The Mindbody Prescription

This book is about emotions, illness and wellness, how they are related and what one can do to enhance good health and combat certain physical conditions. The ideas are based on twenty-four years of successfully treating an emotionally induced physical disorder known as the Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). (Location 65)

When I put the idea to the test, by telling patients that I thought their pain was the result of “tension,” I was astonished to observe that those who accepted the diagnosis got better. Those who rejected it remained unchanged. (Location 152)

Note: Fascinating Consistent with stuff like the placebo effect, where the mind makes it real First you have to even believe it’s possible for it to be the source If you don’t, you cdan’t start to connect the dots, but if you’re at least OPEN to it, then you can start

Our brains have decided that feeling tense, which is the appropriate response to being tense, is too unpleasant to bear and is not as socially acceptable as having something “physically” wrong. And so the brain makes a few adjustments in circuitry and instead of looking and acting like a nervous wreck, presto—a bellyache or a backache. The reason why the ulcer had to go was that everybody began to realize that it was a phony, that it really meant tension, and that’s not socially acceptable. (Location 211)

The subtle but important shift was that unconscious emotional phenomena necessitated physical symptoms. (Location 231)

The purpose of a defense mechanism (in this case physical symptoms) is to divert people’s attention to the body, so that they can avoid the awareness of or confrontation with certain unconscious (repressed) feelings. (Location 263)

Most importantly, these manifestations demonstrate that there is no separation between mind and body; that the two are inextricably intertwined. One cannot study the pathology of human disease without factoring in the role of the psyche. (Location 274)

To neglect this dimension of illness pathology is as great an omission as to ignore the role of microorganisms in human illness. (Location 277)

Retirement is generally “dangerous to your health,” whether you’re a man or a woman. The loss of status, the change of pattern and lifestyle almost invariably produce disturbing internal reactions that may cause emotional or physical symptoms. (Location 325)

That is how mindbody symptoms come about—and they are universal in Western society. They are not a sign of mental or emotional illness. To look upon them as abnormal or aberrant leads to gross medical mismanagement. (Location 366)

Freud conceived of three components of the emotional mind that his translators called the superego, the ego and the id. Transactional psychoanalysts refer to these components as parent, adult and child. For the purpose of teaching my theories I prefer the latter. (Location 376)