A Soul Under Siege

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Blaming The Patient For Their Cancer

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New Age or Old Shame?

By Dr. Larry Lachman - C. 2003

"…Anyone who even hints that the person with cancer is responsible for getting it and/or for not getting better is not only the rankest amateur and should be completely ignored, but is setting in motion confusion, anxiety, and anger at the self…"
—Lawrence LeShan, Ph.D., Cancer As A Turning Point

"The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little."
—William Rounseville Alger

"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth."
—Mahatma Gandhi

My Own Story

I was fuming! I had just gotten off the phone with a young woman who was a practitioner of "Therapeutic Touch" and "Polarity Therapy." Therapeutic Touch involves laying on the hands to promote healing through working on a person's "energy fields." Polarity Therapy involves the use of massage, diet, exercise and self-awareness to maintain or restore "electromagnetic energy." Why was I fuming you ask? Because this young woman had the audacity to say to me, "So, Larry, what lesson did you have to learn by getting sick with cancer?" "What purpose is your tumor serving you?" In hearing this, I felt like someone kicked me in the gut! I was being blamed for causing my own cancer. In my post-surgery emotional abyss, I was being told that I "created" the cancer and it was "my fault." I was now a soul under siege.

The Illusion of Control: Why We Blame and Scapegoat Cancer Patients for Getting Sick

Scapegoating comes from the shadow side of our soul. It is the tendency to blame "a relatively powerless innocent person for something that is not his or her fault." In college date rape, it is the woman. In street gang thievery, it is the "mark." And among fringe elements of the New Age movement, it is the cancer patient. Why is this happening?

Well, psychologists have discovered that in order for you and I to make sense out of the world and keep our anxieties in-check, we have to create reasons to explain why disturbing events happen. When we do this we are making what's called an "attribution." We humans need to believe that there is always an identifiable cause to every event: cause and effect. By doing so, we feel like we are in control of our lives and the world around us. Random-Chaos Theory is not an option!

It is also my experience as both a therapist and cancer survivor that when these very same people who blame cancer patients for getting sick get sick themselves, they tend to blame a temporary situation or an environmental cause outside of themselves for their illness. In other words, when other people get cancer, it's their fault because of who they are as people. When the Mind/Body Guru gets sick, it is the fault of toxins in the environment. This is what we shrinks call exhibiting a, "self-serving bias." And when those who use a self-serving bias blame those of us who have cancer for getting sick, they are really saying more about who they themselves are as people then who we are as cancer patients. As the German author Johann Richter said, "A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's."

Sociologist Arthur W. Frank writes, "Today the healthy want to believe that disease does not ‘just happen.' They want to believe that they control their health and that they have earned it. Those who have cancer must have done something wrong, which the healthy can then avoid. The sick person must have participated in sickness by choosing to have a cancer personality. Otherwise illness is an intolerable reminder of how risky life is."

Overcoming the Siege: How Cancer Patients and Psychologists are Soulfully Fighting Back!

Probably the most strident response to this trend of blaming people for their cancer has come from cancer survivor and author, Susan Sontag, who in 1978, wrote the book, Illness as Metaphor, which decries such practices as being "punitive uses of illness in our culture."

In addition to Sontag, psychologist and mind/body expert Dr. Joan Borysenko, in her book Fire In The Soul, writes, "…The idea that we are 100 percent responsible for creating our own reality is a psychologically and spiritually impoverished notion. In my experience, when patients with this belief are unable to cure themselves, they often feel like failures or undergo a painful crisis of faith…"

Frequently, when you or I are blamed for creating our own illness, the blamer is partly basing his or her assertion on mind/body research coming from a field of study that has a very long name: "psycho-neuro-immunology."

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI for short) is the field that studies how our mind—our thoughts and feelings—can affect our body and health. The founding father of PNI, Dr. Robert Ader, who is the Director of the Center for Psychoneuroimmunology Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center, was one of the first scientists to prove that our immune systems—our health defense systems against germs and disease--could be influenced or "conditioned," similar to Pavlov's experiments with dogs. Pavlov noticed that dogs naturally salivated in response to food, not requiring any sort of conditioning at all. However, when he began ringing a bell just before delivering the food, he discovered that his laboratory dogs became conditioned to salivate only to the bell, even without any food being present. Likewise, Dr. Ader was able to condition mice to weaken their immune defense systems by first giving the mice some sweetened water that was then followed by a drug that was known to suppress the immune system. Eventually, the mice became conditioned and suppressed their immune systems to the sweetened water only.

Although PNI has shown that stressors (studying for final exams for example) can influence our immune system (sometimes weakening the response of "Natural Killer T Cells," that fight off cancer), there is no proof that stress alone, or how we think, or if we hold in our anger, will cause a full-blown disease like cancer. Dr. Ader himself fears the term Psychoneuroimmunology, which he coined in the late 1970s, will be undermined by ‘so-called friends'—clinicians and researchers who embrace the idea of holistic or alternative medicine too zealously and use PNI data to legitimize claims for all types of alternative therapies. As Dr. Ader himself says, "…The basic research isn't a fad, but the way some people are using the term could turn it into a fad."

Clarity of the Soul: What Does The Research Really Show?

Four factors taken together, along with random chance, explains why you and I got cancer. They are:

Genetics: The genes that we inherited from our parents partly determined how many cancer cells we had at any given moment and how well our immune systems responded to such cells.
Environment: Our exposure to toxins, heavy metals, radiation and the like, also partly determined the likelihood of our developing cancerous cells.
Nutrition: What we ate, the fat content, and artificial additives in processed foods, may have also partially contributed to our having developed certain types of cancer.
And finally, Behavior: Our smoking, drinking, and getting repeatedly sun burned without using adequate sun block, could have also partially contributed to you and I getting cancer.

So, what's my point? It took ALL FOUR OF THESE FACTORS TOGETHER, along with random chance, for you and I to get cancer. As Pete Teeley, the former press secretary to Vice President George Bush during the Reagan administration says, "In many respects, cancer is the ultimate quirk of fate, an unfortunate convergence of a genetic error and an environmental insult." I fully agree.

Soul On Top: Tips On How To Cope With The Blamers

My tips for coping with people who blame you for getting cancer come from my own set of beliefs as well as what I have learned in working with chronically or terminally ill people for the last 21 years. They are:

As was said in the movie, "Forrest Gump," with Tom Hanks, "poop" happens! There are random chance events that occur in the world that we have no control over.
"You're not that good." You and I are simply not that powerful as to conjure up cancer at will. Frequently in the therapy group that I lead, I often challenge guilt-ridden, self-blaming members by telling them, "Okay, if you're that powerful, what three-digit number am I thinking of?" Of course, they can never guess what I'm thinking because they, just like you and I, don't have that much magical power to read people's minds or create a disease like cancer out of thin air.
Instead of buying into the "magical thinking" and self-serving bias of some Mind/Body Gurus, I recommend that you start doing things that can increase the chance that you will be cured, or at the very least, lead to a moderate or long-term remission with your cancer. They include:

Give yourself permission to be "attended to" by friends and family who love you and want to support you during your cancer journey. Nurture your soul that is under siege.
Ask for drugs to help reduce the side-effects from your cancer treatment. Why be nauseas when you don't have to be?
Join a support group or therapy group made up of fellow Samurai warriors who are going through the same journey with cancer as you are. Why go at it alone and have to recreate the wheel all over again?
Prioritize what really is important to you and start doing those things NOW! The past is gone and the future is uncertain. There is no time like the present to do what you want to do. Go for it!
Get "control over the lack of control" that cancer engenders, by practicing "supportive" healing techniques such as yoga, meditation, muscle relaxation and therapeutic massage. Become the soulful captain of your own ship.
Pace yourself. If you're tired, rest! Be kind to yourself. Take 5.
Use assertive "I statements" to ask for what you want from your doctor, treatment team, family or friends (as described earlier in Chapter 2). Take charge of your treatment, of how you are treated and your over-all quality of life.
Allow yourself to grieve the many losses that accompany being diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening disease, such as the loss of stamina, loss of hair, loss of relationships and loss of your daily work or recreation routines. Stop being a volcano. Let out some steam. Your soul will thank you.
And, be very, very clear, with yourself, your doctor and with your family, on where you will "draw the line," as far as your quality of life is concerned. Ask your self this: How much of what type of treatment will you put up with and for how long? Inner healing is NOT dependent on outer or physical healing. Do it your way and keep control throughout your journey no matter where it takes you.

By doing some of these more constructive and soulfully empowering things that I have listed above, you will literally become an active participant in your own treatment thereby creating the best possible chance of achieving a successful outcome with your illness. By not "buying into" the Mind/Body guru's blaming and shaming, you will not only boost your immune system and enliven your soul, but you will be making a clear and definitive statement that you are not to be blamed for getting sick and now that you are sick, you are going to do things "your way," by taking control of the lack of control that cancer and its treatment bring about.

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