Emotional Cancer

by Tom Kenyon

The concept first occurred to me during a training in Anchorage, Alaska several years ago.

I was teaching how sound could be used to unwind emotion for the purpose of psychological healing. A woman, let’s call her Rose, volunteered for the session in which I would model the technique. As part of the demonstration, I asked her to focus on an area of her body that felt uncomfortable, the idea being that emotions often seem to reside in certain areas of the body.

She said that her kidneys were sore and painful. Rose then volunteered the information that she had just gotten out of the hospital where she had been treated for kidney failure. It was a very scary ordeal for her, as you can well imagine. She was now on dialysis and her name was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant.

I coached her how to move her awareness into her kidneys, and to make sounds on the exhale. I told her to imagine that the sounds were actually coming from her kidneys and to listen to her own sounds as she relaxed deeper into the exhales.

As weird as it may sound, it is quite easy to do, and soon she was making soft moans. Then the sounds changed. At first they sounded like an infant or young child, and then they became the desperate cries of a child in distress. All of us in the room were gripped by the intensity of the moment as we watched a grown woman in her forties crying like a terrified young girl.

Eventually her cries became muffled and changed into soft moans again. Reaching behind her, she touched her lower back in the area of her kidneys. Rose opened her eyes.

In disbelief, she looked at me. “The pain is gone,” she said. “The pain is gone!”

I asked her to describe her internal experience during the process, and she said that she had gone back to about two years of age. She was sitting in a high chair which she recognized from her childhood. As her voice unwound the trapped energy in her kidneys, her mind was catapulted back in time, back into a childhood memory. At that moment in her young life, her mother was living with a boyfriend. The mother had gone to work and the boy friend was supposed to take care of her. But he evidently resented that she took attention away from him. Instead of feeding her normally, he would throw the food at her. This frightened her, and it was this terror that she re-experienced during the demonstration. Somehow, the physical kidneys had benefited from the remembrance and vocal expression of this early childhood fear.

In our class discussion following the demonstration, someone mentioned that her brother had died of stomach cancer. The weird thing about it was that his father was very abusive to him as a child. And whenever he got drunk or angry he would kick or punch his son in the stomach telling him that he was a piece of trash.

Rose’s experience had triggered an “ah-ha” and the sister of the dead brother spoke through tears. She saw how her father’s rage had been repeatedly pummeled into her brother’s abdomen.

For her, this explained the cancer and untimely death of her brother.

The idea that tissues hold emotion was proposed by the Western Psychologist, Wilhelm Reich. But the idea goes much further back than that, back in fact to the ancient art of Acupuncture. The Chinese codified this system of subtle energy medicine thousands of years ago, and one of the chief concepts regards emotion. According to Acupuncture theory, different organs tend to hold different types of emotion. The lungs, for instance, tend to hold grief and sorrow, and the kidneys fear.

Had this woman’s childhood experience of fear weakened her kidney energy (called chi) and predisposed her to kidney failure later in her life? Or were the two unrelated? But whether directly related or not, it was interesting that re-experiencing the pain and vocalizing the fear reduced the sensation of pain and discomfort in her physical kidneys.

I began to look at emotional pain and its relationship to health in a new light. Now back then, in the early 90’s, allopathic medicine did not (and for the most part still does not) recognize a direct relationship between emotion and health.

Frankly, I think a lot of this has to do with money. Allopathic medicine is more and more a pharmaceutically based enterprise. And the big drug companies aren’t interested in funding research projects that don’t yield them a profit.

Despite the drug companies’ monolithic hold on medicine, however, a new area of research is taking hold. It is called Psychoneuroimmunology, or the study of how the mind affects health. Back in the early 90’s this fledgling area of medicine was called Psychoimmunology. I guess it’s a sign that the area is more respectable, now that the word is longer and harder to pronounce.

But whatever you call it, this field of medicine is showing some very clear links between our emotional lives and our health.

As the sciences of neurology and psychology join together to explore this formerly unexplored terrain of human biology, some interesting patterns are emerging.

One area this shows up most clearly is in the area of cancer. As you may know, cancer is reaching epidemic proportions in industrialized countries. And there is a growing body of research which shows that much of this is due to increased toxic pollution of our food, air and water. But don’t count on the Big Guys in Washington, or your state capitol for that matter, to do much about it. Money is all that seems to talk in the political arena, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of profit in cleaning up the air and water right now.

I do find it interesting that the current US Oil Companies, excuse me, I mean the current US Administration, virtually wiped out decades of hard won environmental protections overnight.

But let me return to the topic at hand. I didn’t mean for this to be a political statement. Still, one cannot really separate public health from social and political issues. Despite their slight of hand card tricks, our political leaders cannot alter the reality that public health and the quality of our environment are intimately connected.

While the quality of our external environment plays heavily on our state of health, it is another type of environment I wish to discuss,

You cannot see it, but you can feel it. It is your emotional environment. And as a psychotherapist looking at our society, I am reminded of a line from the musical Seventy-Six Trombones—”There’s trouble in River City.”

I call it emotional cancer, and like cancer in general, it can be deadly. Left to its own devices, it can destroy a life. At the very least, it can psychologically cripple an individual so that he or she does not make appropriate life choices. In its more aggressive forms, it can actually disrupt cellular biology leading to physical illness.

Ironically, I have found that this type of emotional cancer frequently shows up in spiritual communities, regardless of their philosophical and/or religious beliefs. There is a reason for this, and I hope to talk about it in a bit. But first I’d like to put some background in place.