Is my cancer caused by stress?

Many people who have a cancer diagnosis ask this question. This is because many people are aware that cancer has arrived in their lives around a time of either acute (which means extreme) or chronic (which means prolonged and unrelenting) stress. Sometimes cancer arrives once the source of stress has been resolved and the body relaxes. You finally think you can relax and then a tumour pops up.

We are talking about psycho-emotional stress. Not physical stress (like lifting something heavy or running really fast… that’s a good kind of stress!).

There are many people who have written about this phenomenon in relation to wider health. Gabor Maté in his book ‘When the body says no’ – Bessel van der Kolk in ‘The body keeps the score’. These are probably the two best-known books on the connection of life-stress and sickness at a cellular level in the body.

More alternative writers have also documented aspects of this. Andreas Moritz’s book ‘Cancer is not a disease: it’s a healing mechanism’ makes a very convincing case for our bodies working to heal us from toxicity, whether it’s environmental or emotional, and the healing mechanisms of flushing out the chemistry of stress and pain from our bodies. Sometimes that process can be focussed on a tumour area.

Our bodies are not suicidal! Although mainstream Western medicine can be useful in the short term in managing symptoms and slowing disease progression, we don’t need doctors to rescue us from our self-destructive bodies. What we actually need is to pay attention to the warning signs that we need to take better care of our emotions and wellbeing.

Keep on taking the tablets and carrying an intolerable burden of psycho-emotional stress: sometimes it seems to be the deal for Western doctors. It’s not a good deal, and more importantly it doesn’t work to bring healing.

To conclude: yes, psycho-emotional stress has probably been somewhere in the roots of your cancer formation. I’m not saying that cancer is an automatic result from stress. It is the unique stress-response that varies from person to person which is the key to understanding cellular dysfunction and chaotic cellular growth.

More on this in my next post.