Free Superhealing: Engaging Your Mind, Body, and Spirit to Create Optimal Health and Well-Being (ARC) by Elaine R. Ferguson

was accused of “blaming the victim” because she found a
    correlation between cancer and an extremely emotional y repressed
    coping style that involves appeasing others, denying one’s own feelings, and conforming to social standards.20 Type C patients were
    devoted to pleasing their spouses, clients, siblings, friends, and co-

    CHAPTER ONE: Your Superhealing Mind-Body Connection 41
    workers. Their core identities seemed to hinge upon gaining the acceptance of the significant individuals in their lives. This coping style seems to weaken the immune system’s defenses and can render a
    person more vulnerable to cancer progression.21
    What Dr. Temoshok was pointing to was a characteristic known
    as other-directedness . Sociologist David Riesman coined this expression in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd to describe the psychological effect of always adapting oneself to another person. People who are extremely other-directed are out of touch with their own emotions and needs and typical y look outside themselves for acknowl-
    edgment and direction. Unfortunately for them, physical health can be compromised by routinely repressing their important needs. As
    Dr. Temoshok noted, this type of person “is not aware that he or she is in distress while focusing on others. Since this pattern develops in childhood as a means of survival, during adulthood this pattern can make some social relations easier, but at a cost to the individual.”22
    Seeing how hard it was for people to change this pattern of behav-
    ior, Dr. Temoshok developed a program called Type C Transforma-
    tion for cancer patients and for healthy people who want to prevent disease. Her program involves “gradual, stepwise alterations in the person’s automatic responses, which facilitate transformation on cognitive, behavioral, and emotional levels.”23
    The emotional responses that are believed to predispose a per-
    son to the progression of cancer are prolonged depression, impaired emotional outlets, and rejection or abandonment by a parent or another significant person. Patterns of excessive denial, avoidance, repression, defensiveness, and rigidity of thought are associated with compromised immunity. This does not mean that emotional repression will cause cancer in every case, only that this behavior pattern is a risk factor for cancer and impedes the chances of recovery.
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    PART ONE: Your Superhealing Mind
    The three basic elements of transformation that type C patients
    benefit from are social support, personal empowerment, and emo-
    tional expression. Dr. Temoshok found that patients who underwent
    transformation surpassed their doctors’ expectations for physical
    recovery. 24
    CONTROL AND HARDINESS STUDIES
    When exposure to stress is prolonged, or when several sources of
    stress exist concurrently, it’s hard for the body to return to a normal, healthy state of balance. Animal studies, as unkind as they are, have borne this out. In one, animals were implanted with tumors and then repeatedly shocked with electricity, a highly stressful event. If the animals could end the shocks, they were more often able to reject
    their tumors.
    How does this translate into the stress of ordinary daily life for human beings? Ellen Langer, a Harvard research psychologist, determined that residents in a nursing home who felt no control over their daily lives, in terms of choices, experienced a much higher rate of death during the study than those who made choices. When the
    residents in her study were allowed to choose their meals and when they made telephone cal s, their rate of dying dropped a full 50 percent within eighteen months.25
    In the 1970s, Salvatore R. Maddi, a University of Chicago profes-
    sor of psychology, read an article in the popular consumer magazine Family Circle that warned, “Stress can kill you, so you need to stay away from it.” He wasn’t certain of this assertion, because he’d previously conducted research that determined that stress