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Outwitting Our Nerves by Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

J >> Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury >> Outwitting Our Nerves




=Enjoying Poor Health.= There was the woman who had been an invalid
for twenty years, doing little else during all that time than to feel
her own feelings. Because of the distressing sensations in her
stomach, she had for a year taken nothing but liquid nourishment. She
had queer feelings in her solar-plexus and indeed a general luxury of
over-feeling. She could not leave her room nor have any visitors. She
was the star invalid of the family, waited on by her two hard-working
sisters who earned the living for them all.

Her sisters had inveigled her to my house under false pretenses,
calling it a boarding-house and omitting to mention that I was a
doctor, because "she guessed she knew more about her case than any
doctor." For the first week I got in only one sentence a day,--just
before I slipped out of the door after taking in her "liquid
nourishment." But at the end of the week I announced that thereafter
her meals would be served in the dining-room. When she found that
there was to be no more liquid nourishment, she had to appear at the
family table. After that it was only a short time before she was at
home, cooking for her sisters. When she saw the role she had been
unconsciously playing, she could hardly wish to go on with it.

=Feeling His Legs.= Mr. R. suffered from such severe and distressing
pains in his legs that he believed himself on the verge of paralysis.
He was also bothered by a chronic emotional state which made him look
like a "weepy" woman. His eyes were always full of tears and his chin
a-quiver, and he had, as he said, a perpetual lump in his throat.
Under re-education both lump and paralysis disappeared completely and
Mr. R. took his wife across the continent, driving his machine with
his own hands--and feet.

=A Subconscious Association.= Mr. D.'s case admirably illustrates the
return of symptoms through an unconscious association. He was a
lawyer, prominent in public affairs of the Middle West, who had been
my patient for several weeks and who had gone home cured of many
striking disabilities. Before he came to me, he had given up his
public work and was believed by all his associates to be afflicted
with softening of the brain, and "out of the game" for good. From
being one of the ablest men of his State, he had fallen into such a
condition that he could neither read a letter nor write one. He could
not stand the least sunshine on his head, and to walk half a mile was
an impossibility. He was completely "down and out" and expected to be
an invalid for the rest of his life.

But these symptoms had one by one disappeared during his five-weeks
stay with me. He had done good stiff work in the garden, carried a
heavy sack of grapefruit a mile in the hot sun, and was generally his
old self again. Now he was back in the harness, hard at work as of
old. Suddenly, as he sat reading in his home one evening, all his old
symptoms swept over him,--the pains in his head and legs, the pounding
of the heart, the "all-gone" sensations as though he were going to die
on the spot. He became almost completely dissociated, but through it
all he clung to the idea which he had learned,--namely that this
experience was not really physical as it seemed but was the result of
some idea, and would pass. He did not tell any one of the attack,
ignored it as much as possible, and waited. In a few minutes he was
himself again. Then he looked for the cause and realized that the
article he was reading was one he had read several months previous,
when suffering most severely from the whole train of symptoms. When
the familiar words had again gone into his mind, they had pressed the
button for the whole physiological experience which had once before
been associated with them. This is the same mechanism as that involved
in Prince's case, Miss Beauchamp, who became completely dissociated at
one time when a breeze swept across her face. When Dr. Prince looked
for the cause, he found that once before she had experienced certain
distressing emotions while a breeze was fanning her cheek. The
recurrence of the physical stimulation had been sufficient to bring
back in its entirety the former emotional complex.

=Another Kind of Association.= One of my women patients illustrates
another kind of association-mechanism, based not on proximity in time
but proximity of position in the body. This woman had complained for
years of "bladder trouble" although no physical examination had been
able to reveal any organic difficulty. She referred to a constant
distress in the region of the bladder and was never without a certain
red blanket which she wrapped around her every time she sat down.
During psycho-analysis she recounted an experience of years before
which she had never mentioned to anybody. During a professional
consultation her physician, a married man, had suddenly seized her and
exclaimed, "I love you! I love you!" In spite of herself, the woman
felt a certain appeal, followed by a great sense of guilt. In the
conflict between the physiological reflex and her moral repugnance,
she had shunted out of consciousness the real sex-sensation and had
replaced it with a sensation which had become associated in her
subconscious mind with the original temptation. Since the nerves from
the genital region and from the bladder connect with the same segment
of the spinal cord, she had unconsciously chosen to mix her messages,
and to cling to the substitute sensation without being in the least
Conscious of the cause. As soon as she had described the scene to me
and had discerned its connection with her symptoms, the bladder
trouble disappeared.

=Afraid of the Cold.= Patients who are sensitive to cold are very
numerous. Mr. G.--he of the prunes and bran biscuits--was so afraid of
a draft that he could detect the air current if a window was opened a
few inches anywhere in a two-story house. He always wore two suits of
underwear, but despite his precautions he had a swollen red throat
much of the time. His prescription was a cold bath every morning, a
source of delight to the other men patients, who made him stay in the
water while they counted five. He was required to dress and live like
other folks and of course his sensitiveness and his sore throat
disappeared.

Dr. B----, when he came to me, was the most wrapped-up man I had ever
met. He had on two suits of underwear, a sweater, a vest and suit
coat, an overcoat, a bear-skin coat and a Jaeger scarf--all in
Pasadena in May!

Besides this fear of cold, he was suffering from a hypersensitiveness
of several other varieties. So sensitive was his skin that he had his
clothes all made several sizes too big for him so that they would not
make pressure. He was so aware of the muscles of the neck that he
believed himself unable to hold up his head, and either propped it
with his hands or leaned it against the back of a chair.

He had been working on the eighth edition of his book, a scientific
treatise of nation-wide importance, but his eyes were so sensitive
that he could not possibly use them and had to keep them shaded from
the glare. He was so conscious of the messages of fatigue that he was
unable to walk at all, and he suffered from the usual trouble with
constipation. All these symptoms of course belonged together and were
the direct result of a wrong state of mind. When he had changed his
mind, he took off his extra clothes, walked a mile and a half at the
first try, gave up his constipation, and went back to work. Later on I
had a letter from him saying that his favorite seat was an overturned
nail-keg in the garden and that he was thinking of sawing the backs
off his chairs.

Miss Y---- had worn cotton in her ears for a year or two because she
had once had an inflammation of the middle ear, and believed the
membrane still sensitive to cold. There was Miss E----, whose
underwear always reached to her throat and wrists and who spent her
time following the sun; and Dr. I----, who never forgot her heavy
sweater or her shawl over her knees, even in front of the fire. The
procession of "cold ones" is almost endless, but always they find that
their sensitiveness is of their own making and that it disappears when
they choose to ignore it.

=Fear of Light.= Fear of cold is no more common than fear of light.
Nervous folk with half-shut eyes are very frequent indeed. From one
woman I took at least seven pairs of dark glasses before she learned
that her eye was made for light. A good example is furnished by a
woman who was not a patient of mine at all, but merely the sister of a
patient. After my patient had been cured of a number of distressing
symptoms--pain in the spine, sore heels, a severe nervous cough,
indigestion and other typical complaints,--she began to scheme to get
her sister to come to me.

This sister, the wife of a minister in the Middle West, had a constant
pain in her eyes, compelling her to hold them half-shut all the time.
When she was approached about coming to me, she said indignantly, "If
that doctor thinks that my trouble is nervous, she is much mistaken,"
and then proceeded to get well. Once the subconscious mind gets the
idea that its game is recognized, it is very apt to give it up, and it
can do this without loss of time if it really wants to.

=Pain at the Base of the Brain.= Of all nervous pains, that in the
back of the neck is by all odds the most common. It is rare indeed to
find a nervous patient without this complaint, and among supposedly
well folk it is only too frequent. Indeed, it almost seems that in
some quarters such a pain stands as a badge of the fervor and zeal of
one's work.

But work is never responsible for this sense of discomfort. Only an
over-sensitiveness to feelings or a false emotionalism can produce a
pain of this kind, unless it should happen to be caused by some poison
circulating in the blood. The trouble is not with the nerves or with
the spine, despite the fad about misplaced vertebrae. When a doctor
examines a sensitive spine, marking the sore spots with a blue pencil,
and a few minutes later repeats the process, he finds almost
invariably that the spots have shifted. They are not true physical
pains and they rarely remain long in the same place.

Pain in the spine and neck is an example of exaggerated sensibility or
over-awareness. Since all messages from every part of trunk and limb
must go through the spinal cord, and since very many of them enter the
cord in the region of the neck and shoulder blades, it is only natural
that an over-feeling of these messages should be especially noticed in
this zone.

Sometimes a false emotionalism adds to the discomfort by tensing the
whole muscular system and making the messages more intense. When a
social worker or a business man gets tense over his work or ties
himself into knots over a committee meeting, he not only foolishly
wastes his energy but makes his nerves carry messages that are more
urgent than usual. Then if he is on the look-out for sensations, he
all the more easily becomes aware of the central station in the spine
where the messages are received. By centering his attention on this
station and tightening up his back-muscles, he increases this
over-awareness and easily gets himself into the clutch of a vicious
habit.

Sometimes a tenseness of the body is the result, not of a false
attitude toward one's work, but of a lack of satisfaction in other
directions. If the love-force is not getting what it wants, it may
keep the body in a state of tension, with all the undesirable results
of such tension. The person who keeps himself tense, whether because
of his work or because of tension in other directions, has not really
learned how to throw himself into his job and to forget himself, his
emotions, and his body.

=Various Pains.= Tender spots may appear in almost any part of the
body. There was the girl with the sore scalp, who was frequently so
sensitive that she could not bear to have a single hair touched at its
farthermost end, and who could not think of brushing her hair at such
a time. There was the man whose wrists and ankles were so painful that
the slightest touch was excruciating; the woman with the false
sciatica; the man with the so-called appendicitis pains; and the man
with the false neuritis, who always wore jersey coats several sizes
too large. Each one of these false pains was removed by the process of
re-education.

=Low Thresholds to Fatigue.= Mr. H. was habitually so overcome by
fatigue that he could not make himself carry through the slightest
piece of work, even when necessity demanded it. On Sunday night, when
there was no one else to milk the cow, he had had to stop in the
middle of the process and go into the house to lie down. To carry the
milk was impossible, so low were his thresholds to the slightest
message of fatigue. It turned out that things were not going right in
the reproductive life. His threshold was low in this direction, and it
carried down with it all other thresholds. After a general revaluation
of values, he found himself able to keep his thresholds at the normal
level.

A fine, efficient missionary from the Orient had been so overcome with
fatigue that he was forced to give up all work and return to this
country. He had been with me for a while and was again ready to go to
work. He came one day with a radiant face to bid me good-by. "Why are
you so joyous?" I asked. "Because," he answered, "before I came home I
was so fatigued that it used me up completely just to see the native
servants pack our luggage. Now we are taking back twice as much, and I
not only packed it all myself but made the boxes with my own hands. No
more fatigue for me!"

A charming young girl who in many ways was an inspiration to all her
associates fell into the habit of over-feeling her fatigue. "You know,
Doctor," she said, "that I give out too much of myself; everybody
tells me so." That was just the trouble. Everybody had told her so,
and the suggestion had worked. It did not take her long to learn that
in scattering abroad she was enriching herself, and that her "giving
out" was not exhausting to her but rather the truest kind of
self-expression. It is only when a "giving out" is accompanied by a
"looking in" that it can ever deplete. The "See how much I am
giving," and "How tired I shall be," attitude could hardly fail to
exhaust, but a real self-expression and the fulfilment of a real
desire to give are never anything else than exhilarating. There is
something wrong with the minister who is used up after his Sunday
sermons. If his message and not himself is his real concern, he will
have only a normal amount of fatigue, accompanied by a general sense
of accomplishment and well-being, after he has fed his flock. To be
sure, I have never been a minister, but I have had a goodly number
among my patients and I speak from a fairly close acquaintance with
their problems.

=Stopping Our Ears.= Roosters seem to be a perpetual source of
annoyance to the folk whose thresholds are not under proper control.
But as roosters seem to be necessary to an egg-eating nation, it seems
simpler to change the threshold than to abolish the roosters. There
was one woman who complained especially about being disturbed by
early-morning Chanticleers. I explained that the crowing called for no
action on her part, and that therefore she should not allow it to come
into consciousness. "Do you mean," she said, "that I could keep from
hearing them?" As it happened, she was sitting under the clock, which
had just struck seven. "Did you hear the clock strike?" I asked. "No,"
she said; "did it strike?"

This poor little woman, who suffered from a very painful back and
other distressing symptoms, had been married at sixteen to a roue of
forty; and, without experiencing any of the psychic feelings of sex,
had been immediately plunged into the physical sex-relations. Since
sex is psycho-physical and since any attempt to separate the two
elements is both desecrating and unsatisfactory; it is not surprising
that misery, and finally divorce, had been her portion. Another
equally unpleasant experience had followed, and the poor woman in the
strain and disappointment of her love-life, and in the lowering of the
thresholds pertaining to this thwarted instinct, had unconsciously
lowered the thresholds to all physical stimuli, until she was no
longer master of herself in any line. When she saw the reason for her
exaggerated reactions, she was able to gain control of herself, and to
find outlet in other ways.

Too many persons fall into the way of being disturbed by noises which
are no concern of theirs. As nurses learn to sleep through all sounds
but the call of their own patients, so any one may learn to ignore all
sounds but those which he needs to hear. Connection with the outside
world can be severed by a mental attitude in much the same way as this
is accomplished by the physical effect of an anaesthetic. Then the
usual noises, those which the subconscious recognizes as without
significance, will be without power to disturb. The well-known New
York publisher who spent his last days on his private yacht, on which
everything was rubber-heeled and velvet-cushioned, thought that he
couldn't stand noises; but how much more fun he would have had, if
some one had only told him about thresholds!


SUMMARY

There are two kinds of people in the world,--masters and puppets.
There is the man in control of his thresholds, at leisure from himself
and master of circumstance, free to use his energy in fruitful ways;
and there is the over-sensitive soul, wondering where the barometer
stands and whether people are going to be quiet, feeling his feelings
and worrying because no one else feels them, forever wasting his
energy in exaggerated reactions to normal situations.

This "ticklish" person is not better equipped than his neighbor, but
more poorly equipped. True adjustment to the environment requires the
faculty of putting out from consciousness all stimuli that do not
require conscious attention. The nervous person is lacking in this
faculty, but he usually fails to realize that this lack places him in
the class of defectives. A paralyzed man is a cripple because he
cannot run with the crowd; a nervous individual is a cripple, but only
because he thinks that to run with the crowd lacks distinction.
Something depends on the accident of birth, but far more depends on
his own choice. Understanding, judicious neglect of symptoms,
whole-souled absorption in other interests, and a good look in the
mirror, are sure to put him back in the running with a wholesome
delight in being once more "like folks."




CHAPTER XV

_In which we learn discrimination_

CHOOSING OUR EMOTIONS

LIKING THE TASTE


It was a summer evening by the seaside, and a group of us were sitting
on the porch, having a sort of heart-to-heart talk about
psychology,--which means, of course, that we were talking about
ourselves. One by one the different members of the family spoke out
the questions that had been troubling them, or brought up their
various problems of character or of health. At length a splendid Red
Cross nurse who had won medals for distinguished service in the early
days of the war, broke out with the question: "Doctor, how can I get
rid of my terrible temper? Sometimes it is very bad, and always it has
been one of the trials of my life." She spoke earnestly and sincerely,
but this was my answer: "You like your temper. Something in you enjoys
it, else you would give it up." Her face was a study in astonishment.
"I don't like it," she stammered; "always after I have had an
outburst of anger I am in the depths of remorse. Many a time I have
cried my eyes out over this very thing." "And you like that, too," I
answered. "You are having an emotional spree, indulging yourself first
in one kind of emotion and then in another. If you really hated it as
much as you say you do, you would never allow yourself the indulgence,
much less speak of it afterward." Her astonishment was still further
increased when several of the group said they, too, had sensed her
satisfaction with her moods.

Hard as it is to believe, we do choose our emotions. We like emotion
as we do salt in our food, and too often we choose it because
something in us likes the savor, and not because it leads to the
character or the conduct that we know to be good.


THE POWER OF CHOICE

Whether we believe it or not, and whether we like it or not, the fact
remains that we ourselves decide which of all the possible emotions we
shall choose, or we decide not to press the button for any emotion at
all.

To a very large extent man, if he knows how and really wishes, may
select the emotion which is suitable in that it leads to the right
conduct, has a beneficial effect on the body, adapts him to his social
environment, and makes him the kind of man he wants to be.

=The Test of Feeling.= The psychologist to-day has a sure test of
character. He says in substance: "Tell me what you feel and I will
tell you what you are. Tell me what things you love, what things you
fear, and what makes you angry and I will describe with a fair degree
of accuracy your character, your conduct, and a good deal about the
state of your physical health."

Since this test of emotion is fundamentally sound, it is not
surprising that the nervous man is in a state of distress.
Indigestion, fatigue, over-sensibility, sound like problems in
physiology, but we cannot go far in the discussion of any of them
without coming face to face with the emotions as the real factors in
the case. When we turn to the mental characteristics of nervous folk,
we even more quickly find ourselves in the midst of an emotional
disturbance. Worried, fearful, anxious, self-pitying, excitable, or
melancholy, the nervous person proves that whatever else a neurosis
may be, it is, in essence, a riot of the emotions.

There is small wonder that a riot at the heart of the empire should
lead to insurrection in every province of the personality. It is only
for the purpose of discussion that we can separate feeling from
thinking and doing. Every thought and every act has in it something of
all three elements. An emotion is not an isolated phenomenon; it is
bound up on the one hand with ideas and on the other with bodily
states and conduct. Whoever runs amuck in his emotions runs amuck in
his whole being. The nervous invalid with his exhausted and sensitive
body, his upset mind and irrational conduct is a living illustration
of the central place of the emotions in the realm of the personality.

But it is not the nervous person only who needs a better understanding
of his emotional life. The well man also gets angry for childish
reasons; he is prejudiced and envious, unhappy and suspicious for the
very same reason as is the nervous man. Since the working-capital of
energy is limited to a definite amount, the control of the emotions
becomes a central problem in any life,--a deciding factor in the
output and the outcome, as well as in comfort and happiness by the
way.

Nothing is harder for the average man to believe than this fact that
he really has the power to choose his emotions. He has been
dissatisfied with himself in his past reactions, and yet he has not
known how to change them. His anger or his depression has appeared so
undesirable to his best judgment and to his conscious reason that it
has seemed to be not a part of himself at all but an invasion from
without which has swept over him without his consent and quite beyond
control.


A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF

Most of the confusion comes from the fact that we know only a part of
ourselves. What we do not consciously enjoy we believe we do not enjoy
at all. What we do not consciously choose we believe to be beyond our
power of choice,--the work of the evil one, or the natural depravity
of human nature, perhaps; but certainly not anything of our choosing.

The point is that a human being is so constituted that he can, without
knowing it, entertain at the same time two diametrically opposite
desires. The average person is not so unified as he believes, but is,
in fact, "a house divided against itself."

The words of the apostle Paul express for most of us the truth about
ourselves: "For what I would, that I do not; but what I hate that I
do." What Paul calls the law of his members warring against the law of
his mind is simply what we call to-day the instinctive desires coming
into conflict with our conscious ideal.

=Hidden Desires.= Although we choose our emotions, we choose in many
cases in response to a buried part of ourselves of which we are wholly
unaware, or only half-aware. When we do not like what we have chosen,
it is because the conscious part of us is out of harmony with another
part and that part is doing the choosing. If the emotions which we
choose are not those that the whole of us--or at least the
conscious--would desire, it is because we are choosing in response to
hidden desires, and giving satisfaction to cravings which we have not
recognized. Repeated indulgence of such desires is responsible for the
emotional habits which we are too likely to consider an inevitable
part of our personality, inherited from ancestors who are not on hand
to defend themselves. When we form the habit of being afraid of things
that other people do not fear, or of being irritated or depressed, or
of giving way to fits of temper, it is because these habit-reactions
satisfy the inner cravings that in the circumstances can get
satisfaction in no better way.

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