In this episode I share some advice I gave to a client today about moving themselves away from creating a ritual or a rigid response to a new symptoms that's showing up for them. When we "thingify" anything, we are teaching the brain a heuristic, a pattern that it will subconsconciously learn and uphold. Since this client and I have worked together for awhile and they've relieved the majority of their symptoms, they were able to catch their pattern of creating safety by controlling and ritualizing their response to symptoms. At the heart of mindbody work we are always working with increasing safety and dialing down fear, cultivating a sense of curiosity and self kindness when difficult thoughts, feelings + sensations arise. I share a bit of my own health journey, my book writing and the most recent retreat I went on. Check it out and find those aha tidbits that help you feel even more brave, more clear on your mindbody healing path. I'm always happy for you to reach out and book a curiosity call!
In this episode I share some advice I gave to a client today about moving themselves away from creating a ritual or a rigid response to a new symptoms that's showing up for them. When we "thingify" anything, we are teaching the brain a heuristic, a pattern that it will subconsconciously learn and uphold. Since this client and I have worked together for awhile and they've relieved the majority of their symptoms, they were able to catch their pattern of creating safety by controlling and ritualizing their response to symptoms.
At the heart of mindbody work we are always working with increasing safety and dialing down fear, cultivating a sense of curiosity and self kindness when difficult thoughts, feelings + sensations arise.
I share a bit of my own health journey, my book writing and the most recent retreat I went on.
Check it out and find those aha tidbits that help you feel even more brave, more clear on your mindbody healing path.
I'm always happy for you to reach out and book a curiosity call!
If you want to know more about Amber's retreats....
https://amberkarnes.com/retreats/
TCCEP56
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Curiosity Cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker hypnotist, trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder. Fat human on planet Earth. Here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity, so you can feel more, better, more of the time in the body you have today, and build the rich full life that you want to live.
[00:00:39] A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey. But always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:56] Hello, my feelers and healers. It is Deb from the Curiosity Cure podcast. I'm so excited to be talking to you today, especially because I now know that the last two times that I tried to record a podcast, it was on mute, my microphone was on mute. I am now watching the little like sine wave, making these beautiful shapes, and now I know that you are going to be able to hear what I say. So no pressure Deb, no pressure. So those other two podcasts, clearly whatever it was that I had to share that I don't remember what it was, some of it I'm sure will filter through into this podcast and I tend to repeat myself. This is the skill of gentle neuroplasticity. Repetition is really everything for rewiring our brains, and especially as we are doing it through a lens of safety. Right? To pull that Alan Gordon, The Way Out Quote is, we want to experience our sensations, and so I'll extrapolate this even broader, like we wanna experience our lived experience through a lens of safety and curiosity.
[00:02:21] That's why this podcast is called the curiosity cure. One of the things that I was actually talking to a client today about is this concept of not thingifying our response to symptoms that we don't want to have a fixed approach because what we're trying to do is not teach the brain to rely on a pattern of relating to any symptom in a codified way. And a colloquial term that I wanna use for this is to thingify it. Here's kind of the way that I'm looking at it. I am going to be writing a book about my clothing store that I had and about the plus size fashion universe and community universe that we had going on when I had Re/Dress, because I want to thingify that experience. Now, it's not the only experience of the store, it's not the only truth around it, but I want to be able to look at a book, like have something that I can hold, that I can look at, that I can relate to that is external for me. That is like a thing. My intention with creating that is to give a home for these memories, for these experiences, for that time in my life.
[00:03:58] And, and in doing that, I'm gonna be like, you know, kind of revisiting a lot of different things and I'm revisiting it from. Now, but I want the book to feel like anybody can pick it up and have a sense of like, oh, this was a thing that happened and that they get to bear witness to it now when we were talking about relating to neuroplastic symptoms or any kind of symptom.
[00:04:28] The thing that we know from the Boulder Back pain study and from other studies about pain, chronic pain and chronic symptoms is that there is a point in which they move into the portions of the brain that are highly correlated with meaning making and learning. And so when we thingify our response to any kind of sensation, what we are doing is creating these well worn habituated patterns and pathways that we can travel down without conscious effort that we're actually just making this very smooth and easy road for our brain to say, this is the experience we're anticipating you to have, and so we're going to give it to you. And in helping people rewire their brain and nervous system and, and therefore their body from the experience of chronic symptoms, the work that I'm doing with clients is often unifying their response. So I was talking to a client today about a new symptom that they're experiencing, and one of the things we talked about was that fear is the, the main thing that we are working with. So there are ways to attend to yourself to go and, you know, go to the doctor and get things checked out.
[00:06:07] There are ways to investigate what is going on without turning the dial up on fear. And without turning the dial up on worry. So with a lot of it is like how to take action and also increase that sense of safety, increase the absence of urgency and how do we become more adept at holding our own hand through these experiences?
[00:06:38] So there were a few things that I offered this client, which is like sometimes when we go to the doctor, we actually have to turn up the intensity around symptoms because we maybe have an experience of not being believed. And so what I like to help my clients see is that we can have that experience and kind of play that game.
[00:07:01] Unfortunately, sometimes that is a way we need to engage in our healthcare system to be able to get things ruled out, but we can also not hold that inside of ourselves as a true fear as a true amplification, of distress. We can say, this is a way I need to be, to get the things that I need, but also feeling like, oh no, you know what? I'm really able to be with these experiences with curiosity.
[00:07:37] When we stop trying to come up with a formalized process of how we respond to something, then we allow the body and the nervous system and the brain to like kind of break open the experience of it, slow things down and start to notice what's everything that's not this sensation? What might be the emotions that I'm having around it? What do I think the genesis might be? So we're always trying to decrease the fear, increase curiosity, and also not make these rigid ways of responding that then later help our brain perpetuate itself in a neuroplastic cycle.
[00:08:28] I hope that that makes sense. I don't know that I'm describing it so, so well, but I, let me see if I can communicate a little bit of my, my client was a little bit like, oh, when this happens, I do these things. So like, I take this medication, then I lay down for this amount of time.
[00:08:47] And they were starting to, to create a ritual around it. And we have worked together for a long time and have dialed down fear and dialed down symptoms. Their approach to their own body is completely different and they're not experiencing the level of pain, or fear that they had been before we started working together.
[00:09:12] So one of the things is like, okay, we're gonna acknowledge that we're a human being. Human bodies are dynamic. We feel things, and sometimes we need to investigate through a medical lens what is happening. And there's always a neuroplastic component to anything. So we always want to tend to our nervous system. We always want to tend to our fear self, and so one of the things that, you know, I reminded them was, Hey, just notice how much you're trying to avoid sensations, but also avoid distress and fear, which is a hundred percent normal. I'm currently in a process of exploring things around my gallbladder.
[00:10:00] So today I met with a gastroenterologist and it looks like I'm going to have surgery at some point. And I think one of the things that's been super interesting for me is how relaxed I feel. I'm not currently in an emergency situation. I definitely was like feeling some discomfort.
[00:10:23] I got some lab tests back, I got some information. So I'm just like, I'm in information gathering mode. I'm learning a lot. I've never really thought about gallbladders all that much. But I'm also holding it really loosely and it's so interesting to notice these shifts in my approach to having a human body to being in this kind of situation.
[00:10:52] There's not a lot of blame or shame. There's a lot of curiosity. Actually, with another client, I was talking about feeling so surprised that I'm not triggered. He and I were talking about kind of leaning into positive sensations even when we are in an acute medical experience that we don't only have to be responding with fear and panic and worry, we actually can be pursuing different avenues of care and also supporting ourselves with feeling resourced.
[00:11:34] Emotional wellbeing, a belief that our bodies are strong and will heal. A belief that like everything is gonna be okay, and just building the capacity to navigate the unknown with this quality of curiosity and relaxation. And so one of the things I was describing to him is as I have now been making a lot of changes in my diet due to my cholesterol and my gallbladder. As a person who was a chronic dieter, who had a lot of negative body image experiences, negative anti-fat experiences growing up and doing some extreme dieting, um, that I never wanted to. Count calories. I'm not counting calories, but like count the idea of counting something in the past might have been triggering, and I'm certainly reading labels now and I'm making food choices intentionally.
[00:12:37] And what has been interesting is noticing how not triggered I am and I really believe that it is based on this work. This work of learning to attend to my body, my nervous system, and myself through a lens of safety and curiosity and self friendship, has allowed me to be in this experience and feel not triggered.
[00:13:05] And so one of the things that I was sharing with him is how much pleasure and freedom there was in noticing not feeling triggered. With clients, I often describe like a control room idea. Like sometimes we'll go into the imagination, right? If we want to turn down fear, fear can literally be a knob.
[00:13:32] That we turn down or a lever or a dimmer switch, some kind of conceptualization of something that can be changed, altered, turned down. So whatever that might be for you, it really can be anything. So when I'm imagining turning down fear, I also like to imagine turning up something that feels good.
[00:14:00] Because when we think about how the brain works and how attention, creates our experience, if we're only focused on what we don't want to be experiencing, the brain really is like paying a lot of attention to what we don't want to be experiencing. And so by understanding that, I wanna be like, what do I want to experience more of?
[00:14:26] And sometimes it's just spaciousness. Sometimes it's just like a good feeling, a feeling of trust. Sometimes when we know like, oh, I'm feeling panicky. It's like, what's the opposite of panicky? And it can be like the. The absence of panic, but then what's that? Right? So really getting kind of granular, getting curious and creative and starting to name what that is. Even just starting to check in with your body.
[00:14:59] So when I was on my call with my client, I described to him the feeling of not triggered. And what I noticed was there was this expansive feeling in my chest, this kind of golden light experience and this feeling of these giant white wings behind me as if I was a Pegasus. You know, from a trapper keeper, tween time back in the eighties, we loved ourselves some, unicorns and pegasuses . So those kinds of wings floating behind me, and like opening in this kind of freedom and expansive way, that's what not feeling triggered feels like.
[00:15:47] And boy do I like that feeling. That is a sexy, fabulous feeling. When I was sharing with my client today. We were navigating, what is the feeling that you want to be feeling more of right as we are moving you through this experience of getting curious about these sensations and symptoms as you are navigating going to the doctor and pursuing, ruling things out, or ruling things in, we can always bring a quality of turning fear down and turning up some kind of pleasure, expansion, spaciousness, whatever it is, even just a feeling of self-trust.
[00:16:39] I did this with a client the other day. We were talking about like finding ways to ground and how are you already soothing yourself? So one of the things that we discovered was she likes to rub her hands on her thighs.
[00:16:56] That that is already a comforting motion that she does. And I was like, great we want to take a unconscious comforting action and create consciousness around it and use it on purpose to help cultivate more of the feeling that we want to be feeling. And so when I think about thingifying something or unthingifying something that is the heart of dealing with symptoms for me is becoming aware, becoming the witness to our habituated patterns. So that requires us to be self observant and even noticing what we don't wanna notice, noticing our own avoidance. As we become a loving self witness, we will just start to, the dots or the puzzle pieces will actually just start to arrive and we'll be able to see more.
[00:18:03] So there's not kind of like the right way you do it and there's not the like way that it's happening for everybody. Everybody is different. So one of the clients that I worked with , okay, first off. They are totally my inspiration. They are now leg pressing almost 500 pounds and I'm just like, what?
[00:18:29] That is so totally badass, inspiring. I wanna leg press 500 pounds. So that's something that they've been doing and. And this is a person who had difficulty walking and standing. So we did a lot of work. They've had a lot of physiological changes. They've now taken trips for weeks on end.
[00:18:51] Their whole life has changed. And one of the things that we were talking about recently was they went and had a really busy day. So they had plans in the morning. They went on an adventure in the afternoon, and then they had evening plans. And what they told me was in the past I would've had to measure out my day and not feel like I could do all that much in a day.
[00:19:22] And this time around, they were definitely tired at the end of the day. But they also rode the wave of the excitement of the activities. And a quality of like, we'll see how this goes. Um, so not worrying in the beginning of the day how everything is gonna play out. And there was no pushing through, right?
[00:19:47] So it doesn't mean like doing more things is better. I don't want people to think that I'm saying that, but when we thingify our schedule, when we limit ourselves and pre decide all of the things. We're actually taking ourselves out of the dynamic relationship with our body, and we're decreasing the amount of prediction updates that we are offering our brain.
[00:20:12] And one of the things that's is essential about recovering from neuroplastic symptoms is to create prediction errors for our brain. To teach our brain that it's making a mistake, right? It can be very gentle. Sometimes it, it's just like, oh shit, I, you know, it's not gentle. Sometimes you're like, you're like taking a walk, you're doing a thing and you realize you did like twice as much activity as you thought was possible for you, and now you have a new baseline and maybe you'll be tired and that's totally fine and totally normal.
[00:20:49] So we want to meet each experience with curiosity and telling ourselves the story about our body in a way that helps support breaking out of conditioned responses, habituated patterns, and negative self-talk or negative beliefs about ourselves like.
[00:21:14] Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know. I know I've told this story before, but I had a client whose goal was to walk up the hill, near their house to go to, I think it was the seven 11. And there was an experience that they had when they were house hunting where they went up and down a lot of different stairs and a lot of different homes.
[00:21:33] They maybe saw like, I don't know, five homes in a day. And I asked them how they felt after that and they're like, I was tired, but like it was fine. Right? Because their attention was being held by looking at houses with their partner and being focused on something that wasn't their body. And when I pointed out to them, I was like, well, what do you think the distance is from your house to the seven 11 compared to the number of stairs that you did?
[00:22:03] And they're like, oh, I walked up and down so many more stairs, uh, than it would be to like go up the hill to the seven 11. And I was like, okay, so then what do you believe about your body and the capacity to go up the hill? And they were like, oh, actually I've, now I really believe that it's possible to go up the hill and like maybe I'll have to go to certain pace or go slow or take breaks or whatever.
[00:22:27] But like all of a sudden in the blink of an eye, that story about not being able to walk up the hill. Or that that would even be hard or something that you would have to train for went away. So it can be really helpful to start to examine and slow down and get curious about what are the stories that I'm believing about my body?
[00:22:49] And how am I codifying or thingifying my approach to my health and wellbeing? At some point, I've had this conversation a few times and it is called Spoon Theory versus Battery Theory, and I have a bone to pick about Spoon Theory and I will not go into it on this podcast, but this idea of not thingifying something will be expanded on in sharing this idea about battery theory.
[00:23:25] So I want you to start to think about like, and I'm not saying don't take your medication and I'm not saying don't do things that help you care for yourself or feel good. I am saying when you have a routine, one of the things that can be helpful in this process is to start to shake up that routine.
[00:23:49] Sometimes I like to think of it as like we're, we're shaking up our habituated patterns like a snow globe or like a Magic eight ball, and I don't know about you, but when I was a kid and I did that magic eight ball, if I didn't like the response, I just shook it again. Um, so we want to break ourselves out of the ways in which we subconsciously perpetuate symptoms, not in any way.
[00:24:20] That means that we're doing it to ourselves, not in any way. That means that we are responsible for the symptoms that we're experiencing. But once you start to look at the brain as a storyteller, right? The brain is a perceiver and anticipator, right? Its job is to keep you safe. So it is anticipating a safety response.
[00:24:48] And its job is to anticipate things before you experience them. So it's always like an overprotective parent in some ways. So one of the ways that we can really retrain our brain is to give ourselves. Exposure experiences. So sometimes it can be helpful to think of it kind of in that framework of like parenting, right?
[00:25:18] It's like kids need support, but they also need freedom. They also need to fail. Like the way that a child learns to walk is through falling and their brain, you know, rewriting those maps of what it means, like how they stand up, how they move forward. And like you, you learn by. Failing at it. Their brain assesses and reevaluates, and it's doing all of these kind of perceptions.
[00:25:46] You know, subconsciously through our interceptive and proprioceptive systems, like through our nervous system, our nervous system is always perceiving the world around us. And so what we want to do is expand our sense of safety creating more positive exposure experiences.
[00:26:11] Here's a story from my retreat. I just went on a retreat called Wild Bodies and it was with Amber Ks, who is a dear friend of mine and but was the first person I ever kind of went on a body positive retreat with years ago. And, um, you know, thinking about kind of doing activities but scaffolding a sense of safety, that definitely was an incredible experience for me.
[00:26:40] So. This trip we were in Mexico. It was, we did yoga, we swam in a cenote, we jumped off cliffs, into the cenote. We had a silent disco dance party. Like we did a lot of fun embodied activities. Note Amber and I are gonna be having a podcast conversation about, fearless embodiment. 'cause I, that's a thing that we talk about all the time.
[00:27:08] So one of the things that happened on that retreat for me was I was on, I, my room was on the first floor and like all of the other, the meals and everything were on the second floor. And I had to go up this spiral staircase up and down the spiral staircase a number of times in the day.
[00:27:27] And my knees don't always love stairs. And one of the things that I explored was, you know, not only like giving myself total freedom to go at my own pace, but also the freedom to be like, whatever happens in this moment doesn't mean anything about any other moments of the day. And that was the next level of creating a sense of safety in my body. So no matter how slowly I went up those stairs, how long it took me, I mean, it, it, I'm making it sound like it took me forever. It didn't, but like, you know, it wasn't doing it like, boop boop boop, b boop, boop, boop. Sometimes I was like, my knee was like, eh, you know, okay, this is uncomfortable.
[00:28:11] But when I really. Just dove into being like, this has no bearing on the rest of my day. It has no bearing on my ability to show up for any other activity, my ability to sit in the van or go swim in the cenote or do yoga or be present for the rest of the day. Like it really did not. Have any bearing on the rest of the day.
[00:28:40] There wasn't anything that I needed to do to manage those sensations. They were just there and then they were not there. And they weren't there all the time. And it was so fascinating to just hold it so loosely that I wasn't thinking about it in any kind of self-referential way. There was no shame.
[00:29:04] There was no fear. Uh, I keep deepening into this sense of permission for my body to just be in its experience. And what was really cool about that was just seeing how, yeah, it didn't play into anything else. My body felt strong. I did a lot of walking and swimming and activities. I did yoga. Sometimes the yoga felt great, sometimes it didn't feel great.
[00:29:38] Um, you know, and I was able to modulate that and I felt really alive and I felt really present and participatory in the activities that I was doing and in the group. It was really cool. It was a really cool experience to just remove any meaning from how I went up and down those stairs.
[00:30:05] And so that is a way of de-thingfying something. I want to invite you to start to explore in your life being like, where is it that I am, like, trying really hard not to experience symptoms. What am I doing to, to keep them away, to set a, a series of rules for myself that are very fixed and formal.
[00:30:31] And just start to get curious about what might it be like to loosen that a little bit, and maybe it's scary and that's okay. But so much of this work is creating a sense of safety with the unknown. That was what this client and I today really talked about, which is, as you are exploring something that you don't know.
[00:30:59] What's going on? What we really need is a sense of safety around not knowing. And that doesn't mean we're not pursuing actions or curiosity, but we are holding ourselves in a sense of safety. In this moment, there's no emergency in this moment. I can be with whatever fear arises and it actually, when I'm with my fear, I know myself even more.
[00:31:36] And sometimes when I'm with my fear, I get to heal the past. 'cause a lot of times those fears are driven from childhood wounds. About times where we didn't have control, where we didn't have agency, where we didn't have a voice that was heard or supported. And if you understand, IFS, there's a, sometimes some of us have a very strong manager and the manager's like, I got this.
[00:32:07] You don't have to feel this. I'm gonna take care of it. Right. But that manager, you know what? That manager's not good at, not controlling everything. And so some of it is like relieving that manager of their duties, even just temporarily just being like, Hey, go on a smoke break, like an imaginary smoke break.
[00:32:30] Like asking the parts of us that are always driving us, because that's how we have developed our patterns of safety in the past. We want to start to flex some different muscles. Right. We're moving ourselves out of just doing that way, same one bicep curl. We're starting to expand into all of the other muscles.
[00:32:57] I don't know if that's a good analogy or not. It's probably a terrible metaphor, but I am known for my terrible metaphors and my repetition, so I want. To invite you to start to explore what arises when you're, when you just let go a little bit, when you make some space between the stimulus and the response, and start to see what shows up there.
[00:33:34] What can I get curious about? What can I ride alongside with? How can I hold my hand through this fear? Where does this, and not like I gotta fix the fear, but like holding some curiosity and being like, oh, that was a fear that I got when I was in third grade and like maybe I changed schools and I didn't know anybody.
[00:33:55] And like, oh yeah, that was a really scary time. But like. Okay. So I can go back and I can be like, Hey kid, you're gonna be okay. Right? I got you. So we start to develop those skills. My invitation always is to start to look at whatever symptoms you're experiencing and maybe life in general through a mind body lens, understanding that our thoughts and our feelings show up in our bodies and that we have a lot of capacity to create change.
[00:34:34] And if you're ever interested in working with me, please book a curiosity call and um, and I would love to have a conversation. Okay, take care. Bye.