Unforgiveness: A Leading Cause of Cancer


Those who hold onto anger and hurt, tend to have poor health, a weakened immune system and are more prone to chronic illness such as cancer. This is due to a rise in the level of the stress hormone cortisol that suppresses the immune system.  Cancer is, in most cases, a state of chronic unforgiveness – a holding onto anger, hate and resentment.  This internal state of chronic stress depletes important adrenaline reserves and breaks the all important oxygen krebs cycle of the body’s cells, leading to cancer cell mutation.  See theCancer-Stress Link.

Forgiveness Therapy

Forgiveness is a way of letting go of the anger and hurt and ultimately a way of improving your health and immune system functioning. Forgiveness does not mean condoning bad behavior or forcing a reconciliation with the offender. Ultimately forgiveness should be done because it is good for you.

Forgiveness Therapy involves speaking your truth and letting go of anger and hurt – without the person you are forgiving being present.  You can speak your truth in a letter to the person you are seeking to forgive (without posting it), or in a role-play setting either during hypnosis or in a counseling session using gestalt role-play therapy.

The Mind-Body Self Hypnosis Cancer CD uses gestalt role-play therapy to guide you through expressing your feelings of anger and hate to those you have not yet forgiven at the subconscious level. The Cancer Healing Guide guides you through expressing your feelings on paper at the conscious level. Both are a way of making peace with others and with yourself so that you can move on with your life.  EFT (the emotional freedom technique) is used to permantly remove feelings of anger, hate and resentment.

Forgiving another is an emotionally freeing experience. When we adopt the mind set that nobody is perfect, that we are all a mixture of good and bad, then life becomes relatively uncomplicated again.

World Research Links Cancer To Unforgivenenss

1. “Chronic unforgiveness causes stress. Every time people think of their transgressor, their body responds. Decreasing your unforgiveness cuts down your health risk. Now, if you can forgive, that can actually strengthen your immune system”. [Virginia Commonwealth University]

2. “The program’s preliminary work suggests that forgiveness lowered the stress hormone cortisol that in turn affects the immune system, but only when the patients forgave the ones they blamed”. [University of Maryland – Institute of Human Virology]

3. “Forgiveness could boost the immune system by reducing the production of the stress hormone cortisol” [Rockefeller University – New York]

4. “When you hold onto the bitterness for years, it stops you from living your life fully. As it turns out, it wears out your immune system and hurts your heart” [Stanford University Center for Research in Disease Prevention]

5. “Those who received forgiveness training showed improvements in the blood flow to their hearts” [University of Wisconsin – Research Dept]

6. Researchers at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research found that forgiveness was linked with better self-reported mental and physical health.

7. A new study from Duke University Medical Center demonstrates that those who forgive others experience lower levels of chronic pain and less associated psychological problems like anger and depression than those who have not forgiven.

8. Researchers at Ohio States University found that the highly stressed women had lower levels of natural killer cells than women who reported less stress. “Natural killer cells have an extremely important function with regard to cancer because they are capable of detecting and killing cancer cells. Psychological interventions, such as forgiveness, have important roles in reducing stress and improving quality of life, but also in extending survival.” [Barbara Andersen, Professor of Psychology, Ohio State University]

9. “I have collected 57 extremely well documented so-called cancer miracles. At a certain particular moment in time they decided that the anger and the depression were probably not the best way to go, since they had such little time left. And so they went from that to being loving, caring, no longer angry, no longer depressed, and able to talk to the people they loved. These 57 people had the same pattern. They gave up, totally, their anger, and they gave up, totally, their depression, by specifically a decision to do so. And at that point the tumors started to shrink.” [Yale Medical School – Dr Bernie Seigel, Clinical Professor of Surgery]

10. “When I suggest emotional healing to people with cancer, they always misunderstand me. They hear it as emotional support. They think I either just want to comfort them, or show them how to have a more positive attitude. They don’t get that something like forgiveness might be the key to their getting well. I see their eyes glaze over when I go on to say that emotional toxicity is most likely the cause of their cancer, and that forgiveness, if used with appropriate treatments and lifestyle changes that address the physical, is a ‘first-line’ primary treatment. Their inability to hear this as a strategy for survival, is a measure of how brainwashed we all are into thinking that treatment for cancer must always be harsh, drastic and violent. With our War-on-Cancer mind-set, it’s hard to imagine that something so seemingly soft and gentle as forgiveness could be the answer to our problem.” [Colin Tipping, Director, Institute of Radical Forgiveness]