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In this week’s Mind Body Connection Series, I take a close look at the meaning of sadness within the context of the power column. One of the most important distinctions to be made is between trauma and sadness. I give to examples of recent sadness in my own experience that show that feeling sad can also be understood as an arrival somewhere good! Each sadness has a potential correlate in your life that can signal something good, such as missing someone meaning you are connected or a sadness signaling a new insight.

In the Power Column, we work to understand the central, defining characteristics of each person and their experiences and a huge part of the goal comes in accepting the fullness of the trauma we experience. Once this is accepted, sadness is now a real option, rather than grief, loss, mourning, and a sense that life is irrevocably damaged. In this way, sadness can be seen as the actual endpoint of trauma and the beginning of having sad things get processed just like any other emotion.

This is a live Q&A about mind body symptoms with Crushing Doubt host Dr. Dan Ratner. If you have chronic pain or other physical symptoms that haven’t been able to be explained or helped by medical doctors or other alternative treatments, this information can change your life. By changing the way we think and feel, we can change our actual physiological processes to relieve — or even cure — many symptoms, from head to toe.

In this episode of our How To Series, I took a request to create something to explain the columns and why they are necessary and helpful in a more basic form. The main point you will hear about is how the organization of the columns allows us not only to understand the mind body experience better, but helps us break down the problems we encounter into manageable parts.

Because each column is well defined and has its own rules, people can use them to figure out which part of the mind body problem on which they are working. Each column also has a simple and clear set of goals.

In the end, the columns system is designed to give you the most accurate information in an organized and accessible way. While it may start off as complicated for some, as I address your questions, the system becomes not only easier but automatic with increased understanding.

Today I am joined by Rose and Tovah, two mind body practitioners who have linked up in the last year or two to provide collaborative treatment for mind body issues and also created a podcast called the TMS Roundtable. We talk about how the two of them — Tovah, a chiropractor, and Rose and ISTDP (Intensive Short Term Dynamic Therapy) psychoanalyst — came to meet through their mutual connection, All the Rage director, Michael Galinsky.

We discussed how who each practitioner is informs how we work in the mind body field and how the two of them work together with their very different styles. The three of us all marveled at how short term work is providing such relief for so many people out there and that the body informs us so much about what we feel inside that we can make a huge leap forward, very quickly.

I very much enjoy talking with Rose and Tovah and putting our heads together on how to organize the healing process and to trust the body to tell us what we need to know. I found tons of common ground with these talented women, including our awareness that unleashing our personal narratives and power is so important.

In this third iteration of my mind body consultation sessions, I begin the mind body map and developing the emotions column with comedian and chronic pain sufferer, Edgar Rivera. It’s been a rough year for Edgar and he comes into the process without any prior information on the mind body process — having not heard of Dr. Sarno or anyone else in the field.

We lay out some of his main emotional themes and consider what contribution to his pain they are having. Regardless, Edgar took to the process well and seemed to make an immediate leap forward in understanding his emotional pain and how it is leading to its physical expression.

As always, my role in the mind body consultation is to find out how the three columns are operating in the given sufferer and that means adjusting the system to fit the individual mind of the person with whom I’m working. Edgar is open and curious and I look forward to seeing how this develops for him and getting him much needed relief.

This is a live Q&A about mind body symptoms with Crushing Doubt host Dr. Dan Ratner. If you have chronic pain or other physical symptoms that haven’t been able to be explained or helped by medical doctors or other alternative treatments, this information can change your life. By changing the way we think and feel, we can change our actual physiological processes to relieve — or even cure — many symptoms, from head to toe.

In this testimonial of healing, I got to sit down with Kimba, who completed my last seminar and got significant relief and reason for tremendous hope for ongoing gains. She came to me with agonizing stiffness and pain in her back, glutes, and legs and having done a good amount of mind body work previously.

As she highlights, she was able to get a sense of relief from the endless search for more information and to gain confidence in an approach that made full sense to her and laid out an ongoing process in which she could thrive. On top of it all, Kimba got direct proof of getting better during the seminar meetings, as her back locked up when she stood up during day seven and we connected it to the fear she had of the seminar ending and worrying that she would not get all better from it.

What she found, through the confidence of this experience and the information in the seminars is that she felt, in her words, 80% better when we finished. She was 50% better this day we talked because, as we predicted doubt is trying to fight it’s way back in. But Kimba is onto it and I am grateful to her for sharing the gains she has made this far. The work continues, but this is a helpful indication that the right information, organized in the right system really does get people better!

On this week’s episode of our How To series, I discuss the vital importance of getting angry on behalf of others. One of the hardest parts of mind body suffering comes in the form of others not being ‘in it’ with us. But whether we are talking about mind body suffering or any other kind, it is often the best way to show that you care by getting in touch with anger towards the people and experiences that hurt the person about whom you care.

One way I look through this lens is to help people recognize that being angry is often judged harshly, rather than seen as a sign of how much we care. I distinguish between bringing that anger to the external situation and simply expressing that form of empathy to the sufferer.

In the long run, we need to get more comfortable, as a society, with anger and, in addition, we have a chance to recognize how to channel this anger towards good. If you can let people know that you are angry on their behalf, they will feel better cared for and, on top of it, if you receive this kind of care from others, you’ll feel a level of empathy you hadn’t known was possible. This key skill helps conquer doubt about the legitimacy of our own suffering.

In my latest interview, I sit down with board certified dermatologist, Dr. Roy Seidenberg. Roy is another very helpful doctor in the mind body community, having learned about Dr. Sarno’s methods during his training. We discussed his own experiences with TMS/mind body issues and what he thought about Dr. Sarno’s work when he first encountered it.

Roy and I also talked about the various types of skin conditions that tend to come from mind body experience. We explore the state of the field and medical training in relation to these ideas not being well known at all.

As always, it is important to check with a medical doctor first and Dr. Seidenberg can be another valuable resource to get you cleared of anything medical and ready to do the mind body work!

Pat is a chronic pain sufferer who discovered the Crushing Doubt channel and my system over the last year. She had been struggling with sciatica and fibromyalgia, among other symptoms. After searching through many mind body programs and ways of thinking about things, she gravitated towards my work, as she put it, because it was logical, organized, and finally made sense of what she was seeing and experiencing in her own body.

Over the last two weeks, she took my eight session seminar and says now that she has taken another several leaps forward, including a sense of real emotional peace. This is the work that we do in this community — you don’t only get the chronic symptoms to abate, but you learn about what makes you who your are, and about how to get peace with yourself that hadn’t previously been possible.

Pat shares many aspects of her experience in this interview, which even I found to be inspiring. It’s very exciting to see such progress in a short amount of time, particularly when we can have confidence it will now last, because we understand how the symptoms have been behaving and why. Understanding it all is the key and my system can help put to rest the constant sifting through too much and too little information all at the same time. Take it from Pat!

This is a live Q&A about mind body symptoms with Crushing Doubt host Dr. Dan Ratner. If you have chronic pain or other physical symptoms that haven’t been able to be explained or helped by medical doctors or other alternative treatments, this information can change your life. By changing the way we think and feel, we can change our actual physiological processes to relieve — or even cure — many symptoms, from head to toe.

In this week’s How To Series, I look at a major breakthrough you can have in your power column: the power of aloneness. When you feel lonely or alone in a bad way, it obviously doesn’t feel good. But the upside of aloneness comes when you are living in the power column.

When your core narrative is in place, you will understand who you are at your essence and you’ll remember that no one else has a say in any of it. Through having that fully formed relationship with yourself, you can unlock a great power: you are on your own journey and no one else is in charge of anything!

In a sense, this is true self-empathy, because you recognize that only you CAN be fully empathic to yourself. You are the only one who knows it all and, don’t forget, it’s your body that knows and represents it best of all. Your body is never wrong about your journey!

Today, I sit down with Barbara Kline, a licensed clinical social worker who just recently retired after helping countless people recover from mind body issues over the course of her career. Among the many topics we discuss, Barbara and I agree that our symptoms are a communication even more than they are a distraction and she found this to be true personally.

Barbara shared her experience talking to Dr. Sarno and getting help from Dr. Andrea Leonard-Segal. She notes that these doctors helped her turn things around with one of my favorite phrases: ‘it might hurt, but it won’t harm you’. We talked about working through triggers and the way progress moves along in this ‘last stop on the train’ intervention for pain.

She and I also saw eye to eye on the power column and how society tries to make us doubt our own ability to craft a life that is exactly as we want it to be. Barbara’s story of a patient getting in touch with the fullness of their anger also resonated deeply. It was a great pleasure connecting with her and I can see why she has successfully helped so many people get better with her warmth, clear thinking, and inner strength.

On this episode of the Mind Body Connection Series, I look at one piece of logic that reveals how we’ve gotten to where we are with MRI and other imaging techniques and why we are so far astray: we seem to have forgotten the unbelievable power of our own brains. When we look at technology and what it can do versus the brain, we can see the illogic in underestimating the mind, making doubt about a mind body connection seem downright silly.

Think about it: your computer can barely function for more than a day without needing to reboot, it becomes obsolete in five years, and it has literally no emotional intelligence at all. The brain, in the meantime, is managing millions of times more functions than a computer, unconscious and conscious alike.

All of this is to say that we have thousands of reasons to believe, without a doubt, that our brains are not only capable of generating mind body symptoms, but it would be strange if they couldn’t, given the functionality already being there physically and the brain having such immense power, adaptability, and functionality.

On my How To Series I look at how to distinguish between a true injury (one that heals!) and a mind body one (one that drags on chronically). When you get hurt, there is the physical component of it, but also the psychological one. You can understand the difference with some telltale signs based on science and logic.

The main distinction really does come in the fact that all tissue that CAN heal, DOES heal. But there are other factors as well, such as the fact that movement related ‘injuries’ are mind body ones right from the start. Identifying and deconstructing triggers is crucial in getting better from mind body experiences that began with a true physical injury, as well.

Focus on the timeline of your recovery and you can see that the science and logic ends up pointing in the direction of mind body experience as long as you have been cleared by a medical doctor from damage to internal organs or from a full blown life or death medical issue.

Today’s interview is with Licensed Mental Health Counselor Liz Wallenstein, who studied with Dr. Sarno and developed her own practice in mind body therapy. We talked about her own experience with mind body symptoms and the various aspects she has found to be contributing factors in her patients and in herself.

We talked about the state of the mind body field and our hopes for where it will go, including what it takes to accept a mind body diagnosis. Liz specializes in the single population and the Jewish community as well. We connected over the aspects of therapy, in general, that can get brought into mind body work more fully.

Liz and I talked about the importance of getting rid of doubt in the diagnosis and in our experience, as well as how people, so frequently, become more powerful as they master their symptoms.

Barb and I met for the final session of four consultation meetings, this time focusing on action steps within the emotions, doubt, and power columns. One of the main advantages of three column work is how much more specifically it identifies what is going on for each person and how their symptoms profile.

Barb and I recognized that a big part of what can now help her to feel better is to use power to crush doubt. By recognizing when she is out of power — with herself, her symptom, or others — she can now challenge some ways in which she can make more powerful choices and align with her true self.

As always, I am so impressed by, and grateful to, the people who share their stories on Crushing Doubt and with our community. I know we all wish Barb well in her recovery and I am pleased to see it heading in the right direction so well.

This is a live Q&A about mind body symptoms with Crushing Doubt host Dr. Dan Ratner. If you have chronic pain or other physical symptoms that haven’t been able to be explained or helped by medical doctors or other alternative treatments, this information can change your life. By changing the way we think and feel, we can change our actual physiological processes to relieve — or even cure — many symptoms, from head to toe.

Today, I outline how to escape a narcissist so that you can be free of that toxicity in your life. We begin by talking about what a narcissist is and also what does not constitute a narcissist, because learning to recognize who and what they are is so important in learning to steer clear of them.

Next, I turn my attention to what makes them operate the way they do so that you can understand what is happening to you in relation to them and why it goes the way it goes. It is crucial to learn to think of them by different rules than ‘normal’ people.

Lastly, I go through a set of rules of engagement, per se, with them to give some basic ideas of what to do or not do to set you up for success. But the bottom line is that they will become easier to recognize and it will be all the easier for you to not have to interact with them once you see the basics: They make you feel terrible on a regular basis and absolutely nothing you have done or any part of who you are is deserving of it.