PREVENTIVE MEDECINE: COPING WITH STRESS
A large number of people harbour negative feelings such as hate, distrust and resentment, sometimes holding on to grievances for years. These feelings work away inside them to make them ill even though the source of the problem is often someone else. Whilst serious grudges and really intransigent problems may need professional insights and expertise, many such negative emotions can be overcome by individuals themselves once they realize that they are doing themselves more harm than anyone else. The starting point is to realize that the past is done and gone and that nothing can undo what we have done. The aim should be to come to terms with what has happened and then try to make amends for it in some way. Often simply having the strength to say ’sorry’ after many years can lift a burden off your shoulders. Sometimes such feelings are best put down in writing rather than discussed face to face, or it may be better to open the door in writing and then meet to talk it out. Very few people can throw a heart-felt apology back in someone’s face and if time has healed the emotional wounds even a little then things can go very well from there. It was a wise man who said, ‘He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass’
The secret of all attitudes, beliefs and behaviour is to know yourself and to have insights into these facets of yourself. This can be very difficult but there are excellent books that can help. Perhaps one of the best is ‘I’m OK-You’re OK’ by Dr Thomas Harris. A few sessions with an insight-trained counselor of some kind can also be invaluable in opening doors for you which then alter the whole way you think in the future. It pays to listen to what good friends say too. There are few people who will be really honest with you in life and, ironically, your partner may not be the best person.
So many emotions, types of behaviour and beliefs are destructive and harmful to us that it is a shame that so little is said about all this in health education of all kinds. It should really be a major strand of preventive medicine-the benefits would be enormous. The burden on doctors would fall dramatically if they were trained to deal with their patients in this way-giving insights into their personalities as an explanation for their ill health. Alas, few doctors are capable of doing this and those that are have too little time to exploit their skills. Hopefully there will soon be a shift away from dealing with the obvious complaints to dealing with the underlying personality problems that produced them in the first place.
If you doubt the importance of the personality in illness and health, think of all the major diseases that we are heir to. Smoking, for example, has an enormous psychological component to it and most smokers won’t or can’t give up until they understand the underlying psychological mechanisms that make them do it. The problem with overeating is much the same. Both are oral pleasures for people who are arrested at the oral stage of their psychosexual development. Most VD is caused by promiscuous behaviour which could be prevented if the individuals concerned had insights into themselves and their actions. The majority of car crashes are in no way ‘accidental’ and neither are the thousands of unwanted pregnancies that occur each year. And so I could go on. And I haven’t even mentioned the obvious emotionally-based problems within marriages, families and working groups-all of which produce disease. The greatest tool of preventive medicine, then, is self-knowledge, and until our medical-care system comes to grips with this people will continue to injure and kill themselves quite unnecessarily.
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