The Body Doesn't Lie (25 page)
Read The Body Doesn't Lie Online
Authors: Vicky Vlachonis
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Pain Management, #Healing, #Medical, #Allied Health Services, #Massage Therapy
Another way a friend can help is if
both
of you support
each other
in overcoming bad patterns and habits. A Korean study found that when coworkers joined a quit-smoking challenge and were offered a reward if
everyone
succeeded in quitting, their quit rates shot to 50 percent (versus the average 4 to 7 percent of those who go it alone)
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—quite a difference in effectiveness!
If you can find a friend who is truly supportive and whom you trust completely, you can use this effective solution with almost any Release challenge—food, smoking, exercise, not calling an abusive ex, you name it. Set up the reward as something you both really want—a weekend away in the city or at a spa, or a night on the town without spouses or boyfriends, or buying a pair of high-end shoes you’d never buy just for yourself (but now that you’re doing it for a friend . . .). Not only are you employing peer support (“C’mon, we can do this!”), you’re also wielding a bit of peer pressure (“Don’t mess up, because then neither of us gets a reward”). This approach can keep you accountable to each other and give you tremendous built-in cheerleading.
Another way you can look for help and support is to explore a new health modality. Before they come to me, many of my patients have been stuck in a health practitioner rut, falsely believing that all their mind-body health needs could be satisfied with one type of healing modality. Perhaps massage, maybe acupuncture, possibly Reiki. I guess it’s my osteopathic background, but I find I’m never satisfied with just one approach to healing. I know that every person’s energy is different, and every single day is different. You may have a health challenge one day that your acupuncturist would never be able to find—but a reflexologist could pinpoint right away.
I wish the United States had more European-type osteopaths, because I love the flexibility I’m able to use with my patients in the UK and other parts of the world. (Perhaps the closest parallels in the States are naturopathic doctors, but they’re not very common.) During any session, I find the exact right combination that works for that person. Just doing cranial sacral therapy without the acupuncture for this person, or the manipulation or reflexology for that person, would seem incomplete. I think of myself as being like a carpenter—I have many different types of tools to help me help my patients. Or like a cook hovering over a pot of soup: a little more salt, a bit more pepper. I see what each person needs at any particular moment and I use that tool.
I’ve never done
just
massage without acupuncture or cranial work because I feel it’s not grounding enough. Massage can release endorphins and natural opiates that help fight pain and help reduce anxiety and stress; it’s great in that way. Yet I need to find the energy that’s blocked and actually fix the blockage, get the nerves and blood supply and cerebral spinal fluid flowing, to get the glymphatic system working and allow everything to move along. That helps me feel that
my
part is complete, and now the person is able to go and do his or her work. The combination of these various therapies helps give both immediate and long-term relief.
While some naturopathic doctors in the United States use multiple modalities within each session, chances are you’ll have to create this kind of experience for yourself. Rather than get locked into a rut with one type of practitioner, schedule an appointment with someone who practices a different type of healing modality, something you’ve never tried before. I know that some of these treatments are pricey, but one session can go a long way. Save up and splurge. I know you’ll find it both eye-opening and valuable. Please consider one of these:
- Acupuncturist
- Chiropractor
- EMDR therapist (
see page
) - Holistic nutritionist
- Hynotherapist
- Massage therapist (especially one skilled in neuromuscular and trigger-point therapy, lymphatic drainage, and cranial sacral therapy, for glymphatic release)
- Naturopathic doctor
- Reflexologist
Whether you seek the help of any other healing professional, I want you to do this: Believe in yourself. The most important professional advice I can give is to find someone you can trust who will locate your pain, who believes that the pain exists, and who cares about removing this pain. You want someone who is patient-centered, not doctor-centered.
It upsets me greatly that some professionals underestimate their patients’ pain—or perhaps they don’t specialize in pain so they don’t understand how deep it can go. Or, even worse: They put fear in patients where none needs to exist.
I had a patient who was thinking of having a child. She went to her doctor complaining of pain in her lower back and ovaries. She had lost some weight and was tired, thinking about her next big job. Her doctor said, “Well, your eggs are aging and I’m not sure it looks happy down there.” This woman was a dynamic, healthy thirty-eight-year-old. She and her husband had just started trying to get pregnant, and her doctor was already pushing her to do in vitro fertilization (“because it’s guaranteed”).
Wow. Does that sound like a healer?
When she came to me, I took a different approach. “Maybe the lower back pain is a message,” I gently said. “Maybe it’s urging you to stop and think, ‘Hang on a second—my lower back is stiff, I’m overworking, and it’s time to stop and think about my future.’ You need to give yourself some rest, heal your pain, and send your ovaries some love, blood supply, and circulation so your eggs can be happy.” She needed to give her sympathetic nervous system a break so that her body could recognize that she wasn’t in crisis and that it was safe to make a baby.
Pain was the signal to make that change—and her doctor should have been the one to help her stop making excuses for the lower back pain and take steps to heal herself, instead of piling on pharmaceuticals and procedures to mask the underlying problem.
I’m always stunned when I hear these stories about uncompassionate, disconnected doctors or therapists. You deserve to be treated by a
healer
, not a drug-pusher or a pacifier. Keep looking for the right person to help you, someone who will take the time to listen to your pain and ask about all your symptoms. Someone who trusts your experience, who believes you when you speak about the intensity of your pain—because pain is whatever the person experiencing the pain says it is, not what the doctor thinks. I’d like you to find someone who believes and can help you understand that though the pain may be present now, it not only can be “managed,” it can be released.
As I noted earlier, keeping a clear mental space is important to the work I do with clients. I always do a cleansing prayer (removing the “evil eye”) on my way to clients. This meditation helps to reconnect me with my Greek heritage and helps me feel clear; it’s important because it sets me up for a clean start in every session, no matter how challenging my prior client was.
An Answer to “Little t” Traumas: EMDR
If your traumas are still painful or raw, or if you feel like you could use some support through this Reflect * Release * Radiate process, I encourage you to reach out to a therapist, licensed clinical social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Having a professional guide as you work through your pain could be the difference for you between checking out again and losing touch with your pain—and finally turning to face it, acknowledge it, and release it.
One therapy that I’m extremely impressed with, one that I hope will continue to expand and have broader application, is known as EMDR: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. EMDR is a perfect example of how you can tap into your body’s own internal self-healing mechanisms to bring you back into Positive Feedback.
First a bit of background. When you encounter a stressful experience, your brain needs time to process and “digest” that experience. After a fight with a friend, you might talk to other friends about it, journal about it, or simply sleep on it, possibly dreaming about it during the REM (rapid eye movement) phase of sleep. The next day, you probably feel better: Your brain has digested the experience and filed it away in the appropriate place in your memory; you can move on.
However, with some traumatic experiences, that process may go off track and the memories get misfiled, as it were. Those misfiled memories can then cause unconscious, automatic reactions to other events that may not seem related to an outside eye. Let’s say your dad forgot to pick you up from dance class once when you were eight, and you stood there alone for a long time before the problem got sorted out. You may forever after be anxious when you’re waiting for a bus or a plane, gripped by the fear that it will leave without you. But you may never connect this recurring fear back to waiting in front of the dance academy as a child.
All those memories are locked into the neural pathways in our brain as well as in nerves and muscle cells throughout our bodies. Research from the University of Texas suggests that victims of rape and sexual assault suffer mightily throughout their lives in eleven areas of psychological and social functioning,
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including debilitatingly low self-esteem and fear of romantic intimacy. EMDR helps to release those traumas and let them go.
How does EMDR work? At the start of the eight-phase treatment, you and your therapist select a negative thought or image to target. During “processing,” your therapist directs you to think about the memory and you move your eyes back and forth across your field of vision for twenty to thirty seconds, following the movement of the therapist’s finger (or a stick or light, or even auditory tones through headphones). The theory is that by alternately stimulating both sides of the brain while the memory is evoked, EMDR triggers neurological and physiological changes that target several areas of your memory network.
The therapist talks you through the painful memory, using a stimulation sequence that allows the brain to properly process the memory of the trauma. Your brain “files” the memory correctly and you work with the therapist to replace the negative thought pattern associated with the memory with a positive one. As you move forward in therapy, you’ll revisit the memory to test if you’ve truly digested it, and continue to locate other, related memories, digesting them in the here and now, and correctly filing them for the future.
Until a few years ago, EMDR had been used only in cases of severe trauma. Studies have shown that in as few as three sessions it can be tremendously effective at helping soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and women who’ve been raped.
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(The entire process takes up to eight distinct stages, but the sessions actively targeting the traumatic memory can be very few.) Recently, more and more mental health professionals are starting to use this important approach in their practice to help people who’ve experienced “small t” traumas: bullying, exclusion, relational aggression—things that are tremendously painful but aren’t typically seen as major traumas.
While such events may not seem “major” to others, I’ve seen again and again how damaging these childhood slights and “small t” traumas can be; I see the aftermath with my patients every day. And many people I’ve talked with report that old, frustrating patterns of self-sabotage, anger, or anxiety that have resisted any change for years are suddenly resolved with a few sessions of EMDR. They’re able to release painful memories that have been holding them back—simply let them go and move on.
If you believe that there’s a trauma from your past holding you back, I urge you to investigate EMDR. Check out appendix B for a tool that will help you locate a practitioner in your area.
One of the most powerful focuses for meditations/visualizations in Release work is forgiveness. You can make your meditation/visualization as specific to your situation as you’d like.
Here’s a critical point: You need to
feel
the insecurity or fear of the original offense in order to release it. If you don’t engage with that emotion, and you don’t release it, you’ll continue to allow fear to get to you—you’re only standing in your own way. You need to cut the cord with fear from the past so that you can truly live in your present life without allowing old patterns to take over.
Below is a meditation I wrote for a client who was going through a particularly challenging time in her marriage. Forgiveness is a scary thing—not for wimps! Your meditation practice is there to help you cope with your fears and overcome them.
I am here today to acknowledge my pain and my fear. I welcome my fear. I am strong. I am not scared. I am not alone. I can talk to my fear.
I am here today to forgive and love my father, who created that fear and abandoned me. I stop that fragile, vulnerable fear from the past, and I stop feeling punished.
I forgive my father, and I forgive myself for punishing myself and punishing my man.
I stop living in the past, in the negative.
I am taking a deep breath. . . . I am not alone. I am safe.
