Undoing perpetual stress
| Richard O’Connor Undoing Perpetual Stress New York: Penguin, 2005 |
This is a book of integrity and common sense and compassion, informed and exact, written in a warm yet detached manner by a therapist who knows how bad it can get. O’Connor is a good guide in showing the connections between mind, body and health, and I highly recommend this book to those of us who are often tense and sometimes distressed.
Often, mental illness is the result of stress acting on a vulnerable individual. And all of us are vulnerable, there will be times when we are out of sync with ourselves, dissatisfied, irritable, overwhelmed and hopeless, out of control and in pain. There are those with “personality disorders ”, narcissistic, borderline and others, then there are others who feel their lives are out of control as they can’t lose weight, they can’t help procrastinating, can’t get out of debt, those who have soft addictions and bad habits that make them feel miserable and ashamed yet give comfort as a means to cope with mild depression. There are those who are numb to their own existence, feeling vaguely empty, feeling as if life is slowly bleeding out of them yet pushing themselves onwards after slapping some band aids on their wounds. Then there are those of us who still have to find confidence, love, connection, fulfillment.
Firstly, O’Connor explains why our nervous systems are not built for the amount of stress we currently face today, and how our training by parents, schools and systems may not equip us with the right skills to face it. The sense of connection with one another, with nature and with God that used to give insulation from stress has been eroded, he says, in the pursuit of opportunity that cuts us off from family and community in a market economy, an argument that Robert Lane made in his book Loss Of Happiness In Market Democracies.
In an effort to cope, many of us develop what he terms the “Perpetual Stress Response”, the fight-or-flight switch in our brains permanently stuck in the “on” position, which causes measurable physical damage. Physical health problems and symptoms, depression and addictions and so-called personality disorders, are often not isolated diseases, and can be alleviated by countering our habitual responses to stress.
Then comes the fascinating part, for he argues that neuroscience is showing us that the brain is constantly changing in reaction to experience. Therefore, stress gets to your physical system. Childhood trauma programmes people for autoimmune disease, depression and anxiety make physical wounds heal less quickly, and social isolation is as great a mortality risk as smoking. There is much self-destructive behaviour we learn when we adapt to difficult circumstances, behaviour that made sense at that time, that has worked its way into our brains so that it is natural and unconscious, but self-destructive. We fall upon these defences time and time again, which mean that we often do not learn from painful experiences but just get more brittle. After much time spent in pain, anxiety and frustration, we lose hope that we can do anything to help ourselves and we fall into a trap of victimisation, stop preparing for joy and only work to protect ourselves from misery.
This new identity pervades our entire being, like a metastatic cancer. It affects not only how we feel, but what we see, how we think, how we act, how we love. And because it affects how we see, we become blind to the changes that are taking place in ourselves. Only rarely do we remember that at one time we were happy, confident, active. (pp. 20-21)
We persist in this behaviour as we do not know how to do anything else. Depression becomes a set of habits, behaviour, thought processes and assumptions that seem very much like our core self.
Then comes the therapy part where, like a good therapist, O’Connor says that we must begin to see ourselves as active agents in creative our own lives, arguing that we can heal damage to the self by making deliberate choices, being mindful of our automatic responses, our learned defences and the tide of our emotions. Life events have a discernible effect on the brain, its structure, chemistry and network of connections, which means that there are activities we can choose to practise that repair the disconnects in the prefrontal cortex of our brain that have been damaged by trauma and stress. There are mental habits which worsen the stress response that we can break.
In Undoing Depression, an earlier book, O’Connor writes:
Obviously this is an intensely personal book for me. I want to keep would-be suicides alive, I want to spare people the useless pain of depression. There is a great deal more that can be done now than was available for my mother and for myself when I was younger. Medication and psychotherapy offer hope to everyone. Learning techniques of self-control, skills of communication and self-expression, challenging one’s assumptions about the self and the world, can give people who literally don’t know anything other than depression the chance for a rewarding life. (12)
– Undoing Depression,
New York: Little Brown and Company, 1997
Richard O’Connor’s familiarity with depression derives both from his own life and his work as a therapist. With poignant illustrations and a unique breadth and depth of understanding, his books translate and transform sound theory into effective practice.
Related works: Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. I also like Susan Howatch’s take on healing in The Wonder Worker, The High-Flyer and The Heart-breaker.