HEALTHY AT 100 (34 page)

These children and parents were finding that they had something important to offer each other. They were discovering that our care and compassion for others often make more difference than we realize.

Relationships are powerful, and can be enormously important to health and longevity. But as so often is true in life, there is also a shadow side to this power. While good intimate relationships are deeply supportive of health, it’s also true that bad ones can cause considerable damage. Sometimes people’s hearts ache with loneliness even in the company of their spouse.

In an article published in
The Journal of the American Medical Association
in 2000, a research team headed by Kristina Orth-Gomer, M.D., Ph.D., found that marital discord dramatically increases the risk of cardiac death in women.
¹¹
The study found that women with heart disease tripled their risk of recurrent heart trouble if they were involved in a stressful relationship. Realizing that many issues could cloud their results, the researchers specifically factored out age, sedentary lifestyle, estrogen status, smoking, lipid levels, education, and a host of other variables that could have altered the outcome of the study.

What is it about unhappy relationships that so undermines the health of women? Another study, presented in 2005 at the American Heart Association’s Second International Conference on Women, Heart Disease, and Stroke in Orlando, Florida, provided further in-sight.
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This ten-year study followed 3,600 men and women aged 18 to 77, all of whom were married or living “in a marital situation.” The researchers collected data on marital discord and tracked the health of the participants to see who developed heart disease or died of any cause during the study.

The greatest health risk was seen in women who kept quiet when conflicts arose with their spouses. Though they might have thought
they were keeping the peace by remaining silent in such situations, they paid dearly for it. Women who did not express themselves in marital conflicts had four times the risk of dying during the study compared to women who spoke their minds.

Men, on the other hand, suffered in their hearts when they saw their working wives burdened by job stress. Men who said that their wives came home upset fom work were nearly three times more likely to develop heart disease than men whose wives didn’t work or were happy in their work.

Relationships that help you to feel acknowledged, safe, and loved are a great boon to your health. But it is also true that relationships that make you feel frightened, hurt, or despised can be poisonous.

Andrew Weil, M.D., bestselling author and director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, relates a particularly dramatic case of healing that took place for “a bank president with chronic hypertension, whose blood pressure normalized one day after his wife filed for divorce. It dropped to 120/80 and stayed there.”
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Somehow I suspect that this man’s relationship with his wife had not been a source of love, joy, and healing in his life.

In another case, author Brendan O’Regan writes of a medical journal article describing the astonishing case of a woman with metastasized cancer of the cervix who was considered close to death. Her condition changed dramatically when, in the words of the case report, “her much-hated husband suddenly died, whereupon she completely recovered.”

Among the most important relationships of our lives, of course, are those with our parents. One of the foremost pioneers in understanding the influence of relationships on health is James J. Lynch, Ph.D. In his 2000 book,
A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness
, Dr. Lynch draws particular attention to the formative role of parent-child relationships.
¹⁴
It is widely recognized that the way parents treat their children can have a huge impact on whether they become confident, joyful, and responsible people, or
grow up insecure, frightened, and dysfunctional. Lynch’s work, however, goes further and shows that how parents treat their children has enormous medical implications.

It’s thankfully becoming ever more widely recognized that physical abuse of children is harmful and indefensible. But verbal abuse can also cause great damage. Negative words can hit as hard as a fist, and can leave deep and lasting scars. It is abusive to destroy a child’s sense of self-worth with such debilitating phrases as “You’re hopeless,” “You’re good for nothing,” “You can never do anything right,” “You’ll never amount to anything,” or “I can’t wait until you grow up and get out of this house.”

According to Dr. Lynch, parents who use language to hurt, control, and manipulate their children rather than to reach out and be present with them cause the youngsters to feel depressed and lonely. The kids then carry these feelings with them into their interactions with others in their lives. They tend to be socially isolated, and, Lynch shows, to end up with illnesses that reduce both the quality and the length of their lives. Lynch presents a wealth of data to support his conclusion that exposure to this kind of parenting proves “toxic” precisely because it leads to premature death. Loneliness in childhood, he says, has “a significant impact on the incidence of serious disease and premature death decades later in adulthood.”

When I first learned of Dr. Lynch’s theories, I was skeptical. I didn’t doubt that a bleak childhood environment could predict
mental
illness in adult life. But could the way our parents treated us when we were children have that much impact on our later
physical
health? But then I learned of a truly remarkable long-term study conducted at Harvard University.
¹⁵
It began in the early 1950s, when researchers randomly chose 125 undergraduate students and asked them to rank their relationships with their parents on a four–point scale as to the degree of their emotional closeness. The scale was as follows:

1. Very close
   

2. Warm and friendly
   

3. Tolerant
   

4. Strained and cold
   

Thirty-five years later, the researchers examined the medical histories of these volunteers and found that an astounding 91 percent of those who had rated their relationship with their mothers as either “tolerant” or “strained and cold” had, by the time they reached their late fifties, suffered serious medical crises. They actually had more than twice the risk of having serious diagnosed disease by that time compared to those who, thirty-five years before, had said they had either a “very close” or a “warm and friendly” relationship with their mothers. Similarly, 82 percent of participants who had rated their relationship with their fathers as either “tolerant” or “strained and cold” had developed serious diseases by midlife.

Even more amazing was that 100 percent of those who had reported that their relationships with both their parents were “strained and cold” had experienced serious medical problems by their late fifties.

There is another aspect to this study that I find fascinating. The students were asked “What kind of person is your mother?” and “What kind of person is your father?” The researchers simply counted the number of positive and negative words the students wrote down in describing their parents. A simple score reflecting the total number of positive words was found to be profoundly predictive of these students’ health thirty-five years later.

The correlation between these descriptions of parental relationships and future health was independent of family history of illness, smoking, emotional stress, subsequent death or divorce of parents, and the students’ marital history. And it was immensely powerful. Fully 95 percent of students who had used few positive words to describe their parents developed serious diseases in midlife, whereas only 29 percent of those who had used many positive words developed comparable diseases. I find this fascinating, because this indicates that
having had a difficult relationship with one’s parents is a greater risk factor for major adult disease than smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure combined.

I could not agree more with the surgeon and author Bernie S. Siegel, M.D., who asserts, “The greatest disease of mankind is a lack of love for children.”

Could the Harvard study have been an isolated instance? Not likely, because many other studies have confirmed these findings. In a similar study, for example, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical School asked more than thirteen hundred healthy medical students in the 1940s to fill out a questionnaire called the “Closeness to Parents Scale” to assess the quality of the students’ relationships with their parents. Fifty years later, it was found that those students who had described a lack of closeness with their parents were far more likely to have developed cancer. The predictive value of parental relationships that were not close did not diminish over time, and was not explained by any other known risk factor, such as smoking, drinking, or radiation exposure. In fact, the strongest predictor of which men would get cancer decades later turned out not to be smoking or obesity, but rather the lack of a close relationship with their fathers fifty years before.
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How we raise our children is so important. We’ve all got our wounds, of course, but if we can face them and heal them, then we have a chance not to pass them on to our children. If we are going to build a healthy and loving world, few tasks are more crucial.

When my wife, Deo, was pregnant with our son, Ocean, I was overjoyed. But I was also concerned, because I wasn’t sure what kind of father I would be.

As a boy, I had been taught that to show any kind of vulnerability or suffering was a weakness. Like many males in the modern world, I had learned to equate being strong with being stoic, and to believe that to ask for help or to cry was unmanly. I had been taught that life was a battle and you had to be armored to succeed. I didn’t understand why I felt so lonely. I didn’t understand my feelings much at all.

My father was a very self-assured and successful man who worked long hours and provided well for his family, yet I did not grow up feeling emotionally close to him or feeling that my love made much difference to him. When he was feeling playful he would sometimes punch me in the stomach, encouraging me to tighten my
abdominal muscles to brace for the blows, and then compliment me on how tightly my stomach muscles were clenched.

On the verge of becoming a father, I was coming to realize that my childhood had left me with an unwillingness to experience and show my feelings. This emotional disconnection kept others from knowing me or being close to me, and also kept me from really knowing or being close to anyone else. I was beginning to see that what I had been taught was a strength was actually a form of fear—a fear of being open, real, and connected to others.

I wanted my son to have a different kind of childhood experience from the one I had known. I wanted to be not only physically present with him, but also emotionally present. I wanted to have a relationship with him in which he could show me who he was and not have to pretend he was anything he was not, and, most important, in which he could have the experience of knowing his worthiness, knowing how important he was to me, knowing that his love mattered infinitely to me. I wanted our feelings to be a source of contact and honesty between us. But for that to happen, I had to learn how to let down my walls.

When Ocean was about eighteen months old, his mother went away for a week, and I was left solely responsible for the little guy. We got along fabulously, but slowly the effort of taking care of his every need began to wear on me. I felt sad that it wasn’t easier for me, and that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. One evening the sadness swelled inside me to the point that it filled me with grief. My own childhood wounds were clearly being reactivated. I lay down on the bed and began to cry for all the children, myself included, who have ever been raised by parents unable to affirm their value and worthiness.

Ocean was, at that moment, sitting in his high chair eating his dinner. Seeing me crying so bitterly, he began asking to be removed from his high chair. At the time, he knew how to say only a few words, but one of them was “down.” As I was crying on the bed, he looked at me with great earnestness, and began saying “Down! Down!”

“I’ve been looking after your every need twenty-four hours a day,” I wailed. “Can’t you just let me cry?”

“Down! Down!” he insisted.

“Okay,” I thought, “you win.” I sighed, went over to the high chair, gently picked him up, and put him down on the carpet. I kissed him, then went back to the bed, lay down, and began again to cry.

My eyes were closed when I felt a gentle pressure on my chest. Startled, I opened my eyes to see Ocean’s loving gaze looking down upon me. He had made his way over to the bed, climbed up on it, crawled over beside me, and placed his hand on my heart, looking into my eyes with tender concern. He had so persistently wanted down from his high chair not because he was a ball of selfish instincts and desires, but because he wanted to be close to me in my grief. He spoke, ever so gently, with deep concern pouring through his eyes:

“Johnny hurt.”

This was the first time he had ever put two words together. It was the first sentence he ever spoke.

I felt relief at that moment, because I realized that I had taken a step in the journey of breaking the cycle. There would be many more steps to take, but I was beginning to discover that I could be emotionally available to my son, and that even with all my flaws and wounds, I still had much love and nurturance to give to him.

As more than thirty years have gone by since then, I’ve time and again been struck by Ocean’s kindness and compassion. His seemingly infinite love has continued to guide and inspire me. Being his father has been an unending source of joy and the greatest privilege of my life.