Crushing Doubt

In this episode of our Mind Body Connection Series, I look at the simple way you can understand the speed of your process of recovery. As always, the speed of your recovery is going to be affected by the level of understanding and peace you have with each of the three columns, as well as your sense of your action steps. I review the basics of each element so you can see how it might affect your getting better more quickly or vice versa.

But I also use a term that I discovered in working with a patient of mine and then extend it to a new one of my own. In working with a couples’ therapist, this patient was introduced to the idea that they would get better at ‘the speed of trust’. I found this to be a fascinating and accurate view that quickly pinpoints how and why people get better quickly. In this video, I review the various aspects of trust that can slow down your process, when trust is not there, or speed it up when it is. There is trust in your body, in your mind, in the process, in me, in yourselves, and more. Each element can change the speed of your getting better.

But it isn’t only trust and the columns that determine the speed, but my adaptation on this trust idea, which is that you will also get better at the speed of doubt. Apart from the doubt column itself, which determines a part of whether or not you can get better (you can!), the level of doubt you have determines the speed at which you get better. The more doubt, the slower the speed of recovery. But this is not to make you worried about doubt, so much as to show you yet another way that moment to moment thinking can give you hope: if doubt determines the speed of recovery, then that means you can always speed things up very rapidly once doubt is pinned to the ground.

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 Brothers in Arms, Edgar, Eric, and Dr. Dan explore a topic that is rarely covered: domestic abuse against men. Edgar kicks things off by bringing in a question from a female viewer about how to leave ‘the devil’ behind, referring to her dead husband, who was physically and emotionally abusive to her. We consider how she can manage her internal experience to let herself hate him, while doing a good job externally to see the other sides of him, particularly where her eleven year old son is concerned, as he sees him as a hero of the police force. We talked about the importance of letting in the full reality with her son, however, as well, as he can also see multiple sides of his father and seeing the reality helps.

In Old News (Maybe From Yesterday), Eric brings the statistical heat, as we find out what the CDC numbers say about the frequency of men as domestic victims and all three Brothers are surprised. We talk about why men shy away from talking about these topics and link it, most primarily, to a sense of shame.

This leads us directly into Edgar ‘walking the walk’, and this episode is not for the faint of heart. He relates his experience of seven years in an abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend and we explore the societal expectations that make talking about such things feel shameful and difficult. But Edgar also reveals that this perpetuation eventually got so dangerous that she attacked him with a knife. The scene is terrifying and Eric and Dr. Dan help Edgar to recognize why he doesn’t remember those years so well and how much more processing this might take as we plan to explore it further in the next episode and beyond.

On this episode of our How To Series, I share a new way of thinking about the columns work, and living in general, that can help you organize your experience between what I call the internal and external track. The key comes in recognizing that we are all taught to integrate everything into one way of operating, but this leaves us trying to deal with internal functions within the confines of the external environment. Instead of doing that, I recommend being able to think of yourself as being on two separate tracks: the internal and the external.

On the external track, you will continue to strive to operate at the highest functioning level possible — doing good for others, behaving well, and even going for perfection as much as you want. You’ll keep looking at nuances and taking the other perspective, etc. All good things to be doing! But, when it comes to your symptoms and your internal needs, you’ll need another place to process these things. I present: the internal track!

On the internal track, you deal with your emotional life almost entirely between you and yourself (occasionally, an external boundary is required if someone is crossing a line). Here is where all of those action steps of the mind I recommend can really take off: black and white thinking, for example, can be a place that is relatively permanent in your internal track, while you are only dipping into it on your external track. Putting the blame where it belongs can be the same, where you might put it there permanently internally, but make it not very relevant externally.

Come check out this new way of organizing your thinking so that the columns become all that more effective.

Today, I got to sit down with a remarkable young man, in Freddie Stevenson — a college football champion fullback who has now turned author with his book, Trials to Triumph. Freddie’s story is a remarkable one and at its center are the very parts of his personality that got him through all of the adversity. He shares his story of going from having a lot of money and resources to the family living in destitution, after they found out the money had been coming from his father’s drug dealing when he was sent to jail for these crimes. What followed was a harrowing journey, including his story of his mother using her literal last dollar to allow her five kids to split a McDonald’s burger five ways.

Fortunately, Freddie and his family continued to fight through and things got easier when his father got out of jail and was able to help again. But the other thing that helped Freddie, in his external life, was football. From the age of five, he showed remarkable talent and by the time he reached high school, he was the undeniable top talent on the team. He received multiple scholarship offers, but went to Florida State, where he battled through the hardship of a position change — from linebacker to fullback — and won a national title in his freshman year.

Even so, with fullback being such a limited need in the NFL, he went undrafted and had to try to catch on with the Bears, who claim they would have drafted him if they hadn’t traded away two of their picks. When he did not make the team, he thought his life was over. He suffered through suicidal ideation, returned to the streets, and was living recklessly.

Freddie’s story is still unfolding, but he has a tenacity, a drive to succeed and be the best he can be, and a belief in himself that we recognized had always been there, and this led him to begin telling his story. Through the telling of his story, he has found a new purpose in life and now inspires people around the world. We can all learn from what he has learned and I encourage you to check out his book on Amazon and many other platforms!

Today, I am joined, once again, by Diane, 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 Diane’s various narratives and locate the doubt within each of them. We uncover her questions, lack of certainty, confusion, and fear. Diane and I found that her doubt is not the main active ingredient in her mind body experience, despite the fact that it is there, like in anyone else. However, she has a leg up on some in this column, because she is optimistic and open and this can lead to conquering doubts more quickly. 

This is the second of four meetings with Diane, 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!

When it comes to becoming powerful, I have good news for you — being your most powerful self actually doesn’t hurt anyone else at all. In fact, if anything, you becoming powerful can inspire someone else to become powerful. This is one of the reasons why I chose this word for the third column: there is an unlimited supply of it. What that means is that you can take as much of it as you want and it only makes things better, not just for you, but for everybody.

This video also helps us consider why accepting the word power has its advantages. The word is vague enough to have multiple meanings, and doesn’t have the disadvantage of being so overly specific that it would not describe all situations. In addition to leaving enough room for multiple and widespread meanings, it also is more accurate of a reflection because it sticks to the simple feeling of whether or not you feel good or not. It covers being in control, feeling confident and/or competent, feeling well liked, feeling safe, feeling like you understand what is happening, and so much more.

I also address the fact that the term power, precisely because some people do object to it, affords us a chance to open up new territory in which to get better. Now we are calling into question the things that leave us feeling afraid or under much more because of the, ahem, power of this word. But, at base, the main reason I find it to be the crucial word is because of two things: 1) It covers all of the territory necessary to address the wide range of issues, and 2) It captures the unlimited supply of power in the world, which can allow you to feel comfortable taking up your space and power in the world, knowing with full comfort that it not only doesn’t hurt anyone, but can help them do the same.

In this episode of Brothers in Arms, Edgar, Eric, and Dr. Dan continue to build ways to talk to each other and to show men — and women, too! — how we can talk to each other. Edgar and Eric ask Dr. Dan questions about how to approach conversation with people to get them to open up and share, even when they are reticent to do so initially. Dr. Dan shares that the key is not in what you say, but in the listening that we do, both actively with the other person and in interpreting whether or not they mean it when they say they are fine.

The dynamic trio then move into Old News (Maybe From Yesterday), where they discuss Simone Biles’ withdrawing from the Olympics and compare her stance on mental health to some other recent athletes and comedians of the past. Dan Prescott, Kevin Love, Dave Chappell, and Robin Williams all are discussed, but the discussion was perhaps most poignant around Robin Williams, as Eric considered what might have happened if the famed comedian had felt more comfortable talking openly about the part of himself that was suffering so much.

In Walking the Walk, Dr. Dan takes another turn, this time all to himself, and talked about the birth of his first daughter and how it crystallized a sense in him that he had really always been alone before then, having now felt the primacy of his role with his daughter. Edgar and Eric are connected, encouraging, and helpful in validating Dr. Dan’s suffering in this regard and the three note together how it changed his life and helped him evaluate the people with whom he could now build the closest bonds.

In this episode of our How To Series, I concentrate on the nuts and bolts of what to do in the power column. We begin with the information from the emotions column and doubt column that require a power column solution. Included in this is the ongoing work of emotional themes as they relate to the core narrative. I cover the way fear flows from the doubt column into a needed intervention in the power column, and explore the same way this relates to level three doubt — doubts about the self and our ability to get better.

Within the power column, itself, you’re going to want to take two main actions, once your core narrative is created and some of your power column themes are outlines: 1) You’ll need to compare what is going on in the present moment to the core narrative and find action steps that bring you back into alignment with the core narrative goals; and 2) You will be assessing your level of power with respect to yourself, others, and your symptoms, and adjusting accordingly when you slip out of power.

One quick tip on the whole thing: knowing whether or not you are in power is as simple as assessing whether or not you feel good at a given moment. Once you’ve recognized when you are out of power, pinpoint what led to that feeling and then choose an action step that can address that problem.

In this interview with Dr. Harold Koplewicz, the founder and medical director of the Child Mind Institute, we get to hear about the brilliant mind of a doctor who wanted to make more of a difference to the community at large and how many wonderful developments have come from this fact. From his growing up with two Holocaust survivors as parents to his interest in finding a cutting edge aspect of whatever field in which he decided to partake, Harold has always chosen his own distinct and principled path.

The Child Mind Institute is at the forefront of research on mental health in children, which is incredibly significant given some of the stats Harold and I discussed here today. With 50 percent of all mental health diagnoses coming before the age of 14 and 75 recent before the age of 24, we know just how big mental well being looms for the youth of our country and across the globe.

Harold and I talked about how they have managed to speed up the process of research by not being so hung up on protecting the data for full and proper credit and, instead, launching it out in to the ether earlier to get things done faster. We also discussed some of the high profile celebrities who have joined in some of the initiatives of the organization, as well as exploring his scaffolding idea of parenting, in which a scaffold is built to support the child until they are ready to stand on their own.

It was a pleasure connecting with Harold, with all of his kindness, intelligence, and drive to help others, and our discussion gave me all kinds of ideas about how to use research to verify the results of my three columns work.