I am currently reading Fred Luskin's book "Forgive for good" where I read that couple of studies have shown that if you often recall or dwell on a past situation that angered you your brain takes it at face value and your nervous system and body reacts as if the situation was occurring and angering you now.
Anger is an aggressive emotion energized by firing up of the sympathetic nervous system. If the firing up lasts too long or happens too repeatedly, that produces TMS. Why? I think it is because a fired up sympathetic nervous system produces stress chemicals such as adrenalin, cortisol, and substance p. The brain interprets the high level of stress chemicals to indicate you are in danger and creates pain. (Remember Alan Gordon's Recovery Program Day 2 lesson: Pain = Danger, or as I would put it Danger = Pain.)
Conscious as well as unconscious anger can fire up the sympathetic nervous system to produce stress chemicals. If I understand Fred Luskin correctly, forgiveness does not mean you accept or disregard what someone one did to you in the past. It just means you get over it sufficiently so that thinking about it does not fire up your sympathetic nervous system. How do you do that? Here are two of Luskin's points:
- Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.
- Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that hurt you, or condoning of their action. What you are after is to find peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that come from blaming that which has hurt you less, taking the life experience less personally, and changing your grievance story.”
A catchy way of putting forgiveness, even though it is somewhat off-putting, is that you need to give up all hope of a better past.
Therefore, its better not to do it and forgive, etc. This strikes me as somewhat opposite of what we are doing, Sarno said to concentrate on anger, journaling concentrates on anger, there are anger expression mediation etc, its all about not suppressing anger etc. I realize I am being a bit simplistic here and there is a middle ground and often anger is not even the issue anymore and its more about fear.. . . often anger is not even the issue anymore and its more about fear. But still how do we find the balance? Allow anger for a while and then let go, right? How do we know when it its letting go and when it is suppressing?
I'll begin with a theoretical point: Anger and fear are not necessarily separate. Why do we repress anger? In
Healing Back Pain Sarno tells the story of a mother who stopped the temper tantrums of her fifteen month old by splashing ice water in his face when he started to have a tantrum. She only had to do it once, and he never had another tantrum. Sarno wrote: "At the ripe age of fifteen months he had learned the technique of repression. He had been programmed to repress anger because it produced very unpleasant consequences, and he would carry that dubious talent with him throughout his life. Now when confronted with the multitude of frustrating, annoying, sometimes enraging things that happen to people every day, this man automatically internalizes his natural anger, and when that anger collects and builds up, he will have TMS or some such physical reaction in response to it." In short, we repress anger because we learned early in life to
fear that experiencing it will produce very unpleasant consequences. The fifteen month old learned that experiencing anger disrupted the bond with his mother, and according to Dr. John Bowlby a secure attachment bond with one's early caregiver is of innate and utmost importance to infants and young children. The fifteen month old will similarly repress anger at loved ones as an adult because, unconsciously, that anger resembles the childhood anger at mother. All this happens unconsciously; the adult will be aware of neither the anger nor the fear of experiencing it. Both are repressed from conscious awareness--not by pain (I don't disagree with Sarno on much but I do on this) but instead by a myriad of psychological defense mechanism learned in childhood.
(To digress, a person who knew Sarno once indicated to me that the fifteen month old in the story was actually none other than little John Sarno.)
Now to the more practical: I believe it is important in one's psychological thinking (or journaling if one is into that) to focus on what Sarno calls "the multitude of frustrating, annoying, sometimes enraging things that happen to people every day" and not dwell on the past. There is plenty in one's current life that can fire up the sympathetic nervous system and produce TMS. Some of our biggest (unconscious) fears involve fear of experiencing anger at people we are close regarding the frustrating, annoying, or sometimes enraging things they do.
