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mstokes's picture

I appreciate what you added

Submitted by mstokes on Sat, 11/15/2008 - 9:10am.
I appreciate what you added to this thread. I agree that accepting something doesn't mean a resignation to it--and often in that acceptance can come the time and space to learn the true nature of that which we initially felt compelled to fight. When I thought of "enemy" before I was mainly thinking of something like cancer--in which I have a hard time finding much redeeming value. But as I recall conversations I've had with my father about his experience with cancer, I see, too, that he doesn't view it as a "me vs. other/enemy" relationship--even as he was clearly "fighting" it with chemo--but that the cancer somehow became a part of him and certainly a part of his story. How, then, can we view as "enemy" or pure adversary something to which we are inextricably linked, that developed from within our minds and bodies? Perhaps that's the rub--that all illness, mental, physical, is part of our bodies, our brains, or stories, and so an appropriate relationship to it is not one of pure other/enemy, but of trying to figure what it's doing, how it got there, and how now to proceed in light of its presence. As I began to explore with migraine in my paper, perhaps, too, this supposed adversary is actually the brain's attempt to try to fight off a stressor--and our hijacking of its activities (unconscious activities?) might actually impede or damage an otherwise valuable process (not to diminish the pain and suffering associated with this and other illness--even if constructive in the end). It's very interesting to me to consider what the brain is trying to do through conflict and illness, and what we as patients and physicians may be doing to help or impede those responses and processes.

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