If you've been on the path of mind-body healing for a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard over and over again that it’s important to process and release your emotions. But the question is, how? That’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode. And just a content warning, I will be using bathroom humor.

For a transcript, go here: https://medium.com/beingwell/the-4-stages-of-emotional-release-845a9fb5dbcb

Also, I wanna tell you about a pilot program that I’m running called the Chronic Pain to Passion Mentorship.

And if you'd like to try out the Curable app (which I mention in episode 1 as the entry point to my own healing journey), you can use my affiliate link to get a FREE 6-week trial — and during the month of May, get 60% off an annual subscription!

www.curable.com/annaholtzman

There’s a lot of debate in the mind-body healing

Today I’m going to share the approach that’s worked for

For a complete transcript, go here: https://medika.life/an-honest-account-of-my-relationship-with-painkillers/

www.curable.com/annaholtzman

Let’s talk about self-love and chronic pain. And I know the phrase self-love might feel uncomfortable to you, so please stay with me, because I promise you, this stuff is important.

Do you know who gets inside your head more than anyone else? The answer is: YOU.

Your relationship with yourself is the most impactful relationship that you will ever have — after all, the cumulative time that you spend with yourself outweighs any other relationship by a long shot.

And think of the way that your other relationships affect you: For example, how does it affect your wellbeing when you’re in a relationship with a person who treats you with kindness and love? How does it affect your physical and emotional health? And now ask yourself, how does it affect your physical and emotional health when you’re in a relationship with someone who routinely cuts your down, bullies you, belittles you and criticizes you?

Now that you have your answers to those questions about how your relationships with other people impact your health, multiply that impact by about a bajillion and you’ll have some sense of the degree to which your own self-talk has an impact on your physical and emotional wellbeing.

And I’m gonna repeat a question that I asked in last week’s episode:

Have you ever seen how a dog’s body cowers when somebody yells at them? Well, ask yourself, how many times a day are you yelling at yourself in your head, and what impact is it having on your body?

The way we talk to ourselves affects our stress levels. And stress makes the nervous system feel unsafe — which can trigger symptoms like pain. For a deeper dive into how this works, you can go back to episode 2 on the mind-body connection.

Unfortunately, negative self-talk is a widespread habit that gets ingrained in us by cultural patterns that are designed to train us into obeying authority rather than loving ourselves. BUT, just as those cultural patterns have trained our brains through authority and repetition, repetition, repetition… You can decide to become your own authority and retrain your brain into loving self-talk through the same pattern of consistent repetition.

And if the concept of self-love makes you cringe, consider that’s a socially conditioned response.⁠ We’re all born innately loving ourselves, but we are socially taught to view self-love in a negative light.⁠ And you might want to ask yourself:⁠ When and how did I learn to cringe at the idea of loving myself?⁠ And what type of social system is that attitude about self-love designed to uphold?⁠

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Because the fact is that self-love is empowering. It protects us from being manipulated and controlled.⁠ When we are trained to view self-love negatively, that training makes us easier to manipulate and control, which is convenient to any system that’s built on a hierarchy of human worth, like, let’s say, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.⁠

But getting back to where we started, cultivating self-love and compassionate self-talk are absolutely key to healing from chronic pain and other stress-related symptoms.

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So, if you’re interested in learning how to cultivate self-love, here’s a two-part journaling exercise you could try out:⁠

Part 1️.  With pen and paper, write down these words: “I love and accept myself.” Then, after you’ve written them down, notice how you feel about those words. And whatever you feel, write about it. Honestly.⁠

Part 2️. Now, project yourself five years into the future. And from the mind of your future self, with a pen and paper, complete this sentence: “Ever since I embraced self-acceptance truly and deeply, this is what life’s been like …”⁠ ⁠

Complete that sentence and just see what flows onto the page!

If you try this out, I would LOVE to hear from you about what it was like! So leave me a comment and let me know.

Sending all the compassion and encouragement your way.

Find me at: www.annaholtzman.com and IG @anna_holtzman

Today I'm going to share 5 problems and solutions that were key to my recovery from chronic pain and to helping my clients recover. And since many of my clients are creative types like me, I'm gonna share some things that are specific to the creative person's recovery from chronic pain.

Problem #1: Thinking that pain is only about your body. I used to think that pain meant there was something wrong with my body. I thought that the stress of working in TV had ruined my posture and eating habits and strained my eyesight and that I needed to fix my body with the right diet or exercise in order to get rid of the pain.

But what I learned is that pain doesn't necessarily mean there's something WRONG with your body. Pain is actually your body's way of trying to protect you. Symptoms like pain are alarm signals. And they’re created by your nervous system to get your attention when your nervous system senses danger.

When pain is acute, meaning temporary, the danger is sometimes (but not always) something physical, like a broken arm. And after your arm gets the attention that it needs, your nervous system senses that the danger is over, and it turns off the pain signal. But when pain is chronic — meaning that it persists or comes back over and over again — the danger is far more often something emotional.

There are many different kinds of emotional stress that can set off our nervous system’s danger signal. Things like: Work stress, relationship and family stress, financial stress, past traumas, and stress from the pressure we put on ourselves to achieve success and make other people happy. Emotional stress can even come from the fear we have of our symptoms and our belief that our body is broken. This fear sets off more pain signals, which in turn triggers more fear — it becomes a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle.

Now, this doesn’t mean that chronic pain can’t have physical components to it as well. But if we want to turn down the chronic danger signal, we need to address emotional stress, we need to soothe the feelings of fear that are triggering the danger signal, and we need to establish a felt sense of emotional safety.

Problem #2: Rest alone with not heal chronic pain. A really common block to healing from chronic pain is thinking that rest alone will heal your symptoms, and that you need to quit your passion in order to rest.

The thing is, passion doesn’t trigger symptoms, fear does — however, chasing our passion can bring on a host of fears, like fear of failing, fear of being seen, fear of criticism... alll those fears.

The problem is, if we abandon our passion — the thing that lights us up in life — we actually get plunged into more stress. Because joy is crucial to reducing stress. So, instead of stifling our passion, we need to unpack the fears that are coming up around our passion. And at the same time, we need to stay engaged with the things that feel fun and joyful and replenishing. Including our passion projects!

It's not that rest shouldn't be part of our healing plan — we do NEED rest for our nervous system to heal. But we need to balance it with the things that light us up!

To read the rest, go to https://www.annaholtzman.com/GetTheGuide

Find me at: www.annaholtzman.com and IG @anna_holtzman

What is the mind-body connection and how does it relate to pain and other symptoms?

We all know intuitively that emotional stress can be expressed in physical sensations and symptoms.⁠⁠

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Some common examples are:⁠⁠

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You have a big deadline at work and you get a stomach ache in reaction to the stress.

Or you have a big fight with a loved one and you wind up getting a headache from the fight. ⁠⁠

Or you watch a scary movie and your shoulders get so tight from the fear that you have a stiff neck at the end of watching it. ⁠⁠

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These are all examples of physical reactions to mental and emotional stress. In each of these examples, the mind perceives something as stressful, and the body reacts.

That, in a nutshell, is the mind-body connection. And I haven’t told you anything that you don’t already know. Like I said, this stuff is intuitive. But in a culture where we’re encouraged to ignore our stress so that we can keep working and being productive, we don’t tend to talk or think about it a lot.

So how do we start paying attention to the mind-body connection? There are an unlimited number of different ways to do this. So, I’m just going to share one of my favorite tools, which is starting a verbal dialogue between your mind and your body through expressive writing.

And here are some conversation starters that you can try as journaling prompts: Here are the prompts:

👉 Dear symptom, what emotions are you feeling right now? (List them all out. If you need help with this, you could try scanning the Nonviolent Communication list of feelings .)

👉 Dear emotion, what do you need to feel honored?

👉 Dear emotion, is there a boundary that you need me to set?⁠

👉 Dear emotion, do you need me to assert myself through self-expression, following my heart, or speaking up?⁠

👉 Dear emotion, do you need support from allies  or peers? And if so, who should I reach out to?

👉 Dear emotion, do you need rest, nurturing or soothing?

If you try these out, I'd love to hear how it goes!

For more support with chronic symptoms, find me at:

www.annaholtzman.com

IG @anna_holtzman

Find me at: www.annaholtzman.com and IG @anna_holtzman

Have you ever cried into your pillow out of desperation when yet another migraine snuck up on you and ruined your day? I have. If you have too, I can truly empathize.

As a psychotherapist and coach who helps people heal from chronic pain, I draw on teachings from books and courses by experts in the field. But my greatest teacher by far has been my own journey of healing from chronic migraines.

I hope that my story invites you to imagine what healing from chronic pain could look like for you.

Part 1: Pain Is a Message

I had migraines for 10+ years. They started as a once-in-a-while thing, but by ten years in they were happening 1–3 times per week. It became a major interference with work, life and frankly, my sanity.

When it first began, I was working a high-pressure job in TV and I could tell that my headaches were related to stress. By the time they reached their worst, I’d left TV and was in grad school to become a therapist. I was studying trauma and was well aware of the mind-body connection. But I couldn’t seem to make a dent in the migraines. I was almost running out of my prescription painkillers each month and I was at my wits’ end.

Then one day when I was feeling desperate, I came across an app called Curable. I wouldn’t normally have thought that an app could help me with migraines, but as I said, I was desperate. And I’m so grateful that I took a chance!

From Curable, I learned something that would start me on a healing path eventually leading to the end of my chronic migraines. It was this: Pain is a danger signal and it’s created in the brain when our nervous system feels unsafe. If we want to turn off the pain signal, we have to help our nervous system feel safe again.

Sometimes the danger is physical (like a broken arm) and sometimes it’s emotional (like a stressful relationship.) Sometimes it’s a learned association (similar to a trauma trigger.)

Sometimes establishing safety is an inside job (like reassuring myself that I’m okay) and sometimes it’s an outside job (like removing myself from an unhealthy social situation.) Often it’s a bit of both.

Once I made these connections, I was able to learn how to stop fighting or avoiding the pain and instead turn toward establishing safety.

Part 2: Express Yourself

As I put this knowledge into practice, I soon began to experience a reduction in the frequency, duration and intensity of migraines. I was psyched!

But healing is not a straight line, and over the course of a year, I had breakthroughs and setbacks, eventually leveling out into what felt like a plateau.

Then one day, a major setback whacked me over the head: I was on the subway in the middle of an hour-long trip when an intense migraine started closing in on me. Dizzy, nauseous and scared, I stumbled out of the train car, switched directions and headed back home feeling defeated, frustrated and hopeless.

Once I gained my bearings, I knew I needed a new tool in my healing toolkit. I’d heard about expressive journaling for chronic pain, but I’d avoided it for some reason. I figured: Why not give it a try.

To keep reading, go to: https://medium.com/p/cd7cc54c32f4

If you’re wondering, “Why the *bleep* am I still in pain?!” — take the FREE QUIZ that I designed to help you get some clarity.

And follow me on instagram for daily healing tips, inspiration and support.

Hey there, I’m Anna Holtzman and I’m so excited to welcome

That’s the whole reason I’m hosting this podcast. When you

My story of how recovering from chronic migraine actually

You’ll hear interviews with other folks from all walks of

You’ll hear me chatting with other mind-body healing

And you’ll hear me doing solo episodes where I talk about a

And just in case you’re still wondering if you’re in the

Are you a creative person who struggles with symptoms like headaches, backaches, stiff

Do you feel

Are you dying to

Do you feel at a loss

If you said yes to ANY of these, then this podcast was made

So, I hope you’ll join me on this journey from chronic pain

Find me at:

www.annaholtzman.com

Instagram @anna_holtzman