Crushing Doubt

This is a live Q&A about mind body symptoms with Crushing Doubt host Dr. Dan Ratner. If you have chronic pain or other physical symptoms that haven’t been able to be explained or helped by medical doctors or other alternative treatments, this information can change your life. By changing the way we think and feel, we can change our actual physiological processes to relieve — or even cure — many symptoms, from head to toe.

Today, I outline how to escape a narcissist so that you can be free of that toxicity in your life. We begin by talking about what a narcissist is and also what does not constitute a narcissist, because learning to recognize who and what they are is so important in learning to steer clear of them.

Next, I turn my attention to what makes them operate the way they do so that you can understand what is happening to you in relation to them and why it goes the way it goes. It is crucial to learn to think of them by different rules than ‘normal’ people.

Lastly, I go through a set of rules of engagement, per se, with them to give some basic ideas of what to do or not do to set you up for success. But the bottom line is that they will become easier to recognize and it will be all the easier for you to not have to interact with them once you see the basics: They make you feel terrible on a regular basis and absolutely nothing you have done or any part of who you are is deserving of it.

I am honored to have been joined by a true legend in Grammy award winning singer/songwriter Judy Collins. We talked primarily about the ups and downs of emotional life, particularly given her experience of the catastrophic loss of her son Clark to suicide in 1992. She shares generously how she was able to survive such detestation, even managing to feel deeply close with her son in an ongoing way all these years later. As Judy wisely puts it, death ends a life, but not a relationship.

Our time together highlights the preciousness of time and connection and the importance of knowing there is a way out, as suicide is so often a choice that comes out of feeling no way out. She shares her experience of making a suicide attempt, herself, when she was fourteen and facing the potential disappointment of her father.

One of the most remarkable things about Judy’s way of surviving her son’s suicide was her ability to reach out to others for support and finding an ability to connect to what she termed ‘the gifts of catastrophic loss’. As she has done so many times musically, she turned the experiences of her heart into something beautiful and to be treasured. I am so grateful to her for taking time with me and bearing her heart and soul on this very important issue as we work to promote suicide prevention.

Today, Barb and I met for our third session of one of my actual mind body three column consultations. I am so appreciative to have another person show the courage and generosity to engage in the actual process with me so that we can bring to all of you a direct view of how the work goes and what it looks like. In this session, we look, in depth, at the power column and how it affects us all in how we relate to ourselves, others, and our symptoms.

You’ll get to see Barb and I build her core narrative and begin to discuss how she can utilize this emotional mantra, of sorts. From the broad, high stakes central emotional experience of her life to the specific way it impacted her, we use the information to create a goal with respect to what she can do about this enduring experience. I also help her to articulate and highlight the ways she can feel out of power in her interactions with herself, as well as exploring certain relationships with others. Finally, we note that the symptoms still feel in control of her and stated our goal of reversing that experience, as she learns to understand the flow of her emotional life into symptoms, reduce doubt, and become more powerful feeling in her own right.

This is the third of four meetings with Barb, so that you can see the full mind body mapping process, how it works, and why. She and I will continue to get her emotional themes articulated, polished, and honed, until she is able to understand each symptom onset or uptick through this lens, giving her the tools to disable the mind body pain process from these acute moments of suffering. We will also continue to get all of her doubts articulated, so that I can help her get answers to them to her satisfaction. Now, we add in her thinking about power in different situations, so that she is more able to make a powerful choice for herself in many different areas. Next week, we turn to the action steps for the four columns. I look forward to carrying this process forward with her and hope it is of value to you all to see how the process works!

In this episode of the Mind Body Connection Series, I discuss the subjective nature of language and the ways our different understandings can get us into trouble or even lead to symptoms from doubt. One way this occurs is in the language of diagnosis or theories about what is actually happening. How much can we actually know when we are using the same words but interpreting them differently?

In my three column system, I try to stay away from terms, or even specific wording, that other people use and focus, instead, on the basic principles and understandings we can all agree upon. If we are going to be our best scientific and logical selves, we have to forget about what we think words mean and zero in on the actual meaning underneath whatever words we might choose at a given time.

Most importantly, there is an objective reality about anything scientific and logical and we need to feel confident in that viewpoint and our ability to find the objective. Words can often obscure that if they are being interpreted so closely that they can lead to disagreements. This video explores how we can cut through words to the heart of the meaning.

This is a live Q&A about mind body symptoms with Crushing Doubt host Dr. Dan Ratner. If you have chronic pain or other physical symptoms that haven’t been able to be explained or helped by medical doctors or other alternative treatments, this information can change your life. By changing the way we think and feel, we can change our actual physiological processes to relieve — or even cure — many symptoms, from head to toe.

In this episode of my How To Series, I cover how to understand boundaries and how to set them effectively. As usual, I find that understanding what is going on underneath it all to be the best guiding principle with respect to figuring out how to do anything. With setting boundaries, the first thing you need to know is what it is you need and why.

Once you figure out who you are, in any given situation — or generally, more importantly — you can then make more effective decisions. This also can help you disentangle from the needs of others when they do not need to be factored into your decision or way of setting up the boundaries.

In addition to clarifying your set up in order to make boundary set up natural and easy, I distinguish between the kind of ‘self care’ that actually harms other people, whereas good boundaries don’t hurt anyone at all. Come find out how!

Dan is joined by four time NBA Champion John Salley to discuss his take on health and wellness. John is a vegan activist and he and Dan connected on the idea that we are very influenced by what we feed ourselves — the actual food, in John’s case, and the ideas we have about ourself and the world in Dan’s case.

John shares how he got his viewpoints, including a look at his NBA days, learning from Adrian Dantley, whom he called ‘the teacher’ — a name I paired by Dantley showing John everything he needed to know about how to take care of his body and mind in the NBA. We also talked about his being an observer and this leading to his being able to make an impact on people through his understanding. Dan and John also bond over people with emotional struggles gravitating towards them both, as they understand that a different way of thinking isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We discuss how following your dreams leads to some of the biggest breakthroughs as well.

John’s successes in life come from his many gifts — including his empathy and comedic instincts — an it was a pleasure to have him on Crushing Doubt to talk about mental health and what we need to do to better address it.

Today, I am joined, once again, by Barb, for the second session of an actual consultation right here, in the moment, on the podcast. As always, I am so appreciative of anyone willing to share their story with the rest of our community, as it takes such courage and generosity and it provides such a help to people in understanding the process in a more direct manner. In this second session, we look, in depth, at the doubt column, the three levels of doubt and the four categories of it as well.

You’ll get to see how I take Barb’s various narratives and locate the doubt within each of them. We uncover her questions, lack of certainty, confusion, and fear. Barb and I found that her sense of being different has many ramifications and one of them lies in her worrying that she will be too different to have a pathway to get better, even though she believes, fully, in the mind body process. 

This is the second of four meetings with Barb, so that you can see the full mind body mapping process, how it works, and why. She and I will continue to get her emotional themes articulated, polished, and honed, until she is able to understand each symptom onset or uptick through this lens, giving her the tools to disable the mind body pain process from these acute moments of suffering. But now we will also continue to get all of her doubts articulated, so that I can help her get answers to them to her satisfaction. I look forward to carrying this process forward with her and hope it is of value to you all to see yet another example of how the process works!

In today’s episode of the mind body connection series, I look at the power of the placebo effect and what it means for our understanding of mind body living. The placebo effect is often regarded, in science, as a novelty act, of sorts — something that is to be disregarded because it occurs with incorrect beliefs. But the placebo effect itself is NOT a false experience. In fact, it is the most compelling example we have, on a regular basis, in every clinical trial that has ever been done, that the mind is ALWAYS creating a physical reality.

This video helps you consider why it has been dismissed and why this is a mistake of epic proportions, as the evidence for mind body work is right under our noses all the time. As always, I challenge the viewer to use science and logic and to not dismiss pieces of evidence in trying to discover the truth. Once we do that, placebo reactions become not only evidence of mind body experience, but direct proof.