Gettysburg Medical News
The Clinical View
by P.E. Hoffsten, M.D.
6 February 2002

WHO OR WHAT YOU ARE

     The column this week relates to language concepts that are going to be a little tricky to understand or believe.  The topic will have to do with how you think about who you are.  In past columns, I have emphasized the importance of psychological considerations in a person’s health. It has been pointed out that there are scientific studies clearly showing that pessimism, angry all the time, learned helplessness, shame, and social isolation are associated with ill health and an early mortality.  Note these traits which quite importantly affect a person’s health are independent of drugs, or surgery, or bacteria, etc. etc.  Rather they have to do with a person’s mental makeup and how the person deals with life’s trials and tribulations.  I maintain that these mental traits are much more critical to a person’s health than are classical medical considerations.

       To begin with, a person being “angry all the time” is an intensely negative force in a person’s general health.  Another word sometimes used to describe the person who is angry all the time is “paranoid”.  The paranoid person believes that other individuals are not telling the truth and generally trying to cause harm.  Granted there are a few evil doers out there but the general population in central South Dakota doesn’t behave in that manner.  People here tend to be helpful, honest, and have a general beneficent interest in their neighbor’s welfare.  To my knowledge, there are vanishing few members of Al – Quade or Taliban  in this area.   Thus being paranoid  about everyone is an unrealistic and destructive attitude for the person that behaves in  this manner.

       One might ask how a person becomes paranoid in their attitude.  An author named, Stephen Andreas considered this in an article in the January issue of a journal called Anchor Point.  He said that one of the roots of a paranoid attitude was people thinking in terms of what they are not.  As an example a person might say, “I am not cruel (lazy, clumsy, dishonest, inconsiderate, disrespectful, sacrilegious, etc. etc).”  Each of these words describes a quality about a person that might generally be felt to be undesirable.  Andreas points out that while certainly no one would want to be characterized by these personal qualities,  when a person denies that they have them, the statement is made “in the negative”.  Specifically, the person is saying what they are not.  While the implication would be that the person is the opposite, that is not what is stated.  Andreas makes the point that there is a difference between saying, “I am not cruel.” and saying, “I am kind.”  The two statements may be thought of as meaning the exact same thing, but one is actually stated in the negative of what a person is not.  The other statement is  stated in the positive of what the person is.  While it seems a small point, Andreas believes that stating things in the negative favors the development of a paranoid attitude.

       This seems a pretty far out concept but thought about for a moment, it has creditability. The pivotal fact upon which this is based is that your subconscious mind only deals in positives. Wow! What was that?  Repeated, “your subconscious mind only deals with images  of what is there, not what is not there.”  Thus, if you say to yourself you are not cruel, you have not said who or what you really are.  Consciously, you can say to yourself that you are not cruel and you understand what that means but your subconscious mind still has no representation of what you are.  While you may be very kind in your conscious mind when you are thinking about other things, your background subconscious mind will have no basis to represent who you are since it does not keep track of all the things your are not.  It only keeps track of what you are. When you are searching subconsciously for who you are, you will make comparisons to other people.  Your subconscious mind will form images of what cruelty is and your conscious mind will reject those as what you are not.  Yet your subconscious mind still has no representation of what you are.  Without an identity, there is no group for you to join and social isolation will follow.  As previously mentioned, social isolation is an intensely negative force on a person’s health.  Also, negative comparisons to what you are not creates hostility toward the people you visualize as having the bad trait.  This creates “angry all the time”.

Andreas makes a point in his article that personal attributes stated in the positive allow a person to have a subconscious identity or an image in their mind of who they are.  When a person says to themselves, “I am kind.”  They will form a subconscious image of a person performing kind acts.  This will be warmly receptive to the person’s persona and they have an image who they are.  This allows them to identify with other individuals with similar characteristics creating “warm fuzzies”.

    I am reluctant to present ideas and concepts such as this because to me they are very complicated and the reasoning presented by Stephen Andreas may be difficult to follow.  But after reading and re-reading his article several times, I think I understand what he is trying to say. Specifically, listen for how you represent yourself.  It will be beneficial for you to say who you are such as, “I am an honest person.”  Try to clean out the language in your vocabulary that is stated in the negative of who you are not such as, “I am not dishonest.”  When you state who or what you are not, you leave an emptiness in your subconscious mind of who you are and this isolates you from other people creating a paranoid tendency.  This seems a far out concept but I agree with Stephen Andreas that it is a reality and has application in improving our general health.

    This Saturday morning, February 9, 2002, there will be a discussion regarding heart failure, it’s causes, prevention, and treatment at the Medicine Rock Café in Gettysburg at about 10:00 AM.  Those having questions or interest in heart problems are invited.