The Immune Power Personality: Immune Power Traits in the Age of AIDS

Of course, any discussion of immunity raises the issue of AIDS, "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome." During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, people diagnosed with the disease were not expected to live long. The media relentlessly hammered home the message that AIDS was an automatic, swift, and harsh death sentence. Only the lucky, we were told, would live as long as one year. Given the immense suffering wrought by AIDS, some patients were considered fortunate not to live that long. I recall a conversation with a physician who thought AIDS patients were better off without illusions about extended survival. Borrowing a line from poet Dylan Thomas, he suggested that such patients need not "rage against the dying of the light."

I shared these early 1980's assumptions. But they were shattered in late 1984, when I met Michael Callen. He was 29 years old and had been living with AIDS for three years. Callen was the first person I encountered with the disease. He was not emaciated or covered with lesions, the way AIDS patients usually appeared in the media. Free of any visible signs of illness, Callen was an anomaly--a man who, for the time being, had beaten the odds against the virulent plague of our times.

By the late 1980's, it became clear that many people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, would remain fit and functional for years. (Basketball star Magic Johnson is a perfect example.) However, when Callen was first diagnosed, he was not simply infected with HIV. He had full-blown AIDS, replete with the opportunisitic infections that were supposed to herald a quick demise. Yet here he was in 1984--robust, energetic, and upbeat.

I met Callen at a New York conference on the role of psychological factors in AIDS. His brief talk was the weekend's most moving moment. He spoke of his struggle to reject the media's insistence that AIDS patients would invariably die quickly and painfully, which he called a "propaganda of hopelessness." With regard to his own long survival, he claimed he was not alone. Many others were outliving medicine's dire predictions. (Studies later proved him right.) Callen also chronicled his political battles against the established medical community, which cast a blind eye toward AIDS prevention and research. He was fighting for causes he believed in, and he was fighting for his own life.

Later, I had several opportunities to speak with Callen, who confided his personal struggles with AIDS. How had he coped with such a devastating diagnosis? He found a doctor whom he trusted, and together they developed a healing partnership. He did not deny the seriousness of his condition, but was resolute in rejecting a death sentence. He was motivated by love and a search for meaning in his life's work and relationships. A revitalized singing career buoyed his spirits. I was struck by Callen's intelligence, compassion, and grit. As in Dylan Thomas's poem, he did rage against the dying of the light, and his light kept burning.

I couldn't help but wonder if his personality had contributed to his unexpected survival. The passage of time would only reinforce my suspicion that it had. Michael Callen lived for twelve years after his original diagnosis. In 1993, he may have been the longest AIDS survivor on record. During those years, he lived his life with passion and intensity. When he died at the end of 1993, he left a legacy of hope to countless other people with AIDS.

On a personal level, I found Michael Callen's courage inspiring. But I was also encouraged by his example to further investigate the role of personality in recovery from illness. Callen's story begged the question: Could an individual's personality traits enable him to resist a disease with the pathological power of AIDS? As I will detail further, in recent years, mind-body scientists have in fact turned up scientific evidence that Immune Power traits can help people infected with the HIV virus to resist collapse into full-blown AIDS.

The significance of these discoveries go far beyond AIDS, however. Immune Power traits have been associated with resistance and recovery from many diseases associated with dysfunctional immune systems--including cancer, arthritis, lupus, asthma, allergies, herpes, and other viral infections.

DEVELOPING AN IMMUNE POWER PERSONALITY

In The Immune Power Personality, I present experiments, data, and case histories showing that Immune Power traits demonstrably, materially improve physical health. I will also provide therapeutic suggestions and specific exercises you can apply to cultivate Immune Power traits and better health for yourself. These strategies include:

• Therapies and mind-body approaches for cultivaing Immune Power traits, implemented by the scientist who studied that trait.
• Strategies for cultivation of Immune Power traits developed by other mind-body practitioners.
• Specific practices and exercises you can follow on a regular basis. These clinician-tested mind-body practices--including meditations and guided imagery exercises--are specifically tailored to evoke that Immune Power trait.

I have been asked one question most frequently about Immune Power traits: Can people really change aspects of their personality?

The researchers represented in this book have shown, with varying degrees of specificity, that Immune Power traits can be cultivated. They are not fixed parts of character that some of us have been fortunate enough to inherit. They are healthy capacities we all have from birth, that each of us experiences and manifests differently. At the same time, Immune Power traits are not rigid molds into which we must twist ourselves to achieve some idealized mind-body state. They are healthy potentialities each of us can maximize and express in our own unique way. As I will show, Immune Power traits can be reawakened in adulthood through short-term therapy, or specifically tailored mind-body methods.

Since each Immune Power trait has demonstrable links to health, the person who develops all seven traits will optimize his or her potential for mind-body wellness. That is why the transformative program I present involves a stepwise approach to cultivating each trait, one at a time. Mind-body pioneer George Solomon has observed that exceptionally healthy individuals, and those who overcome disease, manifest a unique combination of Immune Power traits.

The Immune Power Personality is devoted to the work of seven investigators, the story of each scientist's research, a description of the Immune Power trait he or she studied, and the strategies you can apply in your own life in order to cultivate that characteristic. Taken together, these strategies amount to an overall program of Immune Power Personality development. The available evidence strongly suggests that all of us can develop the seven Immune Power traits, as long as we apply the strategies in ways that meet our singular needs and express our individuality.

I have established an order for developing an Immune Power Personality based on the distinct but overlapping qualities of these traits. The strategies for developing each trait touch upon many different levels of mind-body awareness, but tend to focus more on one particular level. The program starts with an Immune Power trait rooted in an awareness of the body (the ACE Factor), then moves forward with traits emphasize emotions, thoughts, the need for meaning, interpersonal relationships, and spirituality. Thus, in developing Immune Power traits, you start with a simple mindfulness of your physical state-of-being, and progress to more complex levels of feeling, thought, and relations to others and the world.

This program of Immune Power Personality development follows a progression from one Immune Power Trait to another. It does not require that you spend a great deal of time on traits you already possess to a greater or lesser degree. I recommend that people trust their intutions about traits that need more or less cultivation.

The last of the seven traits, "self-complexity" brings together elements from all previous traits, in suggesting that we optimize our state of mind-body health when we accept and nurture all facets of ourselves. Psychologist Patricia Linville has proposed a model of psychophysical well-being, in which our personalities are like broad rivers with many tributaries. Following those tributaries leads us to new terrain--previously unexplored aspects of ourselves that include valuable, untapped resources. When we self-discover these facets, we find alernatives to old, habitual patterns; new ways of coping with stress; and new new sources of pleasure and meaning in our lives.

In a conversation I had with him eight years ago, Lawrence LeShan, a cancer psychotherapist and early pioneer in the mind-body field, summed up the approach underlying the Immune Power Personality. Each one of us, he said, must develop "a firece and tender concern for all parts of ourselves so that no part of our being is standing outside the door, whimpering, 'Is there nothing for me?' " That "fierce and tender concern" is essential to the development of an Immune Power Personality.

The following section presents an overview of developments in the mind-body field and a primer on the immune system itself, as a prelude to the chapters on the specific Immune Power Traits. Breakthroughs in mind-body research have led inevitably to the work I describe throughout, work that has shown how basic human characteristics--not just transitory emotions or "techniques"--are keys to vibrant good health.

DEEPER INTO THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION

Most of us harbor wisdom about the inseparability of mind and body. We may have had grandparents or parents who taught us that we get sick when we overwork, or when our family lives are in turmoil. As adults we remember these lessons, and come to accept that our thoughts, moods, and feelings are powerful influences on our health. Or, we eventually learn these lessons through personal experience:

   We rarely get colds when our lives are going well, but the sniffles begin, as if on cue, when a problem at work or home overwhelms our capacity to cope.

   Our blood pressure reading is high when external pressures are high--whether from our bosses, our families, or an accumulation of taxing demands.

   We develop a serious infection or disease when we feel fatigued, fearful, or downright depressed.

   We may even be subject to symptoms that "express" what we cannot.

   In the vicelike grip of an impossible expectation on the job, we get constant headaches.

   After a death in the family, we take on more responsibilities than we can bear. With the "weight of the world" on our shoulders, we suffer debilitating back pain.

   We hold back our tears after the breakup of a long-term relationship, and suffer one respiratory infection after another.

Experiences such as these help us to recognize that our state of mind is a critical factor in our physical health and well-being. Yet many of our doctors and medical scientists cast doubt upon this native wisdom. A mere quarter-century ago, ideas about the mind-body connection that were embraced by a large sector of the public were forsaken by mainstream medicine. Medical scientists do not accept concepts that could be empirically demonstrated, and research on psychological factors in illness did not meet their standards.

Until the 1970's, those who studied the mind-body connection lacked the sophisticated research tools to ground their theories in biological fact. In order to buttress popular beliefs with scientific proof, mind-body researchers had one overriding task. They had to show that the mind could influence our primary biological system responsible for preventing and healing disease--the immune system.

Our immune system stands guard against the intrusion of noxious invaders-- bacteria, viruses, cancer cells, or any organism that threatens harm to our tissues. An interactive network of cells and substances, the immune system is our body's monitor, its police force, its protector. It has the necessary "intelligence" to distinguish between elements that belong to the "self" and those that are foreign, or "non-self." It is a mutli- armed tool for fine-tuning our biological responses, thus maintaining balance between our internal and external environments. It resolves the crisis of an invasion by fighting the interlopers, repairing the damage, and cleaning up the remnants of battle. The immune system is the healer within.

In the absence of hard evidence, the reigning medical experts refused to believe that the immune system could be regulated by any other biological system. It was viewed as a stand-alone entity--a network that operated independently to eliminate disease agents and heal insults and injuries to the body. For medical scientists to accept the mind's powers over disease and healing, they required proof that the immune system did not stand alone--that it somehow relied on signals from the brain. But the idea of brain-immune connections was considered as preposterous as the notion that the Altantic and Pacific Oceans are joined by previously uncharted waterways.

Today, the idea that the brain and the immune system are interconnected is no longer considered preposterous. It is an incontrovertible fact.

Research from a burgeoning field known as psychoneuroimmunology (PNI, for short) has taught us that the brain and nervous system are intimately involved in the activities of the immune system. So, too, is the endocrine system, our network of glands and the hormones they secrete. PNI research is building a scientific base for a viewpoint long held by advocates of "holistic" medicine: that all our biological systems, including those governing "mind" and "body," are integrated into a seamless whole. Our healing network--the immune system--is an integral part of a larger entity, the "bodymind". We can no longer carve up our biological systems into separate work forces based on a false division of labor.

In a language consisting of cell products, our nervous, endocrine, and immune systems "talk" to each other. But their dialogue is more than occassional chatter. It is non-stop communication along a superhighway of cellular information. These continuous exchanges enable our systems to act in concert to eliminate outisde invaders and maintain the integrity of the body.

To the astonishment of many immunologists, it turns out that our thoughts and feelings are mediated by brain chemicals that also regulate our body's defenses. These chemicals, called "neurotransmitters," are not restricted to the brain. They circulate throughout the body, carrying messages to other systems and cells--including our immune system. In other words, the chemical "carriers" of our human emotions directly influence our physical health.

As PNI scientist Candace Pert has said, "In the beginning of my work, I matter- of-factly presumed that emotions were in the head or the brain. Now I would say they are really in the body as well. They are expressed in the body and are part of the body. I can no longer make a strong distinction between the brain and the body."

So our native wisdom about mind and body, whether garnered from our grandparents or personal experience, is grounded in scientific reality. The so-called mind-body myths were not myths at all. They were truths.

Shortly, I will describe the recent, breakthroughs in PNI research, which are heralding a sea change in the way we practice medicine in this country. Farsighted doctors are beginning to apply mind-body techniques for the healing and prevention of disease. These are methods for calming the mind, relaxing the body, expressing emotions, changing negative thoughts, and controlling physical functions. Commonly referred to as "mind-body medicine," such techniques have proven benefits for people suffering with chronic pain and illness.

The methods of mind-body medicine include meditation, biofeedback, guided imagery, hypnosis, group therapy, behavior therapy, cognitive "restructuring," and individual psychotherapy. These treatments are being applied to an encyclopedic list of disorders, from AIDS, cancer, and heart disease, to arthritis, allergies, back pain, and headaches.

But mind-body science is still young. Investigators are mapping mind-body interactions on the molecular level, yet gaps remain in our understanding of how our thoughts and emotions "trickle down" to influence cells, tissues, and organ systems. Mind-body techniques have proven their value, but mysteries linger regarding why they work, how they work, and which treatments are most effective for specific disorders.

We do know that the mind can either sap or strengthen our bodies' defenses, contributing to illness or nourishing states of health. Still, the title of Bill Moyers' recent PBS television series, "Healing and the Mind," belies the critical question: "Exactly what aspect of the mind is healing?"

Based on dated research, the media has given us oversimplified answers, such as "relaxation," "reduced stress," and "positive emotions." The scientists whose work is the subject of this book are not satisfied with these maxims. Although "relaxation," "reduced stress," and "positive emotions" can be healing, the mysteries of mind and body are deeper still, and more complex.

Yes, we must reduce certain unnecessary stressful influences. But a strategy of avoiding stress makes little sense, because our creativity is stretched, our intellect challenged, and our emotions engaged when we confront and actively cope with hardship. We benefit most--in mind and in body--by adapting to change and loss. What determines our capacities for coping and adaptation? To a great extent, our personalities.

A large body of research over the past several decades has investigated "harmful" personality traits that contribute to ill health. However, in recent years a coterie of scientists has moved to understand the nature of health, and they have discovered positive Personality traits--ways of coping and being that nourish our physical health. Though some will disagree, I believe that research on the health- promoting Personality is a radical turn in the history of medical science. For decades, legions of biologists, pathologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have trained their scientific sights exclusively on the causes of sickness.

This problem has been partly societal. Our media culture emphasizes pathology on every front: disorganized economies, disordered cities, dysfunctional families, and diseases of the individual, from addictions to physical afflictions. Our obsession with pathology has had an especially powerful impact on medical research, which has produced far too little data on factors that promote health.

Abraham Maslow claimed that his fellow psychologists knew a great deal about mental illness and almost nothing about mental health. But of course, the psychologists' limitations are but a reflection of our own. We know too little about our own potential for healthy development. As William James has written: "Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are dampened, our drafts are checked, we are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources."

As James suggested, we awaken to our potential by drawing upon heretofore untapped inner resources. What is our potential? The establishment of a meaningful and successful life in all spheres, including work, creativity, relationships, and health. Indeed, personal growth in work, creativity, and relationships is inseparably linked to our physical well-being. To extend James's metaphor, when we relight our fires, our biological systems are invigorated and our defenses are fortified.

This book is about relighting our fires by recovering parts of ourselves that are capable of creating joy, meaning, and physical health. Before proceeding, I will provide you with essential background on role of personality in health and healing.

BACK TO BASICS: PERSONALITY AND HEALTH

"We know what mind states are bad for our health" said David McClelland, Ph.D., a renowned researcher of human motivation and health. Yet we pay little attention to psychological factors that promote health."

McClelland was right--our culture pays little attention to mind states that promote health. But that is changing. We have had impressive data on mind-states that are bad for our health, but now we're learning what mind-states prevent distress and keep us healthy.

I have emphasized that the key to mind-body health is how we respond to stress. Do we respond with hopelessness or hope? Helplessness or a sense of control? Despair or fighting spirit? Depression or grief that is felt and resolved? Bottled-up rage or healthy anger? Anxiety or tranquility? Panic or rationality? Demoralization or commitment?

Note that the healthy counterparts to each of these unhealthy states are either normal, healthy emotions or proactive ways of coping. Mind-body researchers are honing in on these two aspects of the healing mind. The first aspect is emotional, and the second is behavioral.

Let's start with the healing emotions, which are not necessarily positive. Research has shown that our health is protected when we express the full range of emotions, including the so-called "negative" ones. When we find constructive ways to express anger, grief, and fear, we prevent lapses into hopelessness, depression, and passivity. Bottling up these feelings makes it more likely that we will get stuck in chronic states of distress. The reason? Unless we explore and express these primary human emotions, we cannot receive the information they carry. In the book's first chapter on the ACE Factor, I will explore the informational aspect of emotions, explaining why attending to negative feelings is good for our immune systems.

On the other side of the coin, positive emotions are clearly beneficial to health and well-being. Yet some of us are blocked in our expression of joy, pleasure, and hope. Lydia Temoshok, Ph.D., who studied psychological factors in cancer for over a decade, showed that disease-prone individuals often have difficulty expressing negative and positive emotions. In one study, patients with melanoma (an aggressive form of skin cancer) who expressed emotions had more cancer-killing immune cells and slower growing tumors. Temoshok's research, and other scientists' data, showed that we promote our health by gaining access to the full pallette of human emotions.

The behavioral aspect of the healing mind involves proactive coping. It's not only important how we feel, but what we do about our feelings. We must take actions that redress imbalances in our environment that cause us to experience negative emotions in the first place. For instance, if we suspect that someone is stalking us, we must attend to the "fear"message and then take action by calling the police.

Thus, the healing mind processes emotions and conceives real-world actions in an appropriate and effective manner. But there is an even deeper issue. What part of our being generates emotions? Can we simply manipulate our own psyche to produce desired emotions and actions? Does wishing or willing positive mental states make them materialize?

On the behavioral side, What part of our being generates plans of action to cope with stress? What causes us to act against our own interests, or not to act at all?

The answers to all these questions involve our personalities. Our tendency to respond to circumstances with certain emotions, and our behavior patterns in the face of stress, are expressions of our character. We are all born with traits that are shaped and transformed throughout our life cycle. Genetic inheritance is part of our Personality blueprint; the rest is written during our upbrinings. Perhaps the most powerful personality imprints are laid down in infancy and childhood. Each of us possesses a prismatic configuration of these traits. Personality psychologists believe that this configuration helps to shape our emotional and behavioral tendencies over the course of a lifetime. Yes, free will and choice enables us to undergo remarkable transformations. But we must recognize that we are dealt certain cards, by nature and by nurture, and work with them.

For instance, if passivity is an ingrained trait, then we will let our abusive boss ride roughshod over us. If assertiveness is ingrained, we will stand up for our rights. If resignation is an ingrained trait, then we will become hopeless after the breakup of a romantic relationship. If optimism is ingrained, we will grieve but get on with our lives.

The template for what we feel, and how we express those feelings, is anchored in our personalities. So is the template for how we behave when stressed.

If loss, illness, or catastrophe prompts us to look within for sources of energy and hope, then we must look to our own Personality templates. We might ask: Am I someone who characteristically feels hopeful about achieving my goals or meeting my needs? Am I generally in touch with a will to live?

If painful life circumstances call upon us to acknowledge anger, grief, and fear, then we must look to our own personality templates. We might ask: By nature, do I acknowledge and express negative feelings?

If troubles in our relationships, families, or work seem insurmountable, then we must look to our own Personality templates. We might ask: By nature, do I respond to life's major roadblocks with fighting spirit? Do I implement plans of action that solve problems?

Our personality templates underlie our tendency to feel certain emotions and block others. And our templates underlie our tendency to think and act in particular patterns when our lives are fraught with tension. Whether facing an illness or challenge, most of us want to adopt life-affirming attitudes and act with conviction. But we often fall short of these expectations, and there is only one way to initiate positive change: We must acknowledge our ingrained habits and behavior patterns. Have we lived up to our potential? If not, what stands in our way? Often, we block our own path toward healthy development.

Psychotherapy is one arena where we can explore our personality templates. Patients who make these explorations discover active traits that stand in their way, preventing them from expressing emotions and taking effective action in their own behalf. They recognize that they are stubborn, or repressed, or hostile, or timid, or rigid, or narrow in their thinking.

But psychotherapy patients also discover healthy traits--parts of themselves they have lost, whether as infants, young children, or young adults. These traits, involving healthy ways of handling emotions and real-world problems, did not disappear. They simply became inactive after years of negative conditioning. Such healthy traits can often be coaxed out of their lair within the psyche.

None of us are born without the capacity to feel the full spectrum of emotions. And few of us are born without the potential to develop active, intelligent, and socially adaptive ways of handling our problems. Genes may determine vast differences in how we express emotions or handle problems, but they cannot disable us from feeling or coping. Only early conditioning by parents and/or society can do that. Such conditioning lays down new imprints that cover the healthy impressions we were born with. These imprints are so powerful that they fool us (and others) into thinking that our dysfunctional traits are the sum and substance of our personalities.

I do not mean to suggest that our true selves are defined by purely healthy traits, and our "false" selves--the masks we wear that reflect our conditioning--are defined by purely unhealthy traits. At bottom, we all have a mixture of traits, some of which are "desirable" and "adaptive," some of which are not. The purpose of Immune Power Personality development is not to extinguish our dark sides, but to reopen channels to parts of ourselves we have split off from consciousness. Traditional psychology has told us that we only repress "negative" mind-states and traits. This book represents the view, shared by renowned psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Karl Menninger, that we can recover "healthy" mind-states and traits that we have lost contact with.

Many people remain unconvinced that we can develop healthy traits. Our personalities are fixed in stone, they contend. But psychotherapists have documented successful transformations for decades. As William James wrote sixty years ago,

"The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators... We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable things. We know not the complexities of Personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of character, the resources of the subliminal region."

What aspect of the mind is healing? The researchers covered in this book looked to our personality templates, below those layers of sediment, to discover the health-promoting traits we share. We may not have lived them out. But their imprints are deeper than the dysfunctional patterns laid down through years of conditioning by parents, schoolteachers, relatives, the media, the culture. They are traits that enable us to experience and express emotions. They empower us to use our intelligence, energy, and hope in the service of problem-solving. They allow us to establish healthy relationships with others. They uplift our spirits and our spirituality. Ultimately, they are traits that encompass and express the best in us.

Moreover, they are traits that keep us healthy. As I will document in the rest of this book, each scientist showed statistical correlations between a particular trait and a stronger immune system and/or better health. The aspects of the mind that are healing are Immune Power traits.

The seven Immune Power Personaltity researchers have taken pains not to oversimplify the mind-body link. The model they embrace accepts that personality and emotions are only one set of contributors to disease and health. Moreover, it is difficult to specify the precice percentage that Immune Power traits contribute to overall disease resistance. Wide variations in their contribution are due largely to individual differences. For some, genes and diet are overriding factors, and personality has less to do with health outcomes. For others, Immune Power traits appear to be major role- players. Among still others, personality is a modest but important contributor to wellness. The marrow-minded notion that personality is the only factor in health is not only unscientific, it can lead people to blame themselves for diseases, including cancer and AIDS.

I must add that distinct Immune Power traits are linked to somewhat different immune enhancements and resistance to different illnesses. Each Immune Power trait has its own track record, but, taken together, these traits cover an extraordinarily wide spectrum of health benefits, including resistance to: Viral infections from influenza to HIV; autoimmune diseases from arthritis to lupus; many types of cancer; chronic fatigue; chronic pain associated with inflammations; asthma and allergies. Certain Immune Power traits are also linked to reduced risk of heart disease, and recent research suggests that the immune system does indeed play a role in the development or prevention of heart disease. Ultimately, the purpose of Immune Power Personality development is the health of every bodily system.

The Immune Power Personality is founded on a realistic, scientific basis for mind-body empowerment, not omnipotence. Our brains do not grant us total conscious control of our immune systems. But we can change our behavior, thoughts, and feelings, and doing so changes our physiology--including our immune responses. We don't create our biological reality, but we can affect it. For people struggling with disease, this measure of control yields significant returns in their quality-of-life and health.

Henry Dreher is a health and medical writer specializing in complementary and mind-body medicine. He is the author of Your Defense Against Cancer and The Immune Power Personality, and coauthor of The Type C Connection: The Mind-Body Link to Cancer and Your Health; and Healing Mind, Healthy Woman. Mr. Dreher is a regular contributor to Advances: The Journal of Mind-Body Health, Natural Health, and numerous other periodicals.

From THE IMMUNE POWER PERSONALITY by Henry Dreher. Copyright @ Henry Dreher, 1995. Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.
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