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her sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend who also victimized the younger sister Julia tried to protect. None of Julia’s treating physicians ever asked about her inner life. Why does that matter? Because such personality patterns as Dr. Robinson and others have observed are reversible and, with them, so may be the disease. Despite having been told the illness would inevitably progress, Julia is now symptom-free and medication-free. “I have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis these days—it makes me want to cry telling you,” she said to me. “I’m great.” What could such a statement mean, and why so deeply felt in Julia’s case? We will return to these “beautiful conversations” later, when we look at healing.[*] Grief and Vexation: Miray, Bianca, and Multiple Sclerosis Miray is a fifty-one-year-old physician from Turkey, now working as a clinical trial coordinator at a Canadian hospital. She first experienced diplopia—double vision—at age eighteen, but without the advanced imaging techniques now available, she remained at first undiagnosed. “I saw an ophthalmologist, and he said, oh, this is just a temporary thing,” she recalled. “So I went on corticosteroids for six weeks, and it went away. At twenty-two I had multiple attacks. Whenever I would see my mom, I would see double. I studied in another city and was perfectly okay, but when I would go back to Istanbul, I would have another attack every time I saw my mom.” At age twenty-four, Miray had an MRI that confirmed the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. After she immigrated to Canada, she was symptom-free for years. But during her pregnancy, her husband, in the midst of some business woes, became abusive. “He had this rage and hatred toward women,” she said, “and he would project it on me.” One stress begat another. “He wasn’t making enough money to hire people, so I would work in the hospital from morning to afternoon, then I had to go and mind the store from four until midnight. When I gave birth, things got worse. He was shouting, extremely angry. He was always demeaning me, mocking me, ridiculing me.” Finally, Miray left the marriage and, after many years, saw her parents again. When she did, she was soon unable to walk—a pattern that has persisted ever since. The