As always, I'm following my interest into hypnosis because as a study of things, it does wild and wonky things with this experience we call BELIEF. Belief is an essential part of what keeps chronic pain together as a construct in the brain, the expectation and prediction that this experience will be there when we do X activity. But when we start to think of the mindbody as a system of interrelating structures we experience as "SELF" then we can have so many more access points to help deconstruct pain and reconstruct no-pain (which is what we feel most of the time in most of our body.) We LOVE having more than one answer to feeling better. I help my clients understand their embodied experiences differently and so they change, in the way we want it to change. :)
Here's some articles about mindbody medicine and systems thinking -
https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/mind-body-connection-is-built-into-brain-study-suggests/
https://annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12991-023-00434-5
Click here if you'd like to get on a free curiosity call with me - https://calendly.com/paincoachdeb
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to move with Deb. I am Deb, your friendly neuroplastic, and this is a podcast that explores the relationship between the body and the mind. From a health at every size, judgment-free perspective, I teach you how developing a new internal conversation based on curiosity, self friendship, and simple neuroplasticity techniques can rewire your body mind out of pain and emotional overwhelm to help you build the rich full life that you want to live. Disclaimer, this is not a replacement for medical care.
[00:00:55] Hello and welcome to Move with Deb soon to be renamed The Curiosity Cure with Deb. I am your host. I'm a MINDBODY pain recovery coach, and I am here to share with you some thoughts about the interplay between the mind, the body, the self, and how it relates to what we feel. So I today, you know, I'm supposed to be getting on a plane very early in the morning, tomorrow morning.
[00:01:30] And so of course my brain was like, you need to go record a podcast right now. 'cause that's the most important thing. Not packing, not washing my sheets so that they'll be clean when I come back. Not the entire long list of things that I have to do. It was like, no, you must get on and share this idea with people.
[00:01:54] And so here. It's come from a bunch of conversations with clients. In one conversation with a client today we were talking about how you support yourself when you don't feel well. She was having acute symptoms, not chronic symptoms, but we were talking about the way that our pain behaviors show up.
[00:02:14] Sometimes we get these beliefs like, oh, you know, I have to rest more, or I just need to rest. Or the way that you're managing the experience that you're having becomes this particular kind of thinking. These ways of thinking about pain or about symptoms are kind of socially constructed and socially supported. They're things that we hear other people say them, we say them, and they become so ubiquitous that we're almost not really even clear on what it is that we're saying, but we're saying something that sounds good. Like it satisfies the part of us that is confused and doesn't know how to feel better and we get ourselves in these cycles.
[00:03:03] One of the things that I was thinking about as I've been listening to. James Tripp, who's a hypnosis teacher and a thought leader in that universe, which is somewhat adjacent, but overlapping with pain recovery.
[00:03:17] At the heart of it, we're constructing and deconstructing language and psychophysiological experiences. We're exploring meaning we're exploring sense-making, we're exploring how we shift our physiological experience to go from one that we don't like to one that we like better. All the different ways that are not just taking a pill, having some kind of physical intervention, like how we use these other parts of our experience, especially our brain, to help us create a new experience of our reality. You've heard me talk about predictive brain coding and things like that, we're kind of blending neuroscience. What I really love is, because I'm not a neuroscientist, I am the coach that people work with. So in our work together, which actually a client that I just wrapped up with, she's like, "Working with you is magic."
[00:04:17] And I do not identify as a witch. I don't identify as my work being magical, but I believe there are experiences we have that feel magical, and to me that's like, out of the ordinary, rarefied, unique, special, um, otherworldly, right? And that is kind of what we're trying to create when we are doing mind body work is we're going along, we're having this experience, we're having this experience, we're having this experience.
[00:04:45] We want a different experience. And we're like, I feel really stuck in my current embodied experience, and I don't know how to get to this other place, it's almost like, if you were traveling and you're like, I'm over here and I wanna get over there, but you don't have a map and you don't know how to get there, and you don't know what the transportation options are, you know, you're annoyed that we still didn't get these transporters that we were promised because like, oh man, that would make it really easy. You would literally just be like, pop from one place to the other place that you wanna go.
[00:05:22] Well, we don't have those things, but we do in mind body work and hypnosis, we have these maps. One of the maps that James Tripp has talked about and a mental health educator who I think of as a mentor, Mark Freeman and his work shows up in my work, his work is really informed how I work with clients, they both talk about systems thinking. And I like to think of our mind-body connection as a systems thinking construct.
[00:05:55] The key concepts and systems thinking are, all systems are comprised of interconnected parts. The connections cause behavior of one part to affect another, and all parts are connected. That is a beautiful description of how the mind, the brain, and the body and sometimes, you know, body slash nervous system.
[00:06:20] I don't know, stick the nervous system in there. Is it the brain? Is it the body? It's both. But they're all interconnected. And so when we look at it through that lens, we can start to notice where we can affect change, but also where the problem lies. Of course, if we don't feel like we have a problem, then we have nothing that we wanna solve.
[00:06:45] So usually there's something that's happening that we don't like, that we don't want, that we want less of. And we set about in our individual and collective ways to create change. One is identifying what the problem is, and so one of the things that my client and I were talking about is, what if it's not about necessarily like rushing to feel better or being like, what did I do to not feel good, or what do I have to do to feel better?
[00:07:16] It's really about like slowing down, creating that connection and awareness. So really being able to witness and notice. So witness the process of when I have this sensation, these are the thoughts and feelings that are arising, or you know, it's this time of day and this experience is happening regularly.
[00:07:40] We were talking about the energy feeling slump that you get at like three, four o'clock. And I was like, well, maybe your body's just like, yeah, we're done thinking 'cause we're taking all of this energy and we're sticking it in our bellies so we can process our food. So of course there's going to be changes in our energy throughout the day. The brain is allocating resources to different places to manage our allostatic load. We have different needs at different times in the day. We are not robots. We're human. And so it becomes then about the story that you tell to yourself when you have that kind of inevitable energy slump in the middle of the day or the, the, towards the end of the day.
[00:08:31] And if you're like, oh my God, I still have like these hours left, and then your brain starts to be like, this is the worst and I hate this. And, and all of that is totally understandable. At the same time, it's like, ugh, we're making those two hours that are left almost longer and longer and longer and unbearable, and indeterminate and like, oh my God, because we do have the power with our mind and our perception of things to turn up the volume on discomfort or turn down the volume on discomfort. The time is still the same. So it was really fun to listen to my client already resourcing herself with thoughts about that time. She's like, well, this time's gonna go by, you know, it's gonna be two hours somewhere.
[00:09:21] And so it was really fun to listen to her kind of deescalate. Then we were talking about how do you then support yourself physiologically? Like we've got the kind of mindset support locked in, right? The thoughts about it, the awareness of the thoughts, how we can Interrupt, catastrophizing, right?
[00:09:41] So really becoming this beautiful witness of it without shame. 'cause like man, people at work complain about work that's just like part of work culture. One of the things we were talking about, okay, so bringing your body into this experience, what do you think your body needs in this moment? So we talked about shifting tasks, like having the more thinky tasks in the earlier part of the day, creating the freedom to have some kind of open, spacious mind, even changing eye cues. So looking off into the distance, which will relax your eye muscles, which will send a message to your nervous system that it can relax, that you're in this parasympathetic mode, into this rest and digest. So like having a cup of tea. Talked about feeling emboldened to not always look like you're doing busy work. Like what if people see you doing nothing. So we kind of process some of that fear or those emotions we thought about the worries of like what other people are gonna think. This mind body work is complex. It's really fun when we stop trying to be like, what's the right answer to shifting into this curiosity mindset, because then anything can be looked at and explored and then we come up with so many more interesting and also kind of subtle or simple solutions.
[00:11:12] The answer is not get a new job, or the answer isn't stop working at four o'clock. I mean, it's maybe, but that's not always possible. And so we're like, yeah, what if you just like, knew by that time, like your big thinky tasks were done. And then this is a different kind of mindset time, maybe a more dreamy time, and then looking at the activities that she was doing, and also feeling relaxed and empowered to just be in her own process. And so much of that is this like subtle, pulling away of all of this socialized pressure of perfectionism, of striving, of needing people's approval, when we started thinking how can I continue to support myself even more and what are the systems that I am engaging with? One of the things that we were thinking about is the approach to problem solving.
[00:12:13] We were talking about a future event, spending time with family, and I was like, one of the things that's really fun in mind-body work is what is called positive affect induction. That's a formal part of pain reprocessing therapy, and mad respect to researchers or to therapists or to all these people, but I'm also just like, Positive affect induction. It's just called feeling good, finding good feelings, and it is definitely the thing that we often hide under the blanket of bad feelings.
[00:12:52] We're like we can't possibly feel good unless we resolve this feeling bad, but that is not true. It's just that we have trained our brain to be like, put the problem state, put the problem, in front and then the kind of good stuff that we want, we're we're telling ourself in this kind of system organization that we can only have it, experience it and enjoy it after we've fixed this problem. And I was like, oh, that puts so much pressure on ourselves and we're also making it be the very long way around.
[00:13:30] One of the things that my client and I, that I left her with was, when you're at this event, just ask your brain to find all the different ways that you're having a good time, that you're enjoying yourself. Just ask it gently to find you lots of evidence. We don't have to know what it is beforehand 'cause like maybe it's stuff that only is gonna happen in the moment, like maybe somebody's gonna sit on a plate of beans or like maybe grandma's gonna play a kazoo. Like we won't know ahead of time.
[00:14:01] Like we know some things, but we won't know what is gonna happen in the moment until it happens. And if, we're present to it and asking our brain in this beautiful attention system of ours to notice things on purpose and kind of come back and report. Right, so we can feel it in our bodies, it will literally do that.
[00:14:23] It's a neat trick. I really suggest you try it, especially if you're going into something already pre-planning, like all the ways that you're gonna take care of yourself when like things go wrong. And I'm not saying that that's the wrong thing to do, but when you, when you look at that through a systems lens, what you're doing is allocating a lot of resources to managing problems. And you're taking all of your attention, your energy, your mind, your body, your emotions, and you're warding off all these potential problems and there is no resources left to experience what there is to be delighted by in the moment.
[00:15:07] This positive affect induction is this experience that when I work with my clients, I do spend, I don't wanna say it's toxic positivity, 'cause all feelings are welcome, but what I notice is my clients get faster, better results when we start to work with the brains system and start to train it to look for things that are working, look for things that feel good, experience things, allowing pleasure, creating it on purpose, finding the smallest pieces of joy within a larger system. And because we are human. And we are not robots. Nothing is going to only feel good all of the time, but it's the story that we tell ourselves about the things that feel good and the stories that we tell ourselves about the things that feel less good.
[00:16:03] It's can be really fun when we kind of flip all of these systems upside down and inside out so that they can be building the system that supports you, supports this idea of change and supports this idea of mind body healing. And so we're changing our relationship to the emotions, sensations and experiences that we're having and we are working on creating more and more and more trust and safety.
[00:16:40] I think that's maybe all I wanna say. I just was like, okay, so now I'm noticing my brain just like, yeah, and it's time to take the laundry out of the dryer and fold it and maybe pack a suitcase. So I'm gonna listen to my system that feels really satisfied and happy to have gotten on here and kind of shared with you, a deep part of my process and as I have been coaching and working with people, I notice that change lives inside of this type of systems reorganization. It was a fun piece to notice that these things come together. The research from pain reprocessing therapy, listening to James Tripp, talking about systems theory, remembering Mark's systems theory and the conversations and the the wins that my clients are having, the way that their pain is changing and the way that their relationship with things like work, relationships in their life, stressors and things like that. Those things are shifting and changing and I just don't wanna be like, I don't know why. It must be a fluke. I do know why. This kind of systems process and thinking, helps us think about the circumstance, out of the trigger. Right. We're not necessarily just talking about a trigger, whether that's a person, an event, a physical sensation. We are not just talking about our thoughts and our feelings about it. We are sitting and observing ourself as a system. What is my mind doing? What is my body doing? What is self doing? The part that's on the inside doing, what is my brain doing?
[00:18:28] So I wanna invite you to start to think about your mind, your body, your brain, your nervous system as a system. And if it could communicate to you, like if you could observe it, what are you noticing about it? And then if we are going to try to get more of what we want to be experiencing, how do we ask this system to have that, to create that, to even just observe it.
[00:19:00] That's what I got for you today. If the way I talk about mindbody healing, the way I talk about pain reprocessing, it sounds interesting to you, I would love to talk to you and please hop on a curiosity call and let's chat. Thanks.
[00:00:00] Welcome to move with Deb. I am Deb, your friendly neuroplastic, and this is a podcast that explores the relationship between the body and the mind. From a health at every size, judgment-free perspective, I teach you how developing a new internal conversation based on curiosity, self friendship, and simple neuroplasticity techniques can rewire your body mind out of pain and emotional overwhelm to help you build the rich full life that you want to live. Disclaimer, this is not a replacement for medical care.
[00:00:55] Hello and welcome to Move with Deb soon to be renamed The Curiosity Cure with Deb. I am your host. I'm a MINDBODY pain recovery coach, and I am here to share with you some thoughts about the interplay between the mind, the body, the self, and how it relates to what we feel. So I today, you know, I'm supposed to be getting on a plane very early in the morning, tomorrow morning.
[00:01:30] And so of course my brain was like, you need to go record a podcast right now. 'cause that's the most important thing. Not packing, not washing my sheets so that they'll be clean when I come back. Not the entire long list of things that I have to do. It was like, no, you must get on and share this idea with people.
[00:01:54] And so here. It's come from a bunch of conversations with clients. In one conversation with a client today we were talking about how you support yourself when you don't feel well. She was having acute symptoms, not chronic symptoms, but we were talking about the way that our pain behaviors show up.
[00:02:14] Sometimes we get these beliefs like, oh, you know, I have to rest more, or I just need to rest. Or the way that you're managing the experience that you're having becomes this particular kind of thinking. These ways of thinking about pain or about symptoms are kind of socially constructed and socially supported. They're things that we hear other people say them, we say them, and they become so ubiquitous that we're almost not really even clear on what it is that we're saying, but we're saying something that sounds good. Like it satisfies the part of us that is confused and doesn't know how to feel better and we get ourselves in these cycles.
[00:03:03] One of the things that I was thinking about as I've been listening to. James Tripp, who's a hypnosis teacher and a thought leader in that universe, which is somewhat adjacent, but overlapping with pain recovery.
[00:03:17] At the heart of it, we're constructing and deconstructing language and psychophysiological experiences. We're exploring meaning we're exploring sense-making, we're exploring how we shift our physiological experience to go from one that we don't like to one that we like better. All the different ways that are not just taking a pill, having some kind of physical intervention, like how we use these other parts of our experience, especially our brain, to help us create a new experience of our reality. You've heard me talk about predictive brain coding and things like that, we're kind of blending neuroscience. What I really love is, because I'm not a neuroscientist, I am the coach that people work with. So in our work together, which actually a client that I just wrapped up with, she's like, "Working with you is magic."
[00:04:17] And I do not identify as a witch. I don't identify as my work being magical, but I believe there are experiences we have that feel magical, and to me that's like, out of the ordinary, rarefied, unique, special, um, otherworldly, right? And that is kind of what we're trying to create when we are doing mind body work is we're going along, we're having this experience, we're having this experience, we're having this experience.
[00:04:45] We want a different experience. And we're like, I feel really stuck in my current embodied experience, and I don't know how to get to this other place, it's almost like, if you were traveling and you're like, I'm over here and I wanna get over there, but you don't have a map and you don't know how to get there, and you don't know what the transportation options are, you know, you're annoyed that we still didn't get these transporters that we were promised because like, oh man, that would make it really easy. You would literally just be like, pop from one place to the other place that you wanna go.
[00:05:22] Well, we don't have those things, but we do in mind body work and hypnosis, we have these maps. One of the maps that James Tripp has talked about and a mental health educator who I think of as a mentor, Mark Freeman and his work shows up in my work, his work is really informed how I work with clients, they both talk about systems thinking. And I like to think of our mind-body connection as a systems thinking construct.
[00:05:55] The key concepts and systems thinking are, all systems are comprised of interconnected parts. The connections cause behavior of one part to affect another, and all parts are connected. That is a beautiful description of how the mind, the brain, and the body and sometimes, you know, body slash nervous system.
[00:06:20] I don't know, stick the nervous system in there. Is it the brain? Is it the body? It's both. But they're all interconnected. And so when we look at it through that lens, we can start to notice where we can affect change, but also where the problem lies. Of course, if we don't feel like we have a problem, then we have nothing that we wanna solve.
[00:06:45] So usually there's something that's happening that we don't like, that we don't want, that we want less of. And we set about in our individual and collective ways to create change. One is identifying what the problem is, and so one of the things that my client and I were talking about is, what if it's not about necessarily like rushing to feel better or being like, what did I do to not feel good, or what do I have to do to feel better?
[00:07:16] It's really about like slowing down, creating that connection and awareness. So really being able to witness and notice. So witness the process of when I have this sensation, these are the thoughts and feelings that are arising, or you know, it's this time of day and this experience is happening regularly.
[00:07:40] We were talking about the energy feeling slump that you get at like three, four o'clock. And I was like, well, maybe your body's just like, yeah, we're done thinking 'cause we're taking all of this energy and we're sticking it in our bellies so we can process our food. So of course there's going to be changes in our energy throughout the day. The brain is allocating resources to different places to manage our allostatic load. We have different needs at different times in the day. We are not robots. We're human. And so it becomes then about the story that you tell to yourself when you have that kind of inevitable energy slump in the middle of the day or the, the, towards the end of the day.
[00:08:31] And if you're like, oh my God, I still have like these hours left, and then your brain starts to be like, this is the worst and I hate this. And, and all of that is totally understandable. At the same time, it's like, ugh, we're making those two hours that are left almost longer and longer and longer and unbearable, and indeterminate and like, oh my God, because we do have the power with our mind and our perception of things to turn up the volume on discomfort or turn down the volume on discomfort. The time is still the same. So it was really fun to listen to my client already resourcing herself with thoughts about that time. She's like, well, this time's gonna go by, you know, it's gonna be two hours somewhere.
[00:09:21] And so it was really fun to listen to her kind of deescalate. Then we were talking about how do you then support yourself physiologically? Like we've got the kind of mindset support locked in, right? The thoughts about it, the awareness of the thoughts, how we can Interrupt, catastrophizing, right?
[00:09:41] So really becoming this beautiful witness of it without shame. 'cause like man, people at work complain about work that's just like part of work culture. One of the things we were talking about, okay, so bringing your body into this experience, what do you think your body needs in this moment? So we talked about shifting tasks, like having the more thinky tasks in the earlier part of the day, creating the freedom to have some kind of open, spacious mind, even changing eye cues. So looking off into the distance, which will relax your eye muscles, which will send a message to your nervous system that it can relax, that you're in this parasympathetic mode, into this rest and digest. So like having a cup of tea. Talked about feeling emboldened to not always look like you're doing busy work. Like what if people see you doing nothing. So we kind of process some of that fear or those emotions we thought about the worries of like what other people are gonna think. This mind body work is complex. It's really fun when we stop trying to be like, what's the right answer to shifting into this curiosity mindset, because then anything can be looked at and explored and then we come up with so many more interesting and also kind of subtle or simple solutions.
[00:11:12] The answer is not get a new job, or the answer isn't stop working at four o'clock. I mean, it's maybe, but that's not always possible. And so we're like, yeah, what if you just like, knew by that time, like your big thinky tasks were done. And then this is a different kind of mindset time, maybe a more dreamy time, and then looking at the activities that she was doing, and also feeling relaxed and empowered to just be in her own process. And so much of that is this like subtle, pulling away of all of this socialized pressure of perfectionism, of striving, of needing people's approval, when we started thinking how can I continue to support myself even more and what are the systems that I am engaging with? One of the things that we were thinking about is the approach to problem solving.
[00:12:13] We were talking about a future event, spending time with family, and I was like, one of the things that's really fun in mind-body work is what is called positive affect induction. That's a formal part of pain reprocessing therapy, and mad respect to researchers or to therapists or to all these people, but I'm also just like, Positive affect induction. It's just called feeling good, finding good feelings, and it is definitely the thing that we often hide under the blanket of bad feelings.
[00:12:52] We're like we can't possibly feel good unless we resolve this feeling bad, but that is not true. It's just that we have trained our brain to be like, put the problem state, put the problem, in front and then the kind of good stuff that we want, we're we're telling ourself in this kind of system organization that we can only have it, experience it and enjoy it after we've fixed this problem. And I was like, oh, that puts so much pressure on ourselves and we're also making it be the very long way around.
[00:13:30] One of the things that my client and I, that I left her with was, when you're at this event, just ask your brain to find all the different ways that you're having a good time, that you're enjoying yourself. Just ask it gently to find you lots of evidence. We don't have to know what it is beforehand 'cause like maybe it's stuff that only is gonna happen in the moment, like maybe somebody's gonna sit on a plate of beans or like maybe grandma's gonna play a kazoo. Like we won't know ahead of time.
[00:14:01] Like we know some things, but we won't know what is gonna happen in the moment until it happens. And if, we're present to it and asking our brain in this beautiful attention system of ours to notice things on purpose and kind of come back and report. Right, so we can feel it in our bodies, it will literally do that.
[00:14:23] It's a neat trick. I really suggest you try it, especially if you're going into something already pre-planning, like all the ways that you're gonna take care of yourself when like things go wrong. And I'm not saying that that's the wrong thing to do, but when you, when you look at that through a systems lens, what you're doing is allocating a lot of resources to managing problems. And you're taking all of your attention, your energy, your mind, your body, your emotions, and you're warding off all these potential problems and there is no resources left to experience what there is to be delighted by in the moment.
[00:15:07] This positive affect induction is this experience that when I work with my clients, I do spend, I don't wanna say it's toxic positivity, 'cause all feelings are welcome, but what I notice is my clients get faster, better results when we start to work with the brains system and start to train it to look for things that are working, look for things that feel good, experience things, allowing pleasure, creating it on purpose, finding the smallest pieces of joy within a larger system. And because we are human. And we are not robots. Nothing is going to only feel good all of the time, but it's the story that we tell ourselves about the things that feel good and the stories that we tell ourselves about the things that feel less good.
[00:16:03] It's can be really fun when we kind of flip all of these systems upside down and inside out so that they can be building the system that supports you, supports this idea of change and supports this idea of mind body healing. And so we're changing our relationship to the emotions, sensations and experiences that we're having and we are working on creating more and more and more trust and safety.
[00:16:40] I think that's maybe all I wanna say. I just was like, okay, so now I'm noticing my brain just like, yeah, and it's time to take the laundry out of the dryer and fold it and maybe pack a suitcase. So I'm gonna listen to my system that feels really satisfied and happy to have gotten on here and kind of shared with you, a deep part of my process and as I have been coaching and working with people, I notice that change lives inside of this type of systems reorganization. It was a fun piece to notice that these things come together. The research from pain reprocessing therapy, listening to James Tripp, talking about systems theory, remembering Mark's systems theory and the conversations and the the wins that my clients are having, the way that their pain is changing and the way that their relationship with things like work, relationships in their life, stressors and things like that. Those things are shifting and changing and I just don't wanna be like, I don't know why. It must be a fluke. I do know why. This kind of systems process and thinking, helps us think about the circumstance, out of the trigger. Right. We're not necessarily just talking about a trigger, whether that's a person, an event, a physical sensation. We are not just talking about our thoughts and our feelings about it. We are sitting and observing ourself as a system. What is my mind doing? What is my body doing? What is self doing? The part that's on the inside doing, what is my brain doing?
[00:18:28] So I wanna invite you to start to think about your mind, your body, your brain, your nervous system as a system. And if it could communicate to you, like if you could observe it, what are you noticing about it? And then if we are going to try to get more of what we want to be experiencing, how do we ask this system to have that, to create that, to even just observe it.
[00:19:00] That's what I got for you today. If the way I talk about mindbody healing, the way I talk about pain reprocessing, it sounds interesting to you, I would love to talk to you and please hop on a curiosity call and let's chat. Thanks.