Food for Thought - July 2010

I have long held the view that Alzheimer’s is a condition where the sufferer is actually trying to forget some long forgotten incident.  Some area of the past is so difficult to live with that they do all they can to erase this particular piece of the past from the memory. But in the course of trying to forget, the guilty or painful thought is held to the surface of the mind and less important information becomes lost.  Piece by piece the memory is erased until all that is left is the piece of memory so desperately needed to be forgotten.  I have spoken with many people caring  for relatives suffering this  terrible condition.  They know there is something irritating in the earlier lives of  these people, a something that they don’t want to talk about. Some guilty secret or perhaps not guilt but something best forgotten. This would particularly apply to people who grew up or lived through the horrors of the war years.

A woman whose mother died of Alzheimer’s found, after the mother had died, that in fact the woman she had thought was her mother was her Aunt.  Her mother had died in South Africa when she was 2 years old.  The sister of the mother had travelled to South Africa to help the grieving father.  But unable to have children of her own the aunt had slipped away one day taking the little girl back to England not telling the father where they had gone. It was only after the aunt had died that the terrible truth came to light.  All her life the aunt had tried to forget that  her daughter was the stolen child  of her sister.  The aunt had woven a story around the  truth to keep the secret and of course would herself try to forget the awful truth to block the guilt she had to live with. It was only after the aunt, aged 90, had died that papers were found which revealed the truth.

Another case involved a lady who gave birth to a little boy after an illicit affair.  This left an incredible sense of guilt which she never recovered from or discussed.  It was only near the end of her life that she told another of her children the truth and how she had suffered all her life trying to forget the guilt of cheating on an honest husband. This lady was dying of Alzheimer’s and most of her memory was lost but the memory of what she had tried to forget remained as clear as it had been over 40 years earlier.

This does not mean of course that all guilty secrets will result in Alzheimer’s condition. But it can be a contributing factor. I am well aware of the medical explanation of the symptoms but there is nothing to explain why they begin. The brain is what we use to think and if what we think is in conflict with what we do or if we try to block some area of the brains flowing energy  it is bound to create problems.  The problems are the various symptoms which we try to correct with drugs.   Perhaps the Catholic way of confessing sins does more to erase suffering than we realize.


I truly believe that guilt is public enemy ‘number one’.

I have shown in previous mails how guilt is the driving force behind phobias and Rheumatoid Arthritis and many other conditions of illness.

More than once I have had patients suffering from unexplained illness the cause of which can be found in the life of a lie. When I realize a sufferer has switched religion I ask what they would have done if they had not switched religion.  The answers can vary from lighting a candle, saying a prayer or in one case returning to Kosher food. Whatever the change the symptoms can often be reduced or stopped by returning to the original life patterns.

The man was suffering from a wasting disease, there was no plausible explanation or medical reason. He explained that in the past few years he had slowly been losing weight until now the situation had become serious.  I asked what changed in the 12 months before the weight lose began.  He said he had married.  So, I asked, what was so different about life after marriage.  He told me he was born a Jew but had changed religion to marry a Methodist.  He was no longer accepted in the Jewish community but this did not concern him, he was very happily married.

I told him ‘he’ might have become a Christian but his soul was still a Jew and as a Jew should not be eating anything unacceptable to the Jewish religion.  He went back onto Kosher food and he regained his original weight. The adult continued as a Christian but the soul or child he was tended to his Jewish needs.

The adult you become might change from original teachings , but the child you are will never change and in the final analysis it is the child you are that needs to be satisfied.