(29-15)
Sex
Wife seemed strange
Sex now just
sexually
a memory
(39-75)
(39-75)
Other
Beat Fred
Cut back on
Moved to new house
at tennis
socializing
(31-10)
for first
(18-5)
(25-10)
time
Car trouble
Car trouble
Christmas (rough)
Car finally
(12-20)
fixed
Cat ran away “our child”
Mother-in-law running wild
House needs new roof
(29-50)
Below the line, list all the important events of your life just under their
appropriate years. Basically, these include everything that has made you the person
you are.
This definitely means family events, such as the birth of siblings, people moving
in or out of the house, deaths, and a major illness of anyone: parents, brothers,
sisters, grandparents. If your mother or father was absent for a time or if a parent got
a new job or was fired or promoted, include it. Put in even less tangible events, such
as a shift in relationships for instance, if you remember drawing closer to your
brother around the time you were fifteen.
As in the sample Time Line, add important events involving work and school:
starting school, changing schools, honors, dishonors, and graduations. When did you
start and leave each job? List all transfers, promotions, and shifts in duties. If
particular events on the job stick in your mind, such as a fight or especially
supportive relationship developing with a boss or coworker, put it in. Include big
moments in athletics and turning points in friendships. Things that disappointed you
by not happening are as real as things that did happen, so don't forget to put in the
time you didn't make the team.
Sexual events may be particularly important; jot down all the milestones. Going
way back, note when you first discovered the difference between little boys and little
girls, when you first played "doctor," when you first masturbated, or began to
menstruate. Include your first boyfriend or girlfriend, first kiss, petting, intercourse.
Any event that stands out in your sexual life deserves to be noted just because you
remember it: starts and ends of significant relationships, fights, high points, even
orgasms you'll never forget. (Note: here and throughout this exercise, don't skip
topics that make you uncomfortable. These may be the most important. If you wish,
use a code on the Time Line to ensure secrecy.) Childbirth and abortion are
important parts of your sexual history.
Your medical history is highly relevant. Place in its appropriate spot any
significant illnesses you've suffered, or any operations or major medical procedures.
Needless to say, put in everything dermatological.
If there's anything that impresses you with its emotional impact, give it space on
the Time Line, such as pets, family fights, trips and travels, periods when you were
depressed and didn't know why, any significant change or turning point. The rule is:
If it seems important, it is important.
This exercise is not the work of an afternoon. It's a personal research project
that you will have to live with for weeks, perhaps months. In my experience, many
people get impressive results quite quickly – in a few hours, they've gotten down to
basics, perhaps twelve of the most important events of their lives. After that, there's
often a long period where they return to the project from time to time, adding
important events as they come to mind, touching up, filling in, and refining the Time
Line.
Try posting the Time Line on your bedroom or bathroom wall so you can add
details as they occur to you. Once you get your mind on the proper wavelength,
information and memories gradually percolate and drift up to the surface. You'll
probably discover a wealth of material that was in "inactive storage" – accessible to
your memory but not immediately accessible. As you sift through your memory bank,
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the most important things will emerge.
How can you discover what events, what needs, and what fears and emotional
tasks inhabit the deep parts of your mind, where today, yesterday, and infancy sit
side by side? It is here that your Time Line can yield the fullest dividends. Pressing
relentlessly to reconstruct these years that are both dim and distant yet vibrantly
alive, you are seeking to find out what makes you who you really are.
Constructing your Time Line is a lengthy task but one that will reward you with
insights all along the way, and once you've gotten the first ten or so pivotal life events
down, you've made a significant start. As you search for and wait for more details to
bubble up to the surface, relax. You're your own biographer here but you needn't
worry about the scrupulous standards of objective accuracy that bind most
biographers – our goal is psychological reality. If you remember that your mother
was out of town for six months when you were five years old and she tells you that in
fact she took a two-week trip to Baltimore when you were seven, your version is the
"right" one for your purposes. As a small child, you experienced her loss as
prolonged: the distortions of memory are a lie that tells the truth.
Help from relatives may be invaluable when you're trying to reconstruct early
events, which deserve particular attention if your skin problem began when you
were young. Find out what you can about the big moments of those years, tapping the
memories of your parents, older brothers and sisters, and uncles and aunts. If you
were born with a skin problem, find out what was happening in your family during
the preceding year – this may have influenced the prenatal environment in which you
developed.
The Time Line is a wide-angle panorama that portrays your whole life at once.
Later I'll show you how to move in for a close-up of a critical period.
Now let's look at some striking research that will help us get the maximum
benefit from your Time Line.
If you've picked up a magazine or newspaper or turned on the TV news in
recent years, you've no doubt heard all about stress, and the way that emotional
experience can affect your body profoundly enough to make you ill. Studies have
linked diseases, including heart attack, ulcer, and infection, to stress. If (for genetic or
unknown reasons) your skin is your body's weakest link, it is here that emotional
turmoil is likely to take its toll.
What causes stress exactly? There's a general answer, which is useful, and a
more personal, psychological answer, which will be much more useful. According to
psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, there are certain events, like many
on your Time Line, that cause stress to everyone. Holmes and Rahe call them "life
changes." They developed a scale that lists major life change events and
approximates how much stress each would cause the average person.
Their Life Event chart, (a sample of which follows) covers the gamut of human
experience. The most stressful change is the death of a spouse, rated 100; divorce is
not far behind at 73. No one would argue the impact of these losses on anyone, but
some other stress sources may surprise you. "Changing to a different line of work" is
often a change for the better. We usually think of "Outstanding personal
achievement" as a cause for celebration. Yet Holmes and Rahe rate it almost as
stressful as "In-law troubles."xxv
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The essential ingredient all these events share is change. Any change, good or
bad, forces your mind – and your body to adapt. If too much is demanded in too little
time, your body's adaptation energy is exhausted. Psychologically, all change involves
loss – a promotion at work, for example, means the loss of familiar duties, roles, and
relationships and loss means emotional and physical wear and tear.
The effects of stress and loss are cumulative. In a series of studies, Holmes and
Rahe asked subjects from different cultures and walks of life to score and total up all
their life changes from the past year. They found (with surprising uniformity,
considering the diversity of the people they studied) that those with a score greater
than 300 in one year had an 80 percent chance of falling ill. When the score fell into
the 200 to 299 range, the odds for illness were 50 percent. People who tallied 150 to
200 points had a 37 percent risk of health problems?xxvi
Can you see such a pattern behind your skin disorder? Examine the section of
your Time Line that extends a year before your symptom developed, note events in
the Holmes-Rahe Life Event chart, and add up your score. Do the same tabulation for
years preceding major flare-ups. You may want to compare these scores with
"normal" one-year periods of your life.
This is just the beginning, however. Holmes and Rahe studied the way people
respond to stressful events on the average. You are unique; what's important – here's
a notion we'll return to time and again – is the meaning of these events in your mind
and their effect on your body.
To take a familiar example, day-to-day irritations, such as parking problems and
fights with the boss, are also stressful. Yet individual reactions differ enormously.
Consider two men in the same traffic jam. One is fuming, tapping his fingers,
constantly rechecking his watch, and ruminating over time lost. The other has
resigned himself to waiting as an unattractive but inevitable feature of city life: he's
using the time to mull over a work-related problem while he listens to music on his
tape deck. On the same highway – perhaps in the same car – one man is under stress,
the other is not.
By the same token, your neighbor's divorce may be very different from your
divorce, and the 73 points assigned to this life change event on the Holmes-Rahe
scale may be inappropriate to both (even though it is accurate for the average).
''Troubles with boss" may have one meaning to a person who has difficulty dealing
with authority and an entirely different one for another who has achieved a
philosophical attitude toward the compromises we must make to earn a living. To the
first, such troubles "cost" far more than the 23 stress points assigned by the Holmes-
Rahe scale; to the second, far less.
To personalize your stress score, go back to your Time Line and reconsider the
years before your skin problem started and worsened significantly. List again the
significant changes that took place. Refer to the Holmes-Rahe chart again, but this
time adjust its point values up or down depending on what each event actually meant
to you.
Are these cumulative scores significantly different from your own first totals?
Can you see a pattern? Some people rate their own reactions consistently less intense
than the average, which raises some useful questions. Are they out of touch with their
feelings? Do they deny or suppress their emotions more than most people? Do you
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rate certain events higher in stress than Holmes and Rahe changes – changes for the
better, such as promotions, for example, or relationship ups and downs? If so, you
may have unearthed a valuable clue to your needs, fears, and emotional tasks.xxvii
The question is: Where does your heightened reaction come from? Why is a
business failure, say, distressing but surmountable for Robert G. but devastating for
Horace T.? At every moment, in every situation, you react with a personality that
comes in part from your genetic heritage but that for the most part has been shaped
and molded by the experiences you've accumulated throughout your life.
To put it simply, your earlier years are not just part history. The emotionally
vibrant events that you never came fully to terms with are live and active in your
here-and-now life, vulnerable and sensitive, an emotional Achilles' heel. All the
losses, frustrations, and confrontations of your life connect like the links of a chain; if
you rattle one, all the others will rattle.
When you feel you're overreacting to an apparently unimportant event, it's
because you're also responding to all the earlier events that the experience brings to
mind – not one link in the chain but a dozen. The heart does not overreact. This will
become clear as you understand the past events that survive, alive and kicking, in the
parts of yourself that escape the laws of time.
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NUMBER OF
SCALE
YOUR
LIFE EVENT
OCCURRENCES
VALUE
SCORE
Death of spouse
100
Divorce
73
Marital separation from mate
65
Detention in jail or other institution
63
Death of a close family member
63
Major personal injury or illness
53
Marriage
50
Being fired at work
47
Marital reconciliation with mate
45
Retirement from work
45
Major change in the health or behavior of
a family member
44
Pregnancy
40
Sexual difficulties
39
Gaining a new family member (e.g.,
through birth, adoption, oldster
moving in, etc.)
39
Major business readjustment (e.g., merger,
reorganization, bankruptcy, etc.)
39
Major change in financial state (e.g., a lot
worse off or a lot better off than usual)
38
Death of a close friend
37
Changing to a different line of work
36
Major change in the number of arguments
with spouse (e.g., either a lot more or a
lot less than usual regarding child
rearing, personal habits, etc.)
35
Taking on a mortgage greater than
$10,000 (e.g., purchasing a house,
business, etc.)
31
Foreclosure on a mortgage or loan
30
Major change in responsibilities at work
(e.g., promotion, demotion, lateral
transfer)
29
Son or daughter leaving home (e.g.,
marriage, attending oallege, etc.)
29
In-law troubles
29
Outstanding personal achievement
28
Wife beginning or ceasing work outside
the home
26
Beginning or ceasing formal schooling
26
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NUMBER OF
SCALE
YOUR
LIFE EVENT
OCCURRENCES
VALUE
SCORE
Major change in living conditions (e.g.,
building a new house, remodeling,
deterioration of house or re hbmhood)
25
Revision of personal habits (dress,
manners, associations etc.)
24
Troubles with boss
23
Major change in working hours or
conditions
20
Change in residence
20
Changing to a new school
20
Major change in usual type and/or
amount of recreation
19
Major change in church activities (e.g., a
lot more or a lot less than usual)
19
Major change in social activities (e.g.,
clubs, dancing, movies, visiting ,etc.)
18
Taking on a mortgage or loan less than
$10,000 (e.g., purchasing a car, TV,
freezer, etc.)
17
Major change in sleeping habits (a lot
more or a lot less sleep, or change in
part of day when you sleep)
16
Major change in number of family get-
togethers (e.g., a lot more or a lot less
than usual)
15
Major change in eating habits (a lot more
or a lot less food intake, or v er y
different meal hours or surroundings)
15
Vacation
13
Christmas
12
Minor violations of the law (e.g., traffic
tickets, jaywalking, disturbing the
peace, etc.)
11
This is your total life change score for the past year
Source: The Schedule of Recent Experience (SRE), © 1976 by Thomas H. Holmes, M.D.
For example, suppose a major skin flare-up appears to have been triggered by
the breakup of a casual relationship, a rejection by someone who didn't mean very
much to you. Why the devastating effect on your skin? An introspective look
backward may reveal that loss and rejection loom large in your life story. Look back
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far enough and you may find a similar loss in the childhood days when you were
most needy and vulnerable – the prolonged absence of a parent or a pronounced
emotional withdrawal – that sensitized you to the losses you would experience ten,
twenty, even forty years later.
To use an analogy, a person who is allergic to bee venom can suffer a violent
reaction, even die, when stung – not the first time but after one or more stings have
created a sensitivity. If such a reaction occurs, it is misleading to say that the "trigger"
was the sting that occurred two minutes earlier, ignoring the earlier ones that made
the person sensitive. To understand this vulnerability, you must look back over the
years; the stings of ten, even twenty years ago are still alive in the antibodies that
circulate in the bloodstream.
In reconstructing the events that inhabit the deep parts of your mind, your Time
Line yields its fullest dividends. Pressing to recapture those early years that are both
dim and distant and vibrantly alive, you are finding out what makes you who you
really are. As you fill out your Time Line with all the significant events that have
remained in your memory, be alert for motifs and patterns. Many of these events
have stuck with you because they are connected to your wishes and fears. Your Time
Line, then, is a map of emotional hotspots; the prominence of events having to do
with anger or rejection or loss or guilt may lead to a new understanding of emotional
tasks that keep your skin disease hard at work.
One of my genital herpes patients, for example, noted how childhood events
involving sexuality stood out on her Time Line. She recalled her parents' dismay and
her own shame when they caught her and a little neighbor boy "playing doctor." The
onset of menstruation was a moment of anxiety, again reinforced by parental
reaction. As her memories of those years became clear, she came to appreciate how
her early years had sensitized her to the whole issue of sex – how her parents'
discomfort had silently taught the lesson that sex was an anxious business.
Her herpes, then, had stirred up a feeling of uneasiness that had been planted
long before in her mind. Her genitals were now truly defective and unclean, as she
had always suspected. Herpes for her was more than a physical illness, but also the
focus of fears and anxieties with roots in the long-ago. Realizing the connection
between her troubled sexual feelings and her herpes anxiety was extremely
comforting: the distress now made sense given the logic of her own psychology; she
wasn't crazy to feel as bad as she did. She could begin to bring these feelings out into
the light of day and release herself from their grip.
Why was the remembered shame and anxiety my patient experienced when
discovered "playing doctor" important? This event, in itself, didn't shape