From an interview with Gabor Mate, who wrote the bestseller “When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-disease Connection“:
No personality causes disease. So there’s no cancer personality. However, there are some common traits that, if they are present in exaggerated degrees, will make you more predisposed to the disease. They don’t cause it, but make you more likely to get it because they increase the amount of physiological stress you’ve got inside you. So people who don’t know how to say no, people who are rigid and compulsive, perfectionistic, expecting themselves to be perfect in everything, people who don’t know how to express their experience of anger in a healthy way, people who compulsively and automatically take care of others and don’t think of their own needs, these people are physiologically stressed, whether they know it or not. So it’s not that the person causes the disease. Stress is the thing that leads to disease or leads to conditions for it, but certain personalities are more prone to this stress. Because their boundaries will be invaded but they won’t know it, they’ll be extending themselves and they won’t know it, they will work when they should be resting. So only in that broad sense can you speak of personalities, not in the sense that a particular personality causes a particular disease.
Read on here.
You might want to check out his new highly acclaimed book on parenting and child development “Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers” and his fascinating examination of ADD in “Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It“.
