The Myth of Normal 83

Chapter 7 A Traumatic Tension: Attachment vs. Authenticity Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not. —János (Hans) Selye, M.D., The Stress of Life To hear Anita Moorjani tell it, the disease that nearly killed her was no random misfortune. “The person I was before I got cancer,” the bestselling author told me, “was afraid of disappointing other people. I was a pleaser. I completely lost myself in satisfying other people, I became so drained. I was someone who could not say no; I was a rescuer, and I would be the one who was there for everyone. I didn’t even learn that it’s okay to be me when I had cancer. It took being in a coma to learn that.” Now a vibrant sixty-year-old, Moorjani is convinced that chronic stress induced by the compulsive suppression of her own needs was one of the roots of her metastatic lymphoma, thought to be terminal when she was diagnosed at age forty-three. “My personality was such that I needed something as drastic as cancer to give me reason to take care of myself.” Many of us have heard such sentiments: the notion of “finding the gold” in catastrophe is not at all unfamiliar, nor limited to the sphere of health crises. But the idea that features of our personality may contribute to the onset of pathology is anathema to many. In her still-influential 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor,” the late filmmaker, activist, and brilliant woman of letters Susan Sontag—then a forty-five-year-old cancer survivor—flatly and forcefully