Hidden Within Us - A Radical New Understanding of the Mind-Body Connection (Book by Dr Samuel Mann)

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hidden-within-us-140500557.html

On April 23, 2022, World Book Day, Dr. Samuel Mann, a physician, researcher, and prominent hypertension specialist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital / Weill Cornell Medical College, will release his latest health and well-being book. 'Hidden Within Us' offers a revolutionary understanding of the mind-body connection that is suspected by neither patients nor physicians, and is missing from both medical and mind-body literature.

The book conveys the unrecognized origin of the mind-body connection in the powerful emotions that are hidden from our awareness through repression. Repression is not psychopathology. It is actually a gift of evolution that is a widely unrecognized key component of our resilience in the face of trauma or potentially overwhelming stress. However, the burden of repressed emotion, in time, is an equally unrecognized contributor to many medical conditions.

Dr. Mann hopes this understanding can open a new direction in managing some of the patients with widely encountered yet still inadequately explained and treated medical conditions such as hypertension, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and other pain syndromes, migraine, inflammatory bowel disease, and possibly many others. He emphasizes that the mind-body connection is pertinent in some, but not all patients with these conditions; attribution to a mind-body origin should not be generalized to all patients.

He presents case histories of patients that will make this rarely considered understanding unavoidable to almost any reader. Importantly, the cases will also convey the potential for healing through awareness or medication. Hidden Within Us then goes on to discuss both the paths and the barriers to recovery.

Here are a few illustrative cases:

A 22-year-old patient suffering from unexplained chronic fatigue syndrome had grown up amid severe acrimony between his parents. Despite the absence of any anxiety or depression, his chronic fatigue responded quickly to an antidepressant.

A 48-year-old patient with longstanding unexplained severe hypertension that was uncontrolled on five medications, experienced rapid normalization of her blood pressure and elimination of three medications after gaining awareness of emotions related to her experience of rape when she was 14.

A patient who had been suffering unexplained episodes of sudden and severe blood pressure elevation for five years experienced a rapid cure without any medication after gaining awareness of painful but repressed emotions related to her struggles after a divorce 20 years earlier.​

 

Excuse me, a radical new understanding? Repressed emotions as cause of disease is what Freud claimed 120 years ago.

 

I don't believe repressed emotions cause disease, but I am open to believing that some repressed emotions can cause physical symptoms.

Am I wrong in believing this?

 

Who knows. There is no way to show that a person has a repressed emotion or does not have a repressed emotion. By definition if it's repressed then it's not observable. And the method claimed to bring repressed emotions to the surface, ("recovered memory therapy") is now considered a method of implanting false memories. Presumably that is all Freud ever did.

 

A friends son (32 yrs old) was seeing a physiotherapist for a couple of years for lower back pain, the physiotherapy wasn't helping, his back pain went away after he told his parents he was gay. He had tried to tell them yrs earlier but they didn't want to accept it and this caused him a lot of emotional stress.

 

Correlation does not equal causation.

 

Grim that Yahoo is simply churning unedited and unquestioned, publisher's marketing as 'News'.

 

There is literally NOTHING radical about this! How did he sell this to a publisher?!

 

Stress can cause physical disease by increasing levels of adrenaline in the body. An overactive thyroid causes damage because it increases the levels of adrenaline in the body which leads to a high heart rate, itches, and disrupted hormone function. The body burns through stored fat and will begin to digest the muscles and eventually the liver and the heart.

That is extreme, of course, but lower levels must change how the body functions as well.

But that is not repressed emotion especially in the sense that you do not realise you have stress. It sounds like the usual Freudian myths. Emotion is something we feel. If anything, when something is very traumatic the body protects itself by squashing emotion before you feel it, not repressed but absent.

It is hard work doing that so it can have consequences, not to mention making it hard to feel good emotions too but repression is not proven to exist.

 

The problem with that is: what's stress? A quick look at various definitions and it's something like "the body's response to threats". It's one of the most vague concepts that's ever been put to such widespread use. It basically means anything and everything, especially as it's so commonly applied on things that have no threat level whatsoever.

Lots of definitions are about the mental and physical symptoms in response to stress. So literally stress is sometimes defined as a response to itself, as if the symptoms are the stress itself, caused by stress, by... itself. It can sometimes mean being sad, the death of a loved one is often framed as stress (nevermind what are the practical consequences). Or lacking money. Or facing difficult choices, often where all the options are bad. Most of the common "stress" scenarios have zero threat involved, and yet the common definition is all about threats and fear Fear FEAR.

When people say "I'm stressed at work", there is no threat involved, they are working too much. Or stressed at being new parents, usually means they are sleeping little, having to spend a lot of energy than they should, have little time to relax and less freedom.

Something that can be used to mean everything, essentially means nothing. It's a catch-all with a definition that is completely fluid, changes on circumstances. Whereas we know that it's too often the label given to unexplained illness, where the idea of stress being the symptoms of a threat conveniently become self-justifying, since only the symptoms are there and definitions of "stress", a response to threats, still somehow apply without there being any threat. This is like inventing generalized anxiety when ideologues could not identify things "anxious" people were anxious about, when anxiety is defined as worrying about something.

It really has to be defined first. That's never been done, because keeping it as a vague concept that can mean many different things allows using it to mean whatever is convenient. This is the same as "life events". Literally everything is a life event if someone wants to. I'm frankly of the opinion that stress should either be refined or removed entirely as a concept, in its current use, it serves no useful purpose.