Claire Conger

Any book that gives me insight into why things are happening to me is priceless. Your Body Believes Every Work You Say by Barbara Hoberman Levine is just such a book.

I read Ms Levine’s section about patients anticipatory thoughts about radiation treatment for cancer predicting their results. The patient who thought of the radiation as “black and red arrows spraying his body” had a bad result while the patient who thought of the radiation as a “golden beam of energy” had a good result. (See page 164.)

It occurred to me that my thoughts about the sun burning me preceded my getting basal cell carcinoma. I remember being very annoyed with the sun’s rays reflecting onto my face and not being able to correct the situation. It was four or five in the afternoon, when the sun’s harmful rays are filtered by the atmosphere—I needn’t have worried, but I didn’t know that.

Our dermatologists, our sun-screen providers, and our journalists seeded our thoughts that the sun is harmful. When I grew up the sun was healthful. (As children we were turned into lobsters at the beach! This was, we know now, overdoing it.)

Bad thoughts preceded something bad happening to me. Notice the victim implied by “my getting” and “happening to me” as if 1) it were not my fault and 2) I didn’t have anything to do with it.

The popular wisdom now is that we are blameless when it comes to illness, but I didn’t grow up thinking that. I grew up thinking healthy people were superior in mind. Maybe it’s true.