The Body Doesn't Lie (15 page)

Figure 9.
Body Map Template

Often, I ask my patients about their family history of cancer, heart disease, thyroid conditions, or depression, and they have no idea. They might know about their dad’s high cholesterol or their mom’s colonoscopy scare—but beyond those isolated instances, they really don’t have a clue about their genetic history.

Your Body Family Tree may take you some time to create, but it will be worth it. (See figure 10 for a sample.) You’ll learn a great deal about yourself and your unique genetic makeup. Talk to your siblings, mother, and father about their health experiences, and get as much information as you can about your grandparents (and even great-grandparents!). While you’re listening to family stories, you’ll likely gain clarity about the origins of some of your own struggles and vulnerabilities. This powerful tool will help you better understand your personal history and also can strengthen your compassion for your family members. This exercise is not meant to scare you—it’s about acknowledging your family history and stopping negative patterns.

Another purpose that your Body Family Tree serves is as a record. Many of my patients will say to me something like, “I think Mom told me that she had a cyst once,” but they can’t remember where it was located, when it was discovered, or how it was removed. (This information sits in the back of your brain, creating unconscious worry.) Questions are even more likely with older relatives: “I think my mom’s grandmother had breast cancer, but I don’t know any details. I never even met her.” Writing down that sort of information in one place will help you reflect on your history while holding on to it for the future. You can even bring a copy with you to any doctor’s appointment. You may start to see patterns, such as all the women in your family live into their nineties and tend to have huge families—and you can be grateful for strong longevity or fertility genes. Or you may finally realize that six of your close relatives have diabetes, and you’ve developed a little belly and skinny legs—the family tree may help you realize that you should really get tested for pre-diabetes or insulin resistance. Prevention is better than cure!

One of my patients had struggled with feelings of low self-esteem and seasonal depression for years. Jackie could see that she wasn’t alone: Her mom was incredibly anxious, her sister seemed angry all the time for no reason, and her father was cold and distant. Yet depression was a taboo subject in her house growing up. As a teenager, she yearned to get some help, to talk to a therapist—anything. But she got the message loud and clear that sharing fears or talking about mental health was just not something her family did—much easier to point at the other person and say, “What’s wrong with you?”

Figure 10.
Sample of Your Body’s Family Tree

Jackie started drinking, smoking cigarettes, and smoking pot as a teenager, to escape her feelings of anxiety, and these habits carried through her twenties. By the time Jackie came to me in her early thirties, she’d started having panic attacks. Her neck had seized up and she was complaining of heart palpitations. I sent her home with a packet of Positive Feedback materials and the name of a good therapist. I told her to come back for another appointment and be prepared to discuss her family history.

When she returned, I could see that some weight had already been lifted. “I’d never asked my mom about our family medical history before,” she said. “I can’t believe how much I learned about myself!” Turns out, when Jackie sat down to complete the Body Family Tree, she saw very clearly that her family history was rife with mental health issues. All her maternal aunts suffered greatly with anxiety. Her father’s family had been estranged from one another for years because of angry objections to one sibling’s marriage to a woman of mixed race. Alcoholism was rampant. But the detail that completely opened Jackie’s eyes was the fact that one grandfather had died as a result of being bipolar. He’d been institutionalized during a manic phase in the winter months, and during the middle of the night had walked out into the cold without clothes on, wandering off for miles before he was found. He died of complications from pneumonia.

That one detail helped to convince Jackie, finally, that her anxiety was not a character flaw or a moral failure; it was in her genes. She realized that what she needed most, in addition to talk therapy, was to bring her brain back into Positive Feedback; that, she hoped, might soothe her nerves and help her release the tension in her neck. And she was right: She quickly found that the Morning Glory ritual, the daily meditation and visualization, the Tibetan Rites, and the shift to anti-inflammatory foods (especially those high in omega-3s) helped calm her anxiety and allowed her to move better and shift more easily into the positive. After a blood test revealed she was extremely low in vitamin D, we found that her calcium level was extremely high. We did an ultrasound and found her parathyroid had started to malfunction. Jackie had started taking high doses of vitamin D, which in turn helped support her parathyroid function and relieve her neck pain. Together we worked on stopping the self-critical thoughts that had been polluting her brain and triggering her sympathetic nervous system, and we substituted powerful positive affirmations that soothed her nerves, shifted her into parasympathetic mode, and helped her deal better with stress.

Soothing her nervous system and strengthening her parasympathetic response is an ongoing process, and Jackie continues to improve month by month. She knows that keeping the commitment to the Morning Glory routine is the best way to signal to her body that all is right with the world. She’s hoping that the work she’s doing will inspire more of her family members to do their own work, but she’s not holding her breath. Either way, she knows that her happiness is
her
responsibility, and she can’t help others who don’t know how to help themselves.

Some people wonder why I include siblings in the Body Family Tree. I’ve seen that sometimes their experiences or health scares can serve as a wake-up call for my patients. For example, the sister who has truly awful premenstrual dysphoric disorder may help you understand your mildly awful PMS, while also making you grateful that you don’t suffer quite as much; it’s all perspective.

Most of my patients love this exercise. They make big steps forward when they write down their experiences and start to see connections between what happened to them when they were thirteen or eighteen, and now. Those connections are very real and very common.

Often when my patients are suffering from musculoskeletal problems, they’re “holding” their pain—their entire musculature has trained itself to guard the injury or the pain, trying to prevent more pain. The problem, of course, is that that pain is then bound up inside the tissues and unable to be released.

I help my patients reflect on their pain—its location and its source—so that they can recognize their own patterns of muscular tension and see how they may be contributing by holding on to the past. Once you recognize the location and origin of your pain, and name it, you’re that much closer to releasing it. You really don’t need to be clicked and prodded; very subtle changes can have tremendous impact.

The purpose of creating your Body Timeline is multifold: First, you’ll recall a lot of information about your own health history that you might have lost or forgotten. Second, it’s nice to have all the information in a single place—so you’ll never lose it again. And third, my favorite: As you reflect on your body’s history, you’ll realize just how
much
life you’ve experienced. The joys, the pains, the sorrows—they’re all locked inside your tissues right now, and any pain you might be feeling could be linked directly back to a specific emotional and/or physical experience. And today, any
new
experience—any massage or adjustment or yoga pose, any night of thrilling sex or crushing rejection—might retrigger that memory. How fascinating to do that digging now, and see where today’s pains may have begun—and how much life is stored in every single one—so you can appreciate the lessons of each one, process how they’ve impacted your life, and learn to let them go.

Figure 11.
Example of a Body Timeline

Make a Body Timeline like the one shown in figure 11, but “populate” yours more fully. (The sample, for space reasons, is sparse.) Using separate sheets of paper, make a ten-box timeline for every
decade
of your life (with each box representing a year); note that, unlike the sample, your timeline can contain multiple entries in each box. Start with “Birth” on the first page and end with “Present Day” on the last page. Now start recalling and recording major events in your life:

• Your parents’ relationship at your conception
  
• Your mom’s health and stress level during your gestation
  
• Your birth experience
  
• The birth of your siblings
  
• Any known childhood illnesses
  
• Your early nutrition history
  
• Your first period
  
• The first time you had sex
  
• The first time you were
  really
  in love
  
• When you met your partner
  
• Your marriage
  
• Your separation or divorce
  
• The birth of your first baby
  
• Your father’s death
  
• A bicycle or skiing accident, or falling off a horse
  

You get the idea. Place as many emotional and physical experiences as you can recall on the approximate place on your Body Timeline. Don’t get too perfectionistic about this. It’s not about remembering exactly what year Bobby dumped you for Linda; it’s about remembering when the pain in your chest started—the pain that comes back every time you’re feeling sad and alone. It’s not even about
when
so much as
what
—so you can start to reflect on
what
is still with you, and
why
it is.

You may find that you shed a few tears as you complete this—that is all part of the process. Many people recall deeply painful experiences through this type of exercise. One Ohio State University study found that nearly two-thirds of both men and women reported some type of abuse in their teenage years. More than two-thirds reported two or more abusive partners.
⁴
These intense experiences can get “forgotten” by your conscious brain in the intervening years; even those that are remembered may be kept to oneself. People often talk themselves out of sharing such experiences even with a counselor or trusted confidante (self-message: “It’s really not a big deal”). But even a very “small” trauma—a betrayal by a childhood friend, a taunt on the playground, a cutting remark or appraisal from your parents (“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”)—can stay with a person for decades. And if
that
level of pain can remain, I’m sure you can believe that the memory of an actual assault could still be locked in your tissues.

This timeline is instrumental in letting the pain speak. Through this exercise, you’re finding the source and making connections. Don’t be discouraged if the answers aren’t readily in front of you. Simply completing the exercise is part of the solution. The reflection itself is healing, and you’ll see soon enough the ways in which this timeline will help you better understand your physical and emotional history.