The 7 A's of Healing: When Does The Body Say 'No'?
Did someone teach you to listen to your body? Did someone teach you to love your body? Did someone teach you to take care of your body? Is illness only physical?
“Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits,
only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.”
- Gabor Mate, When The Body Says No -
Did someone teach you to learn about your body?
Did someone teach you to listen to your body?
Did someone teach you to love your body?
Did someone teach you to take care of your body?
Did someone tell you how to interpret the signals that your body sends you?
Did someone shape your perception of body image, and how?
Did someone teach you to rest-and-digest, to know what physical hunger is, to know what emotional hunger is?
Did society influence the way you see and treat your body?
Did you say ‘no’ to any of these questions? Did you say ‘yes’ to the wrong ones?
“The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress:
uncertainty,
the lack of information
and the loss of control.”
Gabor Mate, When The Body Says No
In WHEN THE BODY SAYS NO, Gabor Mate works out two notions:
I. The Biopsychosocial Aspects of Stress:
Stress is not just a matter of the mind but a full-body meltdown involving your biology, psychology, and social life:
UNO - The Biological Breakdown: Mate points out that chronic stress is like having your body constantly punched in the face by life - as understood by yours truly.
It screws with your immune system, cranks up inflammation, and messes with your hormones, leading to all sorts of illnesses like cancer, autoimmune diseases, and heart problems.
Basically, your brain, nervous system, and hormones are all in on this stress party, and it’s not a fun one.
DOS - The Psychological Pile-Up: Your thoughts, emotions, and personality (refer to the first quote!) play a massive role in how you handle stress. If you're carrying around unresolved trauma or constantly repressing your emotions, you're setting yourself up for a world of hurt (sometimes, self-imposed!).
Mate zeroes in on "emotional repression" – the habit of bottling up your feelings – as a major stress trigger that can make you physically sick.
TRES - The Social Squeeze: Your relationships and environment can either be a stress bomb or a stress buffer. Mate talks about how things like social support, work stress, and family dynamics can either help you navigate your world or push you to the edge, adding another layer of stress when you try to live up to unrealistic expectations.
II. Emotional Competence,
where Mate argues that developing "emotional competence"- learning to handle your emotions—is key to protecting yourself from the hidden stresses that wreak havoc on your health.
This emotional competence is crucial for our mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual health.
“Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past.
What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.
In each of the individual histories of illness in this book, one or more aspects of emotional competence were significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved. Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.”
Read that again.
Slowly.
Breathe in the ability to express your emotions effectively.
Breathe out the inability to assert your needs.
Breathe in the integrity of your boundaries.
Breathe out reacting to the past.
Breathe in the present.
Is Illness Only Physical?
What are the 7 A’s of Healing?
1. Acceptance
Acceptance means meeting ourselves right where we are.
Whatever emotions we’re feeling, however we look, whatever thoughts we have about ourselves—acceptance is seeing it all and saying, “I’m good enough.”
It’s about acknowledging our worthiness of compassion despite any anxiety or frustration.
3 ways to begin:
Understand your emotions without judgement.
“The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today
— at least in the industrialized world —
are emotional.
Just like laboratory animals unable to escape,
people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health.
The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities.
We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways.
The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.”
2. Awareness
Being aware of what our body tells us is essential for healing.
If you’re feeling foggy and lethargic, tune into those feelings.
Awareness helps guide future choices and decisions, making us more in sync with what our bodies need.
React to the present: “distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past”, or those that represent the anxieties of the future.
3 ways to begin:
Get used to daily checking in with your mind, body and soul (consciousness).
Reflect on your daily experience - why did X make you feel Y?
Understand the ways your body says ‘no’.
3. Anger
Anger is represented as a “bad emotion”, but Mate reminds us it’s a natural and valuable emotion.
It's something to feel, process, and then move forward from.
Suppressing anger can breed resentment and stress, which isn’t doing our health any favours.
Learning to express anger productively is key to reducing stress and aiding healing.
3 ways to begin:
Breathe through your triggers.
Find a physical outlet to let the anger out.
“You see, the acting-out, the yelling, the screaming and even the hitting,
all that a person does,
serves as a defence against the experience of the anger.
It’s a defence against keeping the anger inside where it can be deeply felt.
Discharge defends against anger being actually experienced.”
4. Autonomy
Autonomy is all about your independent thoughts and actions—your personal boundaries.
It’s knowing what you want versus what others want from you.
Establishing these boundaries helps you stay in control, focus on your priorities, and avoid unnecessary stress.
Know where you end and others begin.
3 ways to begin:
Set your boundaries
Mentally prepare to assert your Self, needs and thoughts.
Observe the choices you make.
“Nature’s ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence — or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community.
Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows.
Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults.
Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism’s chances for long-term survival.
Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy.
Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation.
Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other.
With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy — for the freedom to make genuine choices.
Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress.
Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices — in other words, when autonomy is undermined.
Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does not disrupt the social relationships on which survival also depends, whether with emotional intimates or with important others—employers, fellow workers, social authority figures.
The less the emotional capacity for self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, the more the adult depends on relationships to maintain homeostasis.
The greater the dependence, the greater the threat when those relationships are lost or become insecure.
Thus, the vulnerability to subjective and physiological stress will be proportionate to the degree of emotional dependence.
To minimize the stress from threatened relationships, a person may give up some part of his autonomy.
However, this is not a formula for health, since the loss of autonomy is itself a cause of stress.
The surrender of autonomy raises the stress level, even if on the surface it appears to be necessary for the sake of “security” in a relationship, and even if we subjectively feel relief when we gain “security” in this manner.
If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people, I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness.
The other way of protecting oneself from the stress of threatened relationships is emotional shutdown.
To feel safe, the vulnerable person withdraws from others and closes against intimacy. This coping style
may avoid anxiety and block the subjective experience of stress but not the physiology of it. Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity.
Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen.
Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.”
5. Attachment
Connections with others are a lifeline to healing.
This means not just our relationships but also how we accept help and support.
Letting go of the fear of vulnerability and leaning on others isn’t a weakness—it’s a strength that welcomes healing.
3 ways to begin:
Learn to listen to others as much as you listen to yourself.
Maintain the boundaries you set both for yourself and for others.
Welcome vulnerability through practice.
“Do I live my life according to my own deepest truths,
or in order to fulfill someone else’s expectations?
How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own
and how much has been in service to a self-image
I originally created in the belief it was necessary to please my parents?”
6. Assertion
Assertion is about confidently stating your right to be here, to think and feel, to love and be loved.
It’s not about justifying yourself to anyone.
It's about owning who you are.
3 ways to begin:
Say “No”: learn how to, mentally prepare to do so and do so.
Practice self-assertion in order to learn to serve your own needs.
Understand your fears related to self-assertion, befriend them, talk to them and assert yourself.
“The core belief in having to be strong enough,
characteristic of many people who develop chronic illness,
is a defence.
The child who perceives that her parents cannot support her emotionally had better develop an attitude of “I can handle everything myself.”
Otherwise, she may feel rejected.
One way not to feel rejected is never to ask for help, never to admit “weakness”
— to believe that I am strong enough to withstand all my vicissitudes alone.”
7. Affirmation
Maté talks about two types of affirmation:
First, affirming our creative selves—whether through art, music, cooking, writing, whatever lets us express and be seen.
Second, affirming our connection to something bigger—the universe, a greater purpose, or a higher power.
Feeling connected to the world helps with feelings of isolation and loneliness, reinforcing our sense of belonging and worth.
3 ways to begin:
Spend more time in Nature.
“In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively.
Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working.
What is not in balance?
What have I ignored?
What is my body saying no to?
Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden.”
Take your time to breathe in these 7 As of Healing.
Understand them, truly, from within.
Explore the linked resources in your own time.
Fill in the blanks.
From my body to yours,
Katrin