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.

In this episode of my How To Series, I explain how you can use the logic that comes from our knowledge of body metaphors to be more certain of your TMS/mind body diagnosis. One of the central ways to do effective work in the doubt column is to recognize the convergence of evidence from all areas and I encourage people to not leave out what our spoken words tell us about what we must know.

People can be ‘a pain in the neck (or ass), someone can ‘make you sick’, you can literally get overheated when you are angry, and many, many more. Because metaphors come from actual lived experience, I point out how it strains logic to think these are just poetic statements, as opposed to revealing about what we know to be true of the mind body connection.

As you work to pin doubt to the ground and get it to relent — because it will try to creep back in at every turn — you need to have every bit of logic you can at your disposal. Pay attention to the metaphors of the body and consider why they are such an ever present part of how we talk.

Today I am joined by Penny George and Dan Hindsley, two chronic pain recoverers from the UK who have teamed up to create the website mindbodymedicineinfo.org, which collects tons of information on mind body experience. Not only that, but Penny and Dan (yes, acknowledged…ANOTHER Dan) are spearheading an initiative to get medical doctors more open to mind body ideology, so that we can make progress in society overall. Penny and Dan have created a wonderful resource for sufferers and curious medical doctors alike, including a collection of the best research studies backing up the science behind it all.

We talked about each of their journeys through the mind body process, as Penny got a ‘book cure’ for her chronic fatigue, while Dan resisted the whole idea for fifteen months, until finally coming around. We also explore the ways in which each have had to think about how they want to apply what they know, finding that this is way of helping the community grow and the conversation evolve to be the most powerful and accessible for them. Dan, in fact, tried to be a TMS coach and found it to be not for him, which is a powerful reminder that there are so many ways to contribute to the effort to help people with mind body issues. In fact, as we know, finding your own power and pathway is so important. I look forward to keeping in touch with them and collaborating in our efforts to get people the right information.

Today, I am joined by Barb, who suffers from sciatica, back pain, and a number of other symptoms. This four session consultation shows how each person can fill out their individual columns on their mind body map so that they can understand the role of emotions, doubt, and power in their chronic pain or symptoms, as well some specific action steps the sufferer can take to create their own program to get better, using my overarching system. I was so appreciative that she showed the bravery and openness 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 first session, I orient her to the mind body map work and we began to develop her emotional themes, so that she can recognize the broad, high stakes, but specific experiences and feelings that can lead to the onset and uptick in symptoms. Among the themes we hit upon were not feeling she could be noticed for who she was, needing to strive for attention, feeling different in ways that made her feel bad, giving up control to other people, and more. We talked about how she will feel so much better and with significantly more hope once she understands the mind body experience and how it works inside and out.

This is the first 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. 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!

On this week’s edition of the Mind Body Connection Series, I explore the primary importance of dreaming — not the sleep kind of dreaming, but the kind where your wishes are front and center in your life. I found this to be true in therapy, and using the knowledge of the mind body only adds to my conviction that to realize a dream, you must first HAVE the dream. 

This video helps you think through how to give up old dreams that either cannot be realized or aren’t even serving the function you’d want them to — making YOU happy. I discuss why these dreams are not good for us, and why they aren’t effective in getting us what we want. 

Finally, I talk about the key to happiness not being about getting what you want in external reality, but using your dreams to enact WHO YOU ARE. Related to the power column, we explore how you can use dreams to access your purpose and unlock new, powerful ways of living.

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.

On this episode of my How To Series, I address the kind of mind body experience in which you just cannot stop thinking about the symptoms, which leads to their perpetuation. This is something I call ‘attentional TMS’ or attentional mind body issues.

It can be so hard to stop checking in on the symptoms to see if they might go away at all, but what this actually does is get those neurons firing and, simply by paying attention to the symptoms, you em up strengthening them, or even making them happen in the first place.

As I lay out here, the antidote to attentional mind body issues comes in the power column. When you are aligned with yourself and your mission in life, you basically forget to attend to the symptoms. You have a different path forward in your life that feels good and this can help you lay other doubt to rest, stop checking symptoms, and live your life to the fullest.