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CHAPTER 2 The psychological foundation for health

Scientific research has now established beyond doubt that the mind – body connection is one of the most powerful elements in the conquering of disease in the body. But this knowledge is scarcely applied in the orthodox approach to health, and far from fully applied in many alternative models. This chapter sets out the most up-to-date thinking in this field, and outlines the steps you can take to get yourself into the best possible state of mind to facilitate your recovery.

When you are given a diagnosis of cancer, you have two main problems: first, of course, there is the physical illness itself; and second, there is the terrible emotional turmoil you are thrown into by the diagnosis, along with all the fear and upset that it creates in you and those close to you. Many people with cancer have said that their physical problem has been manageable, but that it is their peace of mind that has been completely shattered. Your emotional needs and state of mind are just as important as your medical treatment, and it is vital that you receive the support and encouragement that you need. It is also important for you to identify and change the negative beliefs you have about cancer, so that you don’t risk buying into these beliefs and giving up before you even start.

Facing the Demons

You are up against three things straightaway. The first is your own negative beliefs about cancer. You may have heard upsetting stories, or have a view of cancer that is entirely based on the collective fear we all have about cancer in our Western society. Second, you have to face the reactions of those close to you, and all the upset and fears that they may be experiencing in relation to your diagnosis. Third, you may have gathered some statistics from your consultant on the average survival times with your particular kind of cancer. He may even have given you a prognosis in terms of the number of months or years that this ‘average person’ with your condition might be expected to live, based on the medical treatments available when the research was done – often many years earlier.

However, statistics never apply to individuals, and the course of your illness is unique to you. There are over 200 types of cancer and the way it develops or regresses is different in everyone who has it. Challenge your negative beliefs. Make sure you have really taken on board the encouraging information presented at the beginning of Chapter 1, and keep repeating it to yourself until you truly believe it! People do actually survive with every sort of cancer, and there is no reason why that should not include you.

Getting into the Right Frame of Mind

It has now been shown that there is a major survival advantage associated with getting yourself into a good state of mind, using positive coping strategies and learning how to use effective mind – body approaches that can reactivate your immune system and your body’s ability to fight back against cancer.

The way you react to a diagnosis of cancer comes down to four crucial factors:

• the beliefs you and others who influence you have about cancer

• the way you feel about your life

• how frightened you are about death and dying

• whether you believe in your own power to affect your health.

The hardest place from which to deal with your diagnosis and illness is where you are depressed, ambivalent about your life, fearful of dying, fearful of cancer and feeling impotent in terms of changing your state of health. But, I assure you, if you are prepared to look at and work with these things head on, with the right support, you can turn the situation around completely. The diagnosis of cancer inevitably throws you into a process of asking yourself and others the big questions about the meaning of life, the purpose of your life and what it is like to die. Certainly, if well facilitated, thinking about your relationship to living and dying can completely alter your ability to cope with your diagnosis and even turn it into a positive experience.

When you become aware of the many things you can do to enhance your chances of survival with cancer, your fear of cancer will start to diminish. You will begin to feel bigger and more powerful than the disease. You might even think of the diagnosis as a much needed wake-up call to enable you to go through a complete health and life revival, moving you step by step towards a life that really excites and fulfils you. As you do this, your attitude towards life will change and you will feel happier, spiritually stronger and more uplifted. The best thing is to see the illness as a message from your body that all is not well, and to use the illness as an opportunity to get your health and lifestyle onto a better footing.

By developing inner strength and thinking deeply about the true nature of life and death, it is likely that you will change your attitude towards dying, too. I do not say this lightly. It is said on the basis of having watched thousands of people with cancer go through the process of using this crisis of illness to completely transform their health and lifestyle. Strangely, a combination of becoming far happier and fulfilled in life, developing inner peace through self-help practices and looking at the question of death head-on almost always results in individuals being freed from their fear of dying. Often, with this release comes a profound new love of life and the realization that, previously, a great deal of life energy was being lost through a deep and somewhat unconscious fear of dying.

However, while you are going through your reaction to the news, it is very important to be aware of how you really feel and to find the support you need to express your emotions; then, as the shock subsides, you can work out how you are reacting and coping (or not) with the diagnosis. Your reaction can make a big difference to your prognosis, and some reactions will be helpful while others will not. There are also some underlying states of mind that can either boost or impair immune function. There is help available to change the way you are coping and to lift negative states of mind so that you can get into the best frame of mind for recovery.

The Psychological Basis for Remarkable Recovery
Caryle Hirschberg: The Role of Belief

In 1995, Caryle Hirschberg, a medical researcher, and Mark Barasch, a journalist who had cancer, published the findings of their Remission Project at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in America. Their book Remarkable Recovery was the first-ever publication on what it is that survivors of cancer have in common (rather than those who get cancer)!

In the questionnaire she sent to these survivors, they were asked which they felt were the most important of 30 self-help practices that had made them well. The practices ticked with the greatest frequency (by over 50 per cent of the participants) were:

They were also asked which they felt were the most important psychospiritual factors in their recovery. Of the 26 items on the list, those reported with the most frequency (over 50 per cent) were:

The reason I love Caryle’s data so much is because these are not the theories of a scientist, but the reported beliefs and feelings of a group of people who have actually achieved the scientifically unachievable – recovery from a serious cancer. What is striking about these findings is the importance of belief – whether it be in one’s own power to heal through self-help, or belief in a higher power to heal, or in the power of prayer or believing that one is going to live and recover fully.

This is what I have witnessed again and again in my 20 years of working with over 20,000 people to recover their health after cancer. From often very sceptical beginnings, two things most frequently ended up astonishing those who apply themselves to the holistic integrated healthcare approach: the first is just how much help is available through prayer and spiritual healing; the second is just how powerful a person can be once he or she begins to use and harness the power of his own mind.

This can be achieved through pure belief, hypnotherapy or the use of your own creative will through visualization and affirmation. In these practices, you literally see in your mind’s eye or choose in words the reality you want for your future. This is another reason it is so important not to remain passive, waiting for either orthodox or alternative medicine to cure you, but to instead get yourself firmly in the driving seat, choosing that the illness will go from the body and visualizing yourself going on into the future, growing old disgracefully!

It also suggests that, if you are currently closed to or sceptical of the power of your own mind or of the help that is available through spiritual healing or prayer, it would be wise to suspend disbelief and at least try to explore such forms of help before dismissing them. They could ultimately provide the vital key to your healing, as has been discovered by so many former sceptics I have worked with.

So, the keys are:

• cultivate a strong belief in your own power to self-heal

• cultivate a strong belief in the power of your doctors and their treatments to cure you

• open yourself to the possibility of healing through spiritual healing and prayer

• use hypnotherapy, visualization and affirmation to choose health and recovery, seeing yourself healed, free of disease and well and happy in the future.

Dr Stephen Greer: The Role of a Fighting Spirit and Alleviating Depression

Before Caryle and Ian’s work, back in the mid-80s, psychosocial oncologist Stephen Greer published his work showing how the very different survival times among women with breast cancer depended on the coping style they adopted within a week of the initial diagnosis. The coping styles he defined were:

• a fighting spirit – taking an active stand against your cancer and believing fully that you can affect your survival

• denial - pretending to yourself and others that nothing is seriously wrong

• stoicism or fatalism – leading to becoming resigned to what is happening

• helplessness and hopelessness – becoming anxiously preoccupied, or collapsing.

His findings showed that those with a fighting spirit fared far better than those in the other three categories both in terms of quality of life and overall survival. Those in denial did next best whereas those who were resigned, depressed and anxiously preoccupied did least well of all. At the 13-year point, 80 per cent of those who had started with a fighting spirit were still alive versus only 20 per cent of those who had collapsed into helplessness. Worse, those who had psychologically collapsed had died quickly, within two years of diagnosis. This means that the average survival rate of 60 per cent for breast cancer at five years masks a huge difference between those who do very much better than expected because of a positive belief in themselves compared with those who do very much worse because they do not.

As this difference in survival rate is bigger than that seen with any medical treatment for breast cancer, Dr Greer realized it was very important to identify those who reacted negatively to their diagnosis and help them to change psychologically so that they could begin to believe in themselves more and become less depressed. Through the use of cognitive behavioural techniques, such patients gained self-esteem and confidence, and began to believe they could survive. Lo and behold, his later studies on the survival rates among these women showed great improvement.

The lessons here are:

• It is vital to feel empowered and believe in your ability to heal yourself

• It is vital to lift your depression

• It is vital for healthcare professionals to provide extra psychological help to improve the coping styles of those who have responded by becoming helpless and anxiously preoccupied by their illness.

Dr Candace Pert: The Scientific Basis for the Mind – Body Connection and the Need to Express Emotion

While both Hirschberg and Greer were gathering their data, huge breakthroughs were being made in the laboratory as the science of PNI, or psychoneuroimmunology, was rapidly expanding through the pioneering work of Dr Candace Pert. She studied the connection between our states of mind, the nervous system, the neuroendocrine system, and the function of the immune system and other healing tissues of the body. It all started with her discovery of the receptor for an opiate secreted in the brain. This naturally occurring opiate was later discovered and identified as endorphin (known as enkephalin in the US). This was a breakthrough, as endorphin was a new kind of messenger molecule different from the kind of neurotransmitters we had known about before. Endorphin was the first molecule to be identified as a neuropeptide or informational substance, and further informational substances were found to be present in all tissues of the body.

This finding started an avalanche of discovery so that, by the mid-1990s, a further 200 of these substances had been identified, secreted in response to different feelings and thoughts, and able to radically affect our tissue functioning. As the PNI findings began to link up with the medical studies, it became clear that those who are chronically stressed or lonely had depressed immune function – with both lower numbers and far lower activity levels in the immune cells. Similar findings were made in those with low self-esteem and those who chronically repressed their feelings. It was even found that the blood cells in depressed people actually carried less oxygen than those who are happy. Dr Pert had discovered that unexpressed emotions can become lodged in the body’s tissues in the form of ‘molecules of emotion’ inhibiting organ function.

The lesson here is:

• Stress over which we have no control, loneliness, grief and unexpressed feelings can inhibit both our immune function and tissue-healing capacity. Conversely, becoming happy and self-expressive can revive our tissue functioning.

Dr Susan Kobasa: The Role of Emotional Patterning

Things became even more interesting when it was found that the immune system has a memory, and that painful memories or repeats of past experiences in which a person has failed or been defeated, can also trigger immune collapse. Researcher Dr Susan Kobasa had described a psychological syndrome she termed ‘learned helplessness’, when those who had experienced failure earlier in life tended to keep repeating the pattern. Now science was showing that this result was mirrored in the immune system. On the other hand, she had also found that a ‘personality hardiness’ in those who respond to stress as a stimulating challenge resulted in a similarly healthy immune response. Here, at last, was a reason why earlier researchers could not make a direct link between stress and cancer – it depended not on stress per se, but on how the individual responds to stress.

The lesson here is:

• It is very important to provide psychological support to those who are not coping well and who see themselves as losers in order to change this underlying negative belief and replace it with strong, positive coping skills and experience of success.

Dr Leslie Walker: The Role of Empowering Cancer Treatment

The final piece of the jigsaw appeared more recently from UK researcher Professor Leslie Walker, who has worked for more than 20 years on the connection between mind – body approaches and improved survival in women with breast cancer. His recent study showed a staggering 17.5 per cent increase in survival 13 years after treatment in women who were taught relaxation techniques and, through hypnosis, to believe that their chemotherapy would cure them. In this case, the benefit of the treatment itself was 15 per cent, so the effect of the mind was greater than that of the medicine! Most interesting of all was the fact that the women who achieved this huge rise in survival rate were those whom Walker called ‘women who were too nice’. The medical description was ‘women with a high level of social conformity’ who tended to look after everyone else and bottle-up their own feelings. He also found an increase in immune function after relaxation and hypnotherapy, so once again it appears that a positive belief in cure and recovery is vital.

The lessons here are:

• It is vital to use visualization, affirmations or hypnotherapy to empower your treatments and to develop belief in their ability to cure you.

• It is important to identify and help those who are too ‘other-focused’ and to help them learn how to put themselves first.

Professors Spiegel and Fawzy: The Role of Support

This all fits with earlier studies done in the US, looking at the effects of psychological support on survival in those with breast cancer and melanoma. Professor David Spiegel showed a doubling of the average breast cancer survival time in those who had weekly support; Professor Fawzy showed a drop in the melanoma death rate from 10 per cent to 2 per cent in those who received weekly support, and confirmed an improvement in immune function, too. The emphasis in both interventions was on the expression of feelings (rather than being positive).

The lessons here are that:

• It is vital to receive support in expressing your feelings rather than bottling them up.

• Being positive does not mean hiding your grief or anger.

Blowing the Myth of Positive Thinking

If, while reading this, you have been feeling upset and emotional, please know that those who have a fighting spirit are almost always those who also have strong emotions and a big reaction to their diagnosis. It is absolutely normal to feel shocked and grief-stricken after receiving a diagnosis of a serious illness. Having a fighting spirit does not mean being permanently positive about having cancer and a fixed, determined grin on your face!

Some readers may misinterpret the information above, believing that it is harmful to become emotional or feel despondent at times about what is going on. This could not be further from the truth. According to PNI, a good cry or outburst of anger are just as good for boosting immune function as having a good laugh. It is repressing your feelings and becoming depressed that flatten the immune response. In fact, ‘fighters’ are defined by their ability to face reality, expressing the appropriate emotional response and ‘bottoming out’ with their feelings, and THEN to set about gathering the information and support they need to mount a realistic, proactive response to their situation.

Working Out How You Are Dealing With Your Diagnosis

Do you think you are reacting with a fighting spirit and believe in your power to heal yourself?

If you think you are reacting with anything other than a fighting spirit and want to change this, it important that you find help and support to deal with your diagnosis differently. Please go to the Resources Directory (pages 255–417) to find help in contacting a counsellor or psychologist trained in cognitive behavioural therapy to help you learn a more positive coping style. Your oncology department may also have a clinical psychologist who can help you, especially if your pattern is to give up and collapse in the face of difficulty.

Do you believe in the power of your cancer treatments to cure you?

You may choose to work with a hypnotherapist to develop powerful positive associations with your treatments, or you could use the relaxation and visualization exercises given in Cope Positively with Cancer Treatment, a CD available from Health Creation (call the Helpline on 0845 009 3366), to empower your treatments.

Do you need help from prayer or spiritual healing?

Contact the local prayer group associated with your church or religious group. Find a healer through the National Federation of Spiritual Healers (helpline: 0845 123 2767). They also do distant healing through prayer for those who are unable to get to a healer. Some of their healers will visit the home or hospital if necessary.

Have you got enough psychological support to express your feelings fully?

Find out about local support groups and counsellors from your GP, the hospital or the Resources Directory (pages 255–417).

So, far from pretending you feel all right if you do not, with support, try to face what is really happening to you, express your feelings, and then create an action plan based on your true situation and needs. Once you have done this, you will feel genuinely positive that you have a working plan and are back in control again.

Underlying States of Mind that May Need to Change

As well as the states of mind that arise in reaction to the diagnosis, there is the question of what was going on for you emotionally before you were diagnosed. As you move into your healing journey, it is important to look at the big issues of:

• improving your will to live

• decreasing your stress levels

• learning to express your feelings in everyday life

• letting go of loneliness and depression

• healing emotional wounds from the past

• identifying and changing the ‘limiting beliefs’ by which you live your life.

Looking at your will to live

The nitty-gritty issue for anyone facing a life-threatening diagnosis is the question of how strong is your will to live? This is a highly confrontational question, but a vital one to nail if you are going to succeed in fighting cancer. Carl Jung realized many years ago that all of us have an equal and opposite urge towards life (eros) and towards death (thanetos). When the eros side is strong, we feel powerful and passionate towards life. But when thanetos is dominant, death can seem very seductive.

So, do not feel that you are alone if the diagnosis of cancer has in some way excited you or felt like a good way out of the stress and distress of living. Ultimately, of course, we all have to die. Dying is a totally natural part of living. But it is awfully sad and wrong to give up and allow yourself to die because your spirit has been crushed by loneliness, grief, disappointment or a broken heart.

I have often witnessed incredible healing when someone has genuinely turned the corner and chosen life. For you, perhaps the diagnosis of cancer can be a real turning point and an opportunity to say ‘yes’ again to finding joy in living. This may happen quite naturally because often the diagnosis of cancer itself throws into sharp focus all that is precious about your life. But if you feel ambivalent about living, the best help you can get is to work with a transpersonal or psychosynthesis counsellor who will work with you gently and creatively to rekindle your zest for life. This is explored more fully in Chapter 9.

The problem of stress

A little bit of stress is healthy and often brings out the best in us. But prolonged stress, particularly stress over that which we feel we have no control over is a major depressant of our immune function. It may be hard to accept but, usually, the stress we are experiencing is of our own making. This is either because we get ourselves into or tolerate ridiculously stressful situations or because we have innate self-stressing tendencies, pushing ourselves to unrealistic limits. It really comes down to deciding that your health and happiness is more important than the goals for which you strive. The diagnosis of cancer can be the most perfect excuse to pull out of anything that is causing you stress.

Expressing your feelings

The next new trick you may need to learn is how to express your feelings in everyday life (not only in relation to the diagnosis). You have already discovered how those who are too nice have suppressed immune function. It is good to copy the Europeans and let rip with your feelings! Remember, anger is as good at improving white blood cell activity as laughter.

Getting out of isolation and loneliness

Another problem for our immune system is isolation and loneliness. So, do everything you can to get back into connection with people. This can be through belonging to groups who support and value you – whether that is a regular class, or a support, community or religious group. Nowadays, there are a huge number of growth and development classes you can join, and there are many support groups that either relate specifically to cancer or are less specific, such as women’s or men’s groups.

Getting out of depression, fear and anxiety

Perhaps you have more serious problems mentally and realize that you are actually depressed. Here again, you are not alone! It is estimated that up to 77 per cent of people with cancer are measurably depressed and it is really little wonder with all the uncertainty and trauma that are experienced. Most cancer units have a clinical psychologist whose job it is to help people come out of cancer-related depression or anxiety, so this route might be worth investigating if you feel really down. But a combination of support from a support group, counselling and spiritual healing can be equally good to lift depression. If you consider yourself to be a fearful or anxious person, this is another state of mind that it would be good to change. The best way of cracking fear and anxiety is by learning to relax and, better still, to meditate or to have a soothing massage or aromatherapy.

Freeing ourselves of limiting beliefs

Most of us allow ourselves to be governed by the limiting beliefs we have picked up during our childhood as to what we are able to achieve or not. This means that, if we have learned that we don’t ever succeed, or that we are not loveable or that good things never happen to us, then this is what happens to us. It is like we have been programmed with faulty software, which will always stop us from reaching our potential and achieving what we want. But through the integrated medicine revolution, a huge number of effective ways of changing our state of mind have surfaced, including developing self-esteem and confidence, and replacing negative beliefs with positive ones. If you recognize that you are being run by your limiting beliefs, then NLP (neurolinguistic programming) can be a powerful tool to change this.

Getting the Help You Need
Counselling

The first step is usually finding someone who will listen really well to what you are going through. This is usually found in a counselling relationship and, again, I would recommend transpersonal or psychosynthesis counselling, where the state of the spirit is given attention along with help to change our feelings, beliefs and behaviour in positive ways.

The counselling relationship is often believed to be only about helping you to accept what is happening to you, grieving appropriately and becoming adapted to the change. However, in transpersonal or psychosynthesis counselling, the relationship is more about trying to find out what is right about your life and only needs your focused attention to flourish. Help can be given to try to see the message in the crisis and to grow positively from the experience, rather than just learning to accept what is happening.

This is a far more positive and creative form of counselling that fits well with the integrated medicine model. Yes, you may need some straightforward compassionate counselling at first, to help you deal with the shock and your reactions but, later on, you need a counsellor who can help you reframe the crisis as an opportunity for healing and growth. A counsellor of this kind may also help you look at the benefits you may be gaining from illness, helping you learn how to get these benefits without having to be ill. A good counsellor will help you change from being passive in your life to taking an active role in the creation of your ideal lifestyle. He can help you rekindle your will to live and reconnect with that which really turns you on.

Often, a transpersonal or psychosynthesis counsellor will also be able to help you develop a positive mental focus through developing visualization or affirmations with you to help you strengthen your belief in yourself and in your healing. Your counsellor, or a spiritual advisor, can also help you in your spiritual explorations, perhaps helping you to open up to the possibility of healing from a higher source.

The important thing is not to see a counselling relationship as being only about helping you when you are in extreme distress or seeing it as meaning that there must be something wrong with you. Having regular counselling throughout your recovery process can completely transform a potential nightmare into a true blessing, helping you to grow and even benefit in the long term.

Preparing for the Worst, Working for the Best

Another helpful role of the counsellor is to help you, if you feel you need to, face and plan for the worst-case scenario that could happen. You can then spend much less time worrying and fantasizing about it, and get on with creating a different, much more positive reality. This may mean that you choose to use some of your early sessions with your counsellor thinking about how you would feel, and what would need to happen if everything went really badly.

If you do this, the level of detail that you go into is up to you, but it could involve thinking right through the practicalities of whether you have made a will, what financial resources are available for your dependants, who would care for them if you were unable to, and how you would like to be cared for if you become disabled and dependent. You can even go into the details of where you would like to die and what kind of funeral you would like to have. This will inevitably force you to face your feelings and beliefs about death, so you may also need the help of a spiritual advisor. This may sound extremely grim, but most people who have employed this head-on approach have found it tremendously liberating. Paradoxically, any step you take in the direction of both healing old wounds and preparing to let go of life will enable you to live all the more fully. This, in turn, will enhance your energy, vitality and health and, consequently, the chances of stabilizing your disease.

Healing Your Emotional Wounds

Another thing that might emerge from this process is the urge to complete unfinished emotional business with anyone against whom you are holding a grudge, or by whom you feel you have been aggrieved or hurt. It may not be necessary to go anywhere near these people to do this work – it may be quite possible to make your peace with others during your counselling sessions. This often has very surprising results, as the dynamics of these old and difficult situations and relationships can often change dramatically once you have shifted your position.

Attending to these background emotional issues will be part of your long-term Health Creation Programme (see Chapter 9) and be best addressed after you have been through your treatment.