Although I didn’t know it at the
time, I had an inescapable shock in 1983 that triggered a collapse of my immune
system and caused me to get cancer in 1985. Two years prior to my diagnosis of
the early stages of colon cancer, I experienced the sudden loss of my wife,
Barbara, in a skiing accident.
At the same time of the diagnosis, I was also experiencing high levels of stress at work where I was asked to an advocate for a young female professor who was being unfairly removed from her job because of campus politics. (She eventually sued the university and won a large settlement).
Later, upon reflection of the possible connections between these events, I realized that both the death of my wife and the removal of this female professor were related to issues about the “death of the feminine.”
I married Janae in November 1984 (see photo to left) and she became an enormous resource in helping me heal deeper layers of the shock of Barbara’s death. Her demise also triggered very early memories of being abandoned by my mother a week after my birth. I knew somehow that Barbara’s death was connected to the loss of my emotional connection with my mother at a very early age. Many a night Janae held me as I cried about my losses.
My first shock came when I was first taken to my mother after I was born. I had black hair all over my body (a common occurrence) and she told the nurse, “This is not my baby, there must be some mistake. He looks like a monkey.” I know this actually happened because every time someone my mother met a pregnant woman, she would retell this story of my birth, including her seeing me as a monkey. I must have heard the same story told dozens of times before I left home for college.
The second shock happened when my mother could not produce milk to nurse me. She didn’t seem to understand that it takes a while before the milk actually comes in. I believe that she also suffered from post-partum depression and perhaps even psychosis because of her beliefs that she was a failure as a mother. When she was unable to produce milk to nurse me after one week, she turned me over to a baby-sitter and went back to work. I also have a body memory of someone, likely my mother, trying to drown me when I was very young.
The shock of these early abandonments by my mother was so great that I became a failure-to-thrive infant. I weighed 6 pounds at birth and at eight weeks I only weighed five pounds. They even fudged the weight in my baby book by writing over “5 lbs” to try to make it into “8 lbs.” A careful look with a magnifying glass clearly showed the write-over.
I believe that my paternal grandmother saw what was happening and intervened. Between the age of six weeks and ten months, I lived with her and my mother visited me on weekends. I got enough love and nurturing care from my grandmother that I bonded with her and began to thrive again while living at my grandmother’s house.
I did not have access to the information about my infancy prior to Barbara’s death because my family had conspired to keep secrets about events that happened around the time of my birth. It was after her death that I finally learned the truth about the family secrets. This helped me understand why my mother was so emotionally fragile after I was born and how it caused my early shock and trauma. Barbara’s death was the last straw in my defenses against feeling the emotions related to these early experiences. Finally I was able to consciously process these abandonments and truly begin healing them.
My diagnosis of cancer in 1985 was also a shocking experience. I went into a deep depression, making me fear that maybe my life was over. I considered my options very carefully. Did I want to undergo surgery or chemo or radiation? Or did I first want to see if less invasive methods could be successful? I chose the latter and began working with a nutritionist who helped me make changes in my diet, and use nutritional supplements and other non-invasive treatments to support my immune system.
My first task was to clear the candida from my body. Since then, I’ve learned that candida is very common with cancer and if eliminated, often stops the cancer in its tracks. This protocol involved adopting a very strict diet that did not involve any sugar or yeast producing foods and drinking a strong tea made from a tree bark. The diet forced me out of my comfort zone, but I stuck with it and began to feel better almost immediately. After the candida cleanse, I adopted a mostly an alkaline vegetarian diet and continued to do holding work with Janae. Within a few my cancer symptoms were gone.
I had done some re-parenting therapy with my therapist-contract mother that involved early baby work that included holding and deep attunement work. I knew however, that it was important to continue to do holding work with Janae and address other psychological patterns in therapy that were connected to the cancer. This helped Janae and I deepen our partnership relationship and I committed to doing regular spiritual practices such as yoga and meditation to counter the developmentally-related stress in my demanding lifestyle.
There were many times in my relationship with Janae that I got triggered into reenactments of the early shock and trauma experiences with my mother. At times I would just freeze and become unable to speak or move. Sometimes I could track myself falling into shock and was able ask Janae to hold me until I could get grounded in my body again. Sometimes she would recognize when I began falling into the Black Hole and reach out to touch me. Our abilities to recognize the behaviors associated with developmental shock and trauma and to use our Developmental Process Work tools have been critical in helping me heal much of this very early developmental shock, trauma and stress.
My self-care regime worked very well and for close to twenty-two years I stayed cancer-free. However, a series of inescapable shocks caused a recurrence of the cancer in the spring of 2006. The shocks were the death of my mother and then my father’s immediate diagnosis of terminal cancer all occurring within three weeks of each other in January 2006. I recognized the symptoms and knew immediately that the cancer was back.
These rapid-fire events triggered deep emotions that shutdown my immune system. During this same period, I was also I was also experiencing a lot of stress from directing the Kindness Campaign, a community and school-based violence prevention program. I also was experiencing high stress levels while supporting my dad in beating his esophageal cancer. In the process of researching alternative cures for cancer for my dad, I found there were many more highly effective dietary and nutritional resources for beating cancer than were available twenty-two years earlier.
I
also knew that I had to reduce my lifestyle stress, so I resigned as director
of the Kindness Campaign and closed down its local operation. Then I began
using on myself the alternative cancer cures I had found to help my dad. This
program began with clearing the candida, which had taken hold again.
Fortunately, there were more effective treatments to get rid of the candida and
it only took two weeks using ThreeLac, a potent candida killing powder. I also
discovered Bill Henderson, a local person who had thoroughly researched
alternative cancer cures after his own wife died of “the treatment for her
ovarian cancer.” After what he believed was an unnecessary death, he became
determined to find gentler and more effective ways of curing cancer. Bill’s
book, Cancer-Free: Your Guide to Gentle, Non-Toxic Healing (2005)[1]
gave me lots of alternative treatment ideas
to use with my dad and on myself.
Using the protocol that Bill Henderson suggested in his book, my dad moved from stage IV esophageal cancer to being cancer-free in about three months. Following the same protocol, I became cancer-free in about the same length of time. My dad died about a year later at almost 93 years from a fall—not from his cancer.
I
continue to be free of cancer symptoms and carefully watch my stress levels. I
do yoga everyday, do one hour of meditation and carefully watch my stress
levels. I have become aware that I am very sensitive to stress and recognize
that crossing over a stress boundary will immediately elicit a powerful
reaction in me. For this reason, I maintain a stress-free lifestyle, which
continues to challenge me.
I
still find pieces of developmental shock, trauma and stress to work on that
correlate with my “cancer personality” traits. For example, my empathic nature
makes it easy for me to take on other people’s problems, which also causes me
undue stress. I accept my cancer experiences as teachers that continue to
provide me with opportunities for healing my experiences of developmental
shock, trauma and stress.
[1] Henderson, B. (2004). Cancer-Free: Your Guide to Gentle, Non-Toxic Healing. San Antonio, TX: Get And Stay Well.
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