your health may depend upon it

by Connie Strasheim

DID YOU KNOW THAT MUCH OF ILLNESS results not from physical toxins or infections, but from a lack of healthy boundaries in relationships? (For more information on boundaries, have a look at Dr. Cloud’s and Dr. Townsend’s book series on the subject: (cloudtownsend.com). Contrary to what you might think, boundaries aren’t bad. They aren’t about putting up walls between you and your loved ones, but rather, establishing communication patterns in a way that gets your needs, as well as the needs of your loved ones, met in a healthy way.

If you don’t have healthy boundaries, you’ll be suppressed in your ability to communicate your beliefs, thoughts, needs and wants—basically, your inner truth, to yourself and others. The result is conflict between you and the world, because what you hold on the inside doesn’t match what is expressed on the outside, verbally or with actions. As a consequence, your body suffers under the burden of the lie, or the inconsistency that exists between your belief, thought or need, and your behavior.

The old adage, “be true to yourself” has great merit. Living out of sync with who you are can wreak an earthquake of havoc on your internal world. In fact, some mental healthcare practitioners believe that most people who suffer from chronic illness have a history of serious boundary problems.

The founders of Quantum Techniques, Stephen and Beth Daniel, (www.quantumtechniques.com), in their Quantum Techniques Client Manual, write that your inner truth will be communicated to the world, in one form or another. If it isn’t appropriately expressed through your behavior and modes of communication, then the body will take charge and clamor to be heard through physical symptoms.

If, for example, others ask things of you that you can’t give, and you don’t know how to say “no” to these requests for fear of rejection or some other motive, your body may say “no” for you. How does it do this? By coming down with a bout of the flu or manifesting some other symptom so that you literally can’t perform what has been asked of you. As bizarre as it may seem, your body is trying to protect you and do for you what you will not do for yourself.

Bottom line? Without a healthy ability to express yourself, and especially to communicate your needs to others, your immune system will struggle mightily to help you recover from cancer, Lyme disease, and other serious health conditions.

Don’t despair. None of us lives totally in accord with our inner truth. We silence ourselves because we don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. We don’t say what we know to be right because we fear rejection, even though it may mean we will suffer more in the long haul for it. We haven’t learned to believe in our heart of hearts that loving others means being honest with them, instead of pleasing them, by showing or telling them what we think they want to hear.

Breaking unhealthy boundary patterns can help you to heal on a deeper level as you let go of the need for approval, knowing that you are worthy and loveable no matter how others react to you and that your value doesn’t depend on their opinions of you.

Setting boundaries implies a willingness to risk self-expression in the name of healing. Not only will you love yourself more for doing it, but others will love you more for your honesty, too. What follows is not only a healing of your soul and spirit, but also your body.

excerpted from: The Lyme Disease Survival Guide: Physical, Lifestyle and Emotional Strategies for Healing. Copyright 2008 by Connie Strasheim.

photo credits: Girl on Meadow © Angel Rodriguez / iStockphoto

Connie Strasheim is an accomplished health care journalist and the author of The Lyme Disease Survival Guide: Physical, Lifestyle and Emotional Strategies for Healing. A Lyme disease sufferer, she maintains a blog on Lyme disease and other issues related to chronic illness called Lyme Bytes. Currently, she lives between Denver, Colorado and San Jose, Costa Rica.