Furthermore, stress has both a specific and a general impact on human physiology. Stress ultimately changes every organ in the human body. Stress is systemic, not specific. However, stress also has a very focused physiological impact on specific organs. For each of us, certain organs are uniquely sensitive to stress and this specific profile of sensitivity creates unique patterns of personality, abnormality and illness. This is where the insights offered by Reich can be quite helpful. He identifies specific muscular blockages that help to create and maintain unique human characteristics—that is what character analysis is all about.
As Reich noted, the profile of stress (and muscular blockage) may be genetically determined or established early in life. A child might be exposed to a specific stressor that has a particularly strong impact on a specific organ. Once the profile is established, the “rut” grows deeper. The armor thickens. Sapolsky describes this rutting process: “… stress responses tend to spiral up and down. First, we are triggered. Then, we react to being triggered with confusion, humiliation, and even anger (I’m angry because you scared me). This becomes a spiral of stress. For intense stressful events, we create [a memory] that never goes away.”
In essence, anything that triggers a memory of this event will trigger an intense emotional reaction that may never be resolved during our lifetime. We are caught in an ever-deepening rut. Our armor becomes rusty. Our heart seems no longer to be present. Like the Tin Man, we are vulnerable and powerless– and must wait for some other person (such as Dorothy) to help us out. Chaos theorists suggest that this process of “strange attraction” is to be found in any system that is dynamic and filled with interdependencies.
There is ongoing stress and distress for people who have established a rutted stress profile and stiff armor. As in the case of the tipping point in physical systems, there is a moment where we are overwhelmed beyond repair. We become weak and collapse. The agents that initially are there to fight the stress soon become the internal enemy. The armor that is meant to protect us becomes our enemy. We see this operating in a rather mild fashion when we “catch” a cold. It is evident, in more dramatic fashion, when one’s immune system begins to attack the body and when someone who has faced trauma in their childhood now finds themselves unable to deal with any stressful situation – even if it is only mildly traumatic.
The deeply rutted stress and character armor profile can have a profound impact on our life—both the physical and psychological quality of the life we live and the duration of our life. For some of us, stress has a focused impact on peripheral organs that are not essential to life. For most of us, however, stress hits our most precious, life-giving organs (such as the heart and digestive system). We now know that this latter (very large) group of people will live shorter lives because of their imagined lions. Or they will live long lives but remain frozen in place like our Tin Man.
Escape from Pain
We must add one other ingredient to this potent and often life-threatening mixture. This ingredient can’t be traced back to the African Savannah, but rather is a product of our modem era. In fact, it is a product of the 20″‘ century and concerns the meaning that is assigned to stress and associated pain and suffering. Prior to the 20″‘ century and the introduction of such analgesics as aspirin in Western medicine, pain was assigned a specific meaning by the culture in which the sufferer lived. There was no way to avoid the pain if we were injured or ill; therefore, we tried to assign some value or meaning to the pain and our society helped out by providing a culturally based explanation.
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