The Boundary concept, developed by Ernest Hartmann, MD, of Tufts University, is an especially useful way of looking at personality differences - and understanding why one person may develop a chronic illness that is distinctly different than another.
Boundaries are more than a measure of introversion or extroversion, openness or closed-mindedness, agreeableness or hostility, or any other personality trait.
Boundaries are a way to assess the characteristic way a person views her/himself and the way s/he operates in the world based on how that person handles the energy of feelings.
To what extent are stimuli "let in" or "kept out"? How are a person’s feelings processed internally? Boundaries are a fresh and unique way of evaluating how we function.
According to Hartmann, each of us can be characterized on a spectrum of boundaries from "thick" to "thin."
In his words:
Hartmann first came to his conception in an interesting way.
In the 1980s, he was studying people who have nightmares and noticed that they could also readily recall other vivid or colorful dreams even if they didn’t qualify as nightmares. These people seemed to him especially "sensitive," "vulnerable," or "imaginative," in contrast with other people who came across as more "solid," "stoic," or "persevering."
He suspected that there are real brain and body differences between thin and thick boundary people, and he developed a questionnaire to gain more insight.
Since the 1980s, at least 5,000 people have taken Hartmann’s Boundary Questionnaire (BQ) and more than 100 published papers have referenced it. The scores on the BQ are distributed across the spectrum of boundaries in a Bell-shaped curve.
Women tend to score significantly thinner than men, and older people tend to score somewhat thicker than younger people.
In a nutshell, highly thin boundary people are like walking antennae, whose entire bodies and brains seem primed to notice what’s going on in their environment and internalize it.
The
chronic illnesses they develop will reflect this "hyper" style
of feeling. Thick boundary people, on the other hand, are fairly described as stolid, rigid, implacable or thick skinned:
In sum, highly thick boundary people don’t take in nearly as much in their environment and they are much slower to recognize what they’re feeling. However, they are affected just as much as thin boundary people by what’s happening within.
The differences will ultimately manifest in different types of chronic illness.
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