Introductory Note:
Nowhere do I mean to imply that all illness is a choice or that it is conscious. There are many factors that are beyond what any one person can control such as their dna, the health and nutrition of their ancestors, early childhood nutrition, unavoidable exposure to trauma, toxins in food, air, water and more. And ultimately all bodies break down over time and die.
But I want you to consider where you do have control. As you become aware of things you can do, but do not take action to do something, then the question becomes, “why not?”
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TO BE OR NOT TO BE — SICK
Putting forth the premise that illness is a choice may sound harsh. But think about it this way:
Long before you got sick, you were entrenched for years in hundreds of little habits–habits of eating, exercise, work, lifestyle, smoking, drinking, and habits of how you handled stress, conflict and negative emotions. Even your thinking has been largely a matter of habit. And because thoughts determine emotions, which in turn create different biological chemicals in your body, emotional states and body chemistry are the results of thoughts, beliefs, judgements, and habits of mind. And that involves choice – both conscious and unconscious.
Regardless of what habits or beliefs were installed in childhood by family or culture, upon reaching adulthood, it becomes a choice to continue those habits and to hold those beliefs without question, or not. It comes down to whether they work for you or whether negative consequences appear that call for change.
Choices become habits, and habits create destiny
All habits come about through little decisions made again and again, perhaps multiple times daily until they become an automatic program that starts to run your life. Allowing thoughts to continually be held in mind is a choice, and this choice then becomes part of your attitude and personality [see work of biologist Bruce Lipton, Ph.D.].
Further, your beliefs, judgments, and interpretations of events and experiences collect evidence to prove you right. Left unchallenged (a choice), they will either attract more similar experiences or you will tend to feel and react as if they were similar even though they were not.
These mental habits will guarantee what emotional and physical consequences you experience both immediate and long term including illness. For example, if you interpret a situation as ‘this is scary’, you will activate the stress hormone of cortisol, which shuts off the biological functions of growth, digestion, repair and immune functioning. Whereas if you interpret the very same event as ‘this is exciting’, ‘this is an opportunity’, or ‘what a fun challenge’, your internal chemistry will be very different.
Routinely interpreting what is happening around you as threatening will over time damage your health. However, you can choose to interpret or judge a situation differently, to react differently. Following a decision to do so, and then practicing over time to retrain your mind, might make the difference you need to heal.
Consequences
So there are consequences to all of your choices and the habits they become. And these consequences include your health, mental and emotional well-being, or lack of same.
However, at the time that the choices were made, you may have been unaware of those consequences or you lived in denial. After all, when you picked up your first cigarette were you really paying attention to the health risks? Did you think that you were invincible? Did you think you could outrun the bullet, and that the health warnings didn’t apply to you? Did you just figure on having just a few, and quitting tomorrow? Were you bargaining, “please, God, just let me have this one ___ (cigarette/drink/ice cream sunday) and then I’ll stop and be good!”
Now, years later you may become aware that it has come time to pay the piper. What do you do when you don’t like the negative consequences of your choices? How do you unravel bad habits, bad decisions, limiting beliefs or judgments for which you are now paying dearly?
Making different choices
Healing requires change, and change can be scary.
If a health problem is a result of long standing habits and patterns, healing will always require changing those habits and patterns. The necessary changes may be all pervasive, even drastic, and can be just as scary as the illness itself. Carolyn Myss in Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, says that
“many of us are almost as afraid of healing as we are of illness.”2
Even though a person may be aware of the risks, and their doctor may have recommended dietary, habit or lifestyle changes over the years,
only when there is a clear cause and effect relationship of certain habits and choices with the negative consequences do most people begin to make even the smallest, yet alone the big changes, that may be necessary.
This follows the Law of Inertia, a body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.
It takes more energy to shift direction than to continue to do what you have always done.
And it will take dedication on a daily basis to overcome the years of negative programming. However, each day you choose to practice new habits, it will gain in power.
How committed are you to heal?
Are you willing to do whatever it takes? And if you aren’t, can we then say that you are choosing to remain sick? Myss asks the following:
“If healing required moving to another part of the country, changing your attitudes toward others and yourself, changing all your physical habits, such as diet and exercise, being alone for a long period of time, or going on a retreat to confront your shadow, experiencing illness as a way of healing mentally, emotionally and spiritually, or losing everything familiar to you — home, spouse, job–would you do it?” 3
John Harrison, MD, in Love Your Disease–It’s Keeping You Healthy says that
“Anybody prepared to make fearless decisions in their best interests will avoid all major illness and most minor ones as well.” 4
Illness provides benefits called secondary gains
There may be positive payoffs to being sick. For example, illness may get you out of a job, activity, situation, relationship, or a responsibility that you hate. It can provide an excuse not to do, or not to go where you don’t want, or to do something that you do, for example, to stay home and watch television. It may provide financial awards, temporary or ongoing income, medical benefits, and time off from work. [See article “Secondary Gain – a Gain from Pain”]
Illness may get people off your back. It may provide an excuse, and special considerations or privileges such as handicapped parking. It may allow you to avoid responsibility for yourself or others. It may cast the die–letting the disease or condition make a decision for you when you are too indecisive or weak to do it on your own.
Illness may pull a family or relationship together, or provide a way to check on the feelings of others. It may let others know that you need them, providing them with an important role, and helping them to feel good about themself for helping you. Illness can be a way to get people to come to visit, and to obtain desired attention, emotional assistance, concern, sympathy, demonstrations of caring or love. It can be a way to get people to do things for you, even getting waited on hand and foot as in hospitalization. Finally, a health problem can be a form of self-punishment, a way to atone or pay yourself back for guilty thoughts, feelings, behavior.
Because of all of the above, a person on an unconscious level may choose to become ill, or to do things that make him liable to get sick. Once sick he may obstruct healing, or do all the wrong things such as a diabetic eating sweets, to sabotage getting better.
As Myss says,
“Illness can…become a powerful way to get attention you might not otherwise receive”, and “as a form of leverage, illness can seem almost attractive.”
Benefits to illness can be secondary or primary to the condition. They can be conscious or unconscious (below the level of awareness). As in which came first, the chicken or the egg, did the person get sick in order to get his needs met? Or did he get sick as a result of bad habits or some other reason, and then notice that there were some payoffs in being ill?
Harrison says that
“The person is needy, rather than sick….People get ill to get what they want… People do not get what they want…so they become ill.”5
Basic needs, such as attention, solitude, caring, must be met one way or the other. And if illness is providing those needs, the person must feel secure in meeting those same needs, just as easily as before, but now in a healthy, constructive way. Otherwise, he will resist getting well, or he will get sick again to get his needs met.
A Wake Up Call + Hope
To break the negative cycle, both the pain of the illness needs to be great enough for the person to be motivated to change, and the person must have hope that making changes will make a positive difference in his health.
Without hope or positive expectancy, why bother to even try?
Harrison further states that
“Disease is both self-created and self-cured…. Illness is the physical and psychological result of unresolved needs, not a malfunction of a machine caused by unknown or external factors….We give ourselves illnesses in order to ‘take care of ourselves’ psychologically.”
Harrison and Stephen Parkhill, author of Answer Cancer, refer to an unspoken contract between doctor and patient that says the following. The doctor, in exchange for money, will remove unpleasant symptoms for the patient without upsetting the patient’s chosen lifestyle or habits, attitudes or feelings, judgments or beliefs. The doctor will participate in the illusion that the patient is a victim and not responsible for either the disease or its removal and return to health. The doctor will take over responsibility for the patient’s health and all decisions relevant to his health care.
Harrison puts it this way:
“I have consulted you to have my need recognized, my suffering validated, my pain removed and my disease retained. In return, I will support you financially and give you status commensurate with the powers I ask you to exercise.”6
As Harrison further states,
“It’s this need to be taken care of by people more powerful than ourselves that leads us into taking some decisions that are damaging to us in the long term.”
This agreement between doctor and patient may eradicate symptoms, but miss the cure. It has all the dysfunctional psychodynamics of the Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor Triangle7 –the patient being the Victim, the doctor/therapist being the Rescuer, and the disease/condition being the Persecutor. Roles can switch if compliance in the game is unsatisfactory.
Patients need to get out of the game and take back responsibility for their illness, and take back their power to heal. But in doing so, they need to understand the role that not just their physical habits and lifestyle play, but the all important component of their thoughts and emotions.
What emotional states cause illness?
Parkhill believes that ailments in general come from an unconscious need for self-punishment, self-mutilation, or limitation. He also feels that guilt, blame, criticism, fears, such as the fear of abandonment, or the fear of not surviving because essential needs are not well met, play a role.
To his list, I would add that many other emotions and internal conflicts could be involved depending upon the illness and where it is located. German New Medicine outlines a number of emotional shocks that if are not quickly resolved lead to very specific diseases. [See article “German New Medicine & the Mind-Body Connection”]
Louise Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life, thinks that thoughts of being not good enough, self-hatred or criticism, resentment and guilt are the most destructive to our health. Conversely, she feels that forgiveness, self-acceptance, love and releasing the past are key for healing.
Unraveling Bad Choices and Making Better Ones
Postulating that illness is a choice, even if it is an unconscious one, implies that there is a different choice or choices that could potentially be made that would leading to a different outcome–one of health, vitality, and overall well-being. Once clear about the negative consequences of all of your habits and patterns, you may be motivated to change. This will include making changes in your thinking, beliefs, attitude, how you deal with stress, as well as diet, lifestyle.
Make a commitment to take positive action. Start with making the most obvious and the most do-able changes, and the changes most likely to make the most difference.
There are many ways of tackling the various mental, emotional and habit components.
- Self-hypnosis really helps to focus on priorities, increase motivation to do what you need to do, change negative thinking, and to release stress.
The modalities or techniques listed below are also invaluable in releasing stress, self-sabotage, and healing issues. Dowsing, Emotion Code, Hypnosis, and NLP have the additional benefit of being able to locate the source/s of the problem.
- Thought Stopping and Switching
- Emotional Freedom Technique
- Emotion Code
- Tapas Acupressure Technique
- Hypnosis
- Neural Linguistic Programming
- Pendulum Dowsing
- my own Infinite Intelligence Process8 [see article “Accessing More”]
- Through hypnosis or Time Line Therapy you can go back in time to a choice point and make a healthier, more constructive choice that leads to health. I like the unconscious healing modality that I call “Change Decision”9 that taught to me by A.L Ward, but those of other hypnosis mentors such as E. Arthur Winkler or Walter Sichort and his protege James Ramey, who did something similar.
- Next, you can imagine traveling into the future to a time when the problem has been satisfactorily resolved, find out how that was done, and bring that solution back to the present moment along with the resources to do it. This is called Future Pace, or Crystal Ball, or Magic Wand — all hypnosis and NLP techniques.
- Or again with hypnosis, you can imagine going into a parallel universe in order to change direction to an alternate reality more of your liking. Go the station platform and change trains.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. First published in 5/2007
2. Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, page i x.
3. Ibid, page 138-139.
4. John Harrison, M.D., Love Your Disease, page 51
5. page 46-7
6. Love Your Disease, page 59
7. The Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor Triangle is typically seen with alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, and many of the chronically ill. The Victim uses his problem to manipulate and control others into taking over responsibility for him, bailing him out of problems, and meeting his emotional and perhaps financial needs. The Rescuer initially feels good to be of help, but later comes to feel as if he, himself, is being victimized by the very person he is trying to help, who has takes on the role of Persecutor. Rescuers are caught in this trap because they do not feel good about themselves unless they are helping those they consider more unfortunate than they. Most people in the helping profession as well as nurses and others in the healing arts start out as Rescuers. Hence, they are vulnerable to being used and abused by others. Awareness helps, but the biggest cure for this is high self-esteem and healthy boundaries.
8. ACCESSING MORE – Tapping into the Eternal, Unlimited Self with the Infinite Intelligence Process by Roxanne Louise
9. Change Decision is included in the Visualization Chapter of my book, Your Unlimited Potential, a complete self-hypnosis course and introduction to professional hypnotherapy.
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“Illness as Choice ?” Copyright 7/2015 was then expanded and rewritten 6/2018 as “What if illness were a choice?” by Roxanne Louise. However, this article may be shared in other free online sources only if this copyright notice and link to http://www.roxannelouise.com and http://unlimitedpotentialhealingcenter.com are included with the content.
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