The Works of the Flesh and You
In describing the emotions that cause psychosomatic illnesses, the Bible and Dr. English describe similar emotions which cause psychosomatic illnesses. Compare the physician’s list with God’s:
Emotions Causing Psychosomatic Illnesses | |
Dr. English | The Bible |
hatred | hatred |
resentment | quarreling |
rage | jealousy |
frustration | bad temper |
ambition | rivalry |
self-centeredness | factions |
envy | party spirit |
jealousy | envy |
sorrow | |
love-need | |
fear |
The emotions which English recognizes as being disease-producing are the same emotions that the Apostle Paul denounces and associates with man’s “lower nature” (Phillips) or “flesh” (New King James Version). In either case, the words describe reactions to someone or something that gets in your way. Such reactions are not pleasant to acknowledge in one’s life, particularly when they are tagged “the lower nature” or “works of the flesh.” So the individual tends to deny their presence and perhaps deceives even himself. He focuses his attention not on the shameful reaction but on the bodily ailment that the reaction produces through his nervous and glandular systems.
Actual organic disease of the nervous system is easily observable under the microscope. Structural changes can be seen. But a case of “nerves” is something else.
If you have a viral infection in a nerve, you feel pain and tenderness along the course of the nerve. If you sever a main nerve running to a muscle, you are unable to move the muscle. But a “nervous” person has no physical impairment.
There is, then, the strange situation in which, on one hand, a person has a disease of the nerves without being “nervous” and, on the other hand, a person who speaks of being “nervous” but who has an apparently normal nervous system. The complaints of the “nervous” person are usually lodged in his stomach or intestines or heart–-organs that are not a part of the nervous system.
Tom Fischer drove several hundred miles to reach our clinic. He came because he had stomach pains that the physicians said were functional. “That means,” he said with a wincing grin and a report from the Mayo Clinic fresh in memory, “that my stomach pains are all in my head.”
Essentially he was right about the term “functional,” which means that the pain of an affected area is not caused by a disease. It also usually implies that the individual is not meeting his emotional problems in a wholesome way.
“They asked me if I was having any problems,” he said. “What’s that have to do with my stomach?”
When we first started talking, the idea of his getting well by talking to a counselor seemed a big joke. But he took the experience well–at least he was getting a nice trip out of it.
But life to Tom Fischer was no joke. Especially his employment. Two events of several months ago were still “grinding” him. First, he had been transferred from one machine to another and he did not like the change. Then a company safety officer came along and ordered him to wear safety glasses. Tom refused, saying, “I never will.” The company left it up to him–-wear the glasses or quit. He ate his words.
As we talked, he became upset over his work situation. It was hard for him to admit it, but he hated his work, his boss, and the safety officer. He literally burned within. Then slowly he became more preoccupied with the pains that began to come than with the hate that had brought them on. He was learning to live with a distasteful work situation, though not liking it. As far as his stomach was concerned, he was sure cancer was eating it up.
Strecker and Appel describe a man like Fischer:
Human beings stand a single mental shock relatively well, even if it is severe, like the drowning of an only son. It is a series of shocks or a long-continued emotional strain like worry or apprehension that finally breaks us. Such tiring and destructive emotional stress may be due to a prolonged struggle with difficulties and problems which we are not meeting in a straightforward manner. Long drawn-out fear, anger, shame, resentment, or other intense emotion may produce an increased heart rate and alterations in the activity of the gastrointestinal functions. If these reflexes are established, they tend to keep on going, even after the original situation has disappeared. Thus anxiety, states of intense fear, worry, agitation, and loss of control dominate every waking hour (Discovering Ourselves, Macmillan, p. 197).
This was Tom Fischer’s problem–-a long-term, slow burn of hate that switched to a preoccupation with his body. Tom said his physician called it nervous exhaustion, resulting from mental cross-purposes. With Fischer, it came because he was defeated by a personal problem. He held grudges against his boss and the safety officer. He, of course, could not express his resentment openly and keep his job, so he hid it. But in the effort, he became alert to every muscular pain as well as the sensations of heart and stomach functions. The interesting thing was that he could switch from the anguished details of his suffering to a cheerful, animated discussion of his trip. Turn the conversation back to his work–-Tom Fischer would again begin to grimace. “I didn’t realize how much I hate those men,” he finally said.