When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

Through Maté’s relationship with his mother, he explores his own tendency to mask his discomfort, particularly in front of his mother. He realizes this tendency when he goes to visit her and intentionally masks his limp, which was caused by a knee injury. This is a form of repression, an immature coping strategy that has its origins in Maté’s childhood; Maté learned to be hyper self-sufficient and to not express his emotional experiences in order to not burden his mother.

This tendency has its roots in Maté’s infancy, much of which was spent in a crowded ghetto in Nazi-occupied Budapest, Hungary. As a Jewish family during the Holocaust, Maté’s family was under immense stress; his mother’s parents and sister were killed in Auschwitz, and her husband was in a forced labor battalion for the German army—she had no way of knowing whether he would survive. Maté’s mother did not have the capacity to attentively and securely parent him, and at one point, had to leave him in a safe place apart from herself for a few weeks. As a result, Maté minimized his own needs in order to avoid burdening her further, as well as to avoid the disappointment of his mother’s proximate abandonment of him. He concludes that emotional repression is present in everyone to different extents. Maté suggests that people must examine their childhoods honestly in order to unpack their tendencies and redress any tendency toward repression, as repression causes chronic stress, which contributes to disease and illness.

Mary, whom Maté refers to in the opening chapter of his book, epitomizes The Relationship Between Chronic Stress and Disease Maté establishes. Mary experienced abuse and neglect during her childhood; she lived in several unstable foster homes with her two younger sisters. She has a distinct memory of being seven years old and hiding in the attic of a foster home while her two foster parents drunkenly and aggressively argued. She felt a keen sense of responsibility, even at that very young age, to care for her sisters and to keep them safe.

As an adult, Mary was incapable of saying no. Her needs were always secondary in her mind, or even completely negligible, compared to the needs of her husband and children. This remained the case even as Mary became extremely sick with a complicated range of health conditions, beginning with Raynaud’s syndrome, gangrene in a finger, and finally, scleroderma. Before Mary died of this disease, Maté spoke to her at length about her life, believing that Mary’s repressive coping style, formed in childhood, held the key to understanding her health conditions. Through Mary, Maté suggests that mind and body are inseparably intertwined and that Mary’s body expressed the chronic stress of a repressed individual.