15 Things You Need To Know If You Want To Be An "Olympian Of Healing"

When I was an arrogant young whippersnapper indoctrinated into the brainwashing of academic medicine, I honestly believed that as a Northwestern-trained OB/GYN educated in “The Northwestern Way,” I knew how to save lives. My training program was rigorously evidence-based, with weekly journal clubs and tons of training about how to interpret statistics and evaluate a medical journal article for how credible it was. Anything health-related that fell outside the rigors of evidence-based medicine was worthy of contempt and mockery.

Within ten years of finishing my training, I would wind up shattered and disillusioned. Unlike some, I wasn’t so disillusioned that I turned my back on conventional medicine. I still believe it saves lives and I would still use it myself and recommend it to patients for many health conditions. But I no longer believe it’s the whole enchilada. My training failed to even recognize, much less appreciate, all the aspects of healing that fall more into the “subjective” category, things like bedside manner, the qualities of the therapeutic relationship, the mind-body-spirit aspects of healing, trauma-informed medical approaches to disease recovery, and other such hard to quantify aspects of healing.

I spent the first twelve years of my post-high school life studying to become a doctor, and I’ve spent the 17 years since I left the hospital in 2007 studying everything medical school missed. So I decided to give myself a challenge. If I died tomorrow, what would I want you all to know about what I’ve learned about healing since I finished my medical training. I wouldn’t include what I DID learn in medical school and still believe in- so I won’t be including things like “Follow public health guidelines” and “Take antibiotics if you get a severe infection” or “Go to the ER if you have a heart attack or stroke or broken bones!”

This is everything else, everything I believe we should be adding to medical education and everything I believe you need to know. So here you go, y’all. This is what I’ve got.

I’ll be going over some of this information in a deep dive online course about spontaneous healing, intentional creativity, and what it takes to create the conditions for becoming an “Olympian of healing” with my partner Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv and my BFF’s and founders of Intentional Creativity Shiloh Sophia & Jonathan McCloud.

Learn more and register here.

1. Bodies are naturally equipped for self-repair. 

The body is designed to heal what breaks inside. But those self-repair mechanisms only operate optimally if your nervous system is in the “tend and befriend” ventral vagal parasympathetic state. We’re all exposed to all kinds of pathogens every day but our bodies know how to protect us from being infected. We make cancer cells regularly and our immune systems kill them. We have this amazing microbiome in our gut that helps keep things running smoothly. And because of psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics, our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings affect the hormonal milieu of our bloodstream and organ function and genetic expression on a moment-by-moment basis. The human organism is a miraculous creation in this way! But our bodies aren’t made to stay well when our nervous systems are jacked up in chronic repetitive stress responses. Anytime you’re in a “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” state of the sympathetic or dorsal vagal parasympathetic nervous system, your body is thwarted from fixing anything that might have broken down. These powerful stress responses, which bolster survival in a real emergency but which destroy the body if firing chronically, override the body’s ability to repair what breaks, allowing chronic and life-threatening diseases to take hold and flourish.

2. Spontaneous remissions are real, but they’re not “spontaneous.”

It’s well known in conventional medicine tthat “incurable” diseases can disappear. The medical literature is full of proof that people have been cured without medical treatment from diseases as deadly and severe as almost every type of cancer, including Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and Glioblastoma multiforme. They’ve been cured from life-threatening diseases like HIV, end stage heart failure, aneurysms, heart defects, abscesses, hydrocephalus, and liver and kidney failure. They have also been cured from common chronic diseases like asthma, hypothyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcers, gallstones, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, ischemic heart disease, cataracts, herniated discs, and epilepsy.

The medical establishment labels these unexpected cures “spontaneous remissions,” and doctors write them up in medical journals as curious flukes. But if you actually study these people, as me and my partner Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv have done, you’ll realize these remissions are anything but “spontaneous.” These people work so hard for their mysterious cures that we’ve come to call them “Olympians of healing’- or more simply, “health outliers.” 

3. Treat causes, not just symptoms.

Conventional medicine focuses on alleviating symptoms but stops short when it comes to helping patients figure out why their bodies broke down and why self-repair failed. Treating symptoms is important: if you’re in pain, by all means take a pill or get a surgery to relieve your pain, if a vital organ stops working, by all means take a pill or submit to an intervention that will help your organ work better or replace your organ. But conventional medicine does nothing to help patients enter into a period of self-inquiry after the initiating symptoms are relieved. Once the acute intervention happens and the symptoms are allayed, a secondary part of the healing process must be facilitated.

3. Trust your intuition, but don’t believe everything you think it says.

Experts might know what’s best for a population of statistics or for public health, but you are not a statistic, so no expert knows what’s best for your individual body better than you do. Expertise is awesome. We need our experts to offer what they offer in their respective medicine bags. But someone else’s expertise does not make them the expert of how your very personal healing journey should go. Conventional medicine undermines patient intuition, and it’s understandable why they do. Intuition is imprecise and hard to validate. But if you’re on a healing journey, your intuition- which is a somatic experience- will guide you better than any expert can possibly guide you. Mixing your own intuition with the opinions of experts- and weighing that feedback in a measured way- will get you the best health outcome. Just make sure it’s true intuition and not a part with an agenda that wants to ignore experts, pretending to be intuition. Discerning the difference is one of the hardest parts of the trauma-healing spiritual path.

4. All aspects of your life can be medicine or poison. You have the power to choose to turn poison into medicine.

Every aspect of your life (your relationships, your work, your creativity, your sexuality, your spirituality, your relationship to money, your environment, your food, how you move your body, etc) has the opportunity to be either poison or medicine, depending on whether you’re these aspects of life relax or stress your nervous system. As I explain in great detail in the description of the Whole Health Cairn in Mind Over Medicine, Whole Health requires lifestyle modifications that transform what might be poison into what can be medicine.  For example, your work can be poisonous to your health if you’re sucking up to a narcissistic boss every day or selling out your integrity to earn a paycheck. Or your work can be medicine as you express yourself creatively and fulfill your calling in a way that helps you (and others) heal. When we live authentically from the life force of our Self/ Inner Pilot Light, our relationships, our work, our spirituality, our creativity, our sexuality, our relationship to money, our mental and physical health behaviors all convert what is potentially toxic into what is healing.

5. Almost all diseases are the result of chronic inflammation.

Inflammation is a normal part of fighting off infections. When the body spots a pathogen, it mounts an immune response- with fever, redness, swelling, pain, and recruitment of immune cell activation. But metabolic diseases result when there’s too much inflammation, unrelated to infection, and the inflammatory process gets stuck in a permanent “on” position.

Harvard magazine published an article that states, “In medicine, believing something is true is not the same as being able to prove it. Because the idea that inflammation—constant, low-level, immune-system activation —could be at the root of many noncommunicable diseases is a startling claim, it requires extraordinary proof. Can seemingly unconnected illnesses of the brain, the vasculature, lungs, liver, and joints really share a deep biological link? Evidence has been mounting that these common chronic conditions—including Alzheimer’s, cancer, arthritis, asthma, gout, psoriasis, anemia, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and depression among them—are indeed triggered by low-grade, long-term inflammation. But it took that large-scale human clinical trial to dispel any lingering doubt: the immune system’s inflammatory response is killing people by degrees.”

Inflammatory diseases tend to cluster together as chronic metabolic diseases- such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, nerve degeneration, and cancer. Because chronic inflammation underlies these metabolic diseases, if a person gets one of these diseases, they’re much more likely to develop others.

6. Chronic inflammation is an auto-immune process.

In medical school, I was taught that auto-immune diseases include diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, Type 1 diabetes, and celiac disease. But nobody taught me that diseases like the #1 and #2 killer in the US- coronary artery disease and cancer- are also autoimmune diseases. (Read more about heart disease and autoimmunity here. Read more about cancer and autoimmunity here.) Long Covid also appears to be an autoimmune disease. All of these autoimmune diseases are the long term side effects of an inflammatory process that gets stuck in the “on” position, even when there’s no infection that needs to be fought off. 

As Harvard magazine asserts here, “Mounting evidence suggests a common underlying cause of major degenerative diseases. The four horsemen of the medical apocalypse — coronary artery disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's — may be riding the same steed: inflammation.” 

In medical school, I was taught that, if anything, inflammation was a beneficial response to invading pathogens, recruiting granulocytes, T-cells, B-cells, macrophages, fibrocytes, antibodies, cytokines, and complement, an array of circulating proteins produced in a cascade of enzymatic activity in the presence of microbes. Once the pathogens is eliminated, suppressor T-cells are supposed to turn inflammation off.

But that’s not what happens with chronic inflammation, which is different than acute inflammation, which is easier to spot because of the Latin pneumonic we did learn in  medical school- calor (heat), dolor (pain), rubor (redness), and tumor (swelling). But when the acute inflammatory response fails to eliminate the offending invader agent completely, suppressor T cells don’t call off the immune system- and chronic inflammation takes hold, often without the obvious fever, pain, redness and swelling. When this happens, the immune system goes on to slowly, gradually turn on its host and attack your body, rather than protecting it. This is what we call “auto-immunity.”

As we age, we all have some degree of chronic inflammation, which is associated with degeneration of the body. But if chronic inflammation, marked by high levels of CRP (C-reactive protein) and other inflammatory biomarkers, get high, they’re associated with all kinds of diseases, most notably coronary artery disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

So trauma causes nervous system dysregulation, and chronic nervous system dysregulation causes chronic inflammation, and chronic inflammation leads to auto-immune dysfunction, which increases the risk of almost every chronic disease process. So in effect, trauma causes inflammation-related diseases, proving that there’s no such thing as “mind-body” because the nervous system impact of psychological, emotional, and spiritual trauma is 100% in the body- as nervous system dysregulation and chronic inflammation.

7. Reducing chronic inflammation can reverse autoimmune-related disease.

Acute inflammation typically results because of infection or a neoplastic process like cancer. But chronic inflammation is different. It tends to show up in the body for three primary reasons- an inflammatory diet (metabolic inflammation), immobility, and the physiological impact of psychological trauma. Overeating or eating nutrient-free foods stimulates an inflammatory response that kicks off a whole cascade of physiological auto-immune activity. Exercise can reverse some of this, but if your diet is poor and you’re not exercising much, the effect is amplified. Chronic PTSD also increases inflammatory biomarkers (read more here and here), largely related to the excess cortisol stimulated by chronic repetitive stress responses. 

The good news is that diseases caused by chronic inflammation can be reversed by reducing inflammation. Gökhan S. Hotamisligil, Simmons professor of genetics and metabolism at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said, “Chronic inflammation is uniformly damaging and is absolutely causal to the process, because if you interfere with it, you can reverse the pathology.” Diet-related inflammation can be reduced by limiting overconsumption and eating an anti-inflammatory Mediterranean diet. Immobility-related inflammation can be treated with exercise. And of course, trauma-related chronic inflammation requires healing and treating the underlying trauma.

As is typical in the conventional medical mindset, scientists have investigated whether anti-inflammatory drugs can reverse chronic inflammation, but the body outsmarts the drugs. If you block on inflammatory pathway, the body tends to switch pathways. If you block too many pathways, you create dangerous immunosuppression. The obvious answer is to reverse chronic inflammation not by using anti-inflammatory drugs, but by treating the sources of the problem- diet, exercise, and psychological trauma.

9. Nutrient-dense foods are potent medicine. 

I didn’t get one single class on nutrition in medical school. Not one. I learned more about nutrition in elementary school, when they taught us about the USDA food pyramid (bread, cereal, rice and pasta at the bottom as what you should fill up on most, then fruits and vegetables next, then milk, yogurt and cheese, with fats, oils, and sweets used sparingly at the top. This pyramid has now been officially discredited, since we now know that a high carb, high glycemic index diet is not good for anyone- and that a low fat diet is not the answer, especially since products branded as “low fat” are usually loaded with refined sugars. 

But they didn’t even teach us about the food pyramid in medical school. If anything, we were taught that disease is the result of obesity, of over-nutrition from too much eating. There was no distinction between empty calories and dense nutrition. I now know that the opposite is true. The hunger mechanism is repetitively triggered when people are not getting the vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins, enzymes, and phyto-chemicals the body needs in order to operate physiological processes.

The truth is that people eating a standard Western diet are not over-nourished; they’re malnourished. It’s not just that you’re eating the wrong things that can poison you, like junk food, processed foods, trans fats, and sugar. It’s that if you’re filling up on non-nutritious food, you’re starving yourself of the nutrition the body needs in order to prevent and recover from disease. 

The average American over 100 years ago consumed two pounds of sugar per year. No big deal. Now the average American consumes 152 pounds of sugar per year. Our bodies were not made to handle that kind of load, because sugar is highly inflammatory. Such a high load of sugar in the bloodstream means that these sharp-edged little sugar crystals go coursing through our blood vessels and cause little cuts in the arteries, which then marshall your immune cells to come in and repair the micro-cuts. When you’re consuming a high load of sugar, year after year, this means you’re repairing cuts on top of scars, and you wind up with scars that we doctors call “atherosclerosis.”

There’s no single healing diet that works for everyone, but in general, high density, mostly plant-based nutrition that includes a broad range of nutritional value and includes low glycemic-index carbohydrates is your best bet. Think Mediterranean diet with loads of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, olive oil, seafood, and chicken, minus red meat, sugar, and filler foods that are nutrient-free.

[NOTE: The Public Health Nutrition Department at Harvard and the professor at Harvard who became the head of the FDA were paid by the sugar industry to say that fat is the problem and “low fat” is the solution, but it was the sugar industry funding that to divert attention away from the research showing that sugar was the problem. Learn about that scandal here.]

10. Life force is essential to the healing process. 

Call it life force, call it chi, call it prana, call it energy, call it love or God or Shakti or the Holy Spirit. What you call it doesn’t matter. All of us have times in life when our life force wanes, and we become anemic on life force. Trauma is the most common reason for dwindling life force and reduced will to live. We all need life force to flow freely in our bodies in order to be optimally healthy, and if that flow gets impeded or our overall life force gets dangerously low, we may wind up with physical symptoms- and we might not survive. You might need drugs, surgeries, or other conventional medical interventions to save your life or spare an organ while your dwindling life force or reduced will to live gets addressed. But those interventions won’t solve the underlying problem of what interfered with your life force flow any more than a blood transfusion solves a bleeding problem or a bone marrow dysfunction. 

11. Optimal health requires regular nervous system hygiene. 

If your nervous system is in Type A hyperdrive 24/7, or if it’s in dorsal vagal hypodrive beyond when you’re resting and sleeping, your body is practically guaranteed to pay the price. This is why it’s ridiculous to even think about practicing medicine without considering the state of a patient’s nervous system. We shouldn’t even be talking about mind-body- because the nervous system IS the body. Every single part of your body is connected to the nervous system, because the nervous system is far bigger and more diffusely distributed than your mind/brain. Most diseases are the result of the long term consequences of chronic nervous system dysregulation- the immune system breakdown, the chronic inflammation, the microbiome disruption, the epigenetic influences, and such. Therefore, most disease treatments will be mere Band-Aids that are ultimately inadequate and ineffective unless they include nervous system hygiene. Nervous system hygiene requires caring about your own safety, emotional health, relationships, and protection from abuse or exploitation.

12. Heal your nervous system.

To practice nervous system hygiene and bring your nervous system into an optimally healthy state capable of somatic self-repair, you have to heal trauma. It’s not just war veterans that have trauma that can make them sick. Everyone has some trauma that likely needs healingSome people have experienced the Big T traumas, the ones researchers call the Adverse Childhood Experiences.). But 100% of us have experienced what might seem like smaller traumas, such as the developmental traumas that interfere with our healthy individuation, capacity for intimacy, ability to assert agency and autonomy over our lives, and other natural full expression of our authentic selves. (Learn more about whether you might have experienced developmental trauma here and here.) Developmental trauma and other “little t” traumas, which Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein, MD calls “the trauma of everyday life,” affects every one of us and impacts our health. Therefore healing and adequately treating psychological, emotional, and spiritual trauma is essential for whole health healing.

13. Reciprocity in relationships is medicine for your body.

You are worthy of enjoying reciprocal, healthy relationships, and you deserve to protect yourself from controlling relationships and narcissistic abuse. Nurturing, loving, empathic, reciprocal, healthy relationships with good boundaries and shared power improve your health. Being oppressed by narcissistic abuse, having your boundaries repetitively crossed by others with wounded boundaries, being overpowered and dominated, and losing touch with your autonomy, agency, and ability to stand up and protect yourself from those who might take advantage of your vulnerability, kind disposition, good nature, and generosity is associated with an increased risk of disease and decreases longevity. If you’re getting sucked dry by vampiric relationships, your health will deteriorate. Reciprocal relationships with healthy give and take support Whole Health and improve longevity.

14.  The placebo effect still works.

Scientists have known about the powerful but mysterious “placebo effect” since evidence-based medicine was born in the 1950’s, after scientists realized that somewhere between 20-80% of people (typically about ⅓) of patients given any treatment in a scientific study would get better, whether or not they were treated with the intervention being studied or whether they were given a sham intervention- a sugar pill, a saline injection, a fake surgery, or some other staged intervention that wasn’t real.

A multi-disciplinary conference at Harvard in the 1990s, the transcripts of which were published in Anne Harrington’s sentinel book The Placebo Effect, concluded that the placebo effect was still a mystery. Since then, placebo effect researchers like Ted Kaptchuk, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, have some theories.

Kaptchuk is quoted in this Harvard article: "The placebo effect is more than positive thinking — believing a treatment or procedure will work. It's about creating a stronger connection between the brain and body and how they work together.” Scientists used to think the placebo effect was all about the power of positive thinking. But now we know it’s far more than that. You also need the rituals of treatment. "When you look at these studies that compare drugs with placebos, there is the entire environmental and ritual factor at work," says Kaptchuk. "You have to go to a clinic at certain times and be examined by medical professionals in white coats. You receive all kinds of exotic pills and undergo strange procedures. All this can have a profound impact on how the body perceives symptoms because you feel you are getting attention and care."

Even the simple ritual of taking a pill may have a powerful impact on how the nervous system interprets symptoms. “People associate the ritual of taking medicine as a positive healing effect," says Kaptchuk. And you don’t even have to trick the nervous system! There’s still a placebo effect if patients know all they’re taking is a sugar pill. Kaptchuk said, "Even if they know it's not medicine, the action itself can stimulate the brain into thinking the body is being healed."

Is it possible to give yourself a placebo effect without having to eat a Tic Tac? Kaptchuk thinks that practicing self-help methods might help. "Engaging in the ritual of healthy living — eating right, exercising, yoga, quality social time, meditating — probably provides some of the key ingredients of a placebo effect," says Kaptchuk.

But I think the ritual of the therapeutic relationship is key to the placebo effect. You giving yourself a sugar pill or you engaging in self-help won’t replace the nurturing care and ritual of someone in a position of authority giving that pill to and telling you they believe it will help you.

Katchuk claims that placebos won't lower your cholesterol or shrink a tumor. Rather, they work on symptoms modulated by the brain, like the perception of pain. "Placebos may make you feel better, but they will not cure you. They have been shown to be most effective for conditions like pain management, stress-related insomnia, and cancer treatment side effects like fatigue and nausea."

15. Practice the Six Steps To Healing Yourself

All this brings me back to 12 years ago, when I was writing the 2013 first edition of Mind Over Medicine, naively thinking I could boil down everything I had learned so far into the “Six Steps To Healing Yourself.” I changed those six steps a bit in the second edition in 2020, but they now seem so inadequate compared to everything else I’ve learned since medical school. Nevertheless, I still stand by them, and they’ve stood the test of time. So let me review them here, with 2024 updates. (Get the revised edition of Mind Over Medicine here.)

Step One: Believe healing is possible.

I used to think positive belief was much more important than I do now. I still believe we need grounded, ethical hope in order to keep us uplifted while we do the deep dive of what it takes to become an Olympian of healing. But after years of watching “Law of Attraction” devotees die because of their magical thinking, I now think too much positive belief, ungrounded in reality and science, can actually kill people.

But passive resignation and automatic acceptance of a doctor’s prognosis doesn’t maximize health outcomes either. There’s a sweet spot between acceptance of what’s real, without magical thinking, denial, or delusion, and holding onto a kernel of hope that you might surprise your doctors and become the next health outlier.

Some patients have told me that if they hadn’t believed there was a chance for cure, they never would have been able to endure what they had to do in order to get Olympic gold. Even if it was just an ounce of possibility, they could motivate themselves to go for it, even when they weren’t feeling well. But if all hope had been lost, they might have just rolled over and passively accepted their fate.

Paradoxically, the health outliers me and my partner Jeffrey Rediger have interviewed accepted their diagnosis, but they challenged their prognosis, not rebelling against it in an unrealistic way, but wondering about it, staying open to the possibility that their doctors might be wrong. That kernel of hope is what fuels people to be proactive in their approach to healing, taking charge of their health, rather than just giving up.

Step Two: Surrender to the wisdom of your wise Self (or intuition or God or spiritual guidance or whatever you want to call it.)

While Step One helps people take charge of their health, Step Two acknowledges that you can’t control your healing journey, no matter how proactive you might try to be. So it’s another “paradox of healing”- It helps to be proactive about taking charge of your health AND you’re not in control of the outcome, no matter how much positive belief you have and no matter how much you invest in getting better.

It’s like getting pregnant. Sure, you can track your ovulation status, eat right, take your prenatal vitamins, make sure you have sex at the right time, and go to an infertility specialist if it’s taking a long time. But even then, you can’t control whether or not your get pregnant.

Healing is like that- you can influence the outcome, but you can’t control it. And if you’re a control freak, that might not sit well with you. So Step Two is about helping you listen to your inner voice, pay attention to the guidance you’re receiving from within, and be courageous enough to act on that advice. But it’s also about letting go of attachment to outcomes. As Tosha Silver says, “The very act of grasping for the feather creates the wind current that pushes it away.” So you can go for Olympic gold, but if you’re clinging to the outcome, you’re actually stressing your nervous system and interfering with the healing process. Try hard, but let go.

Step Three: Surround yourself with healing support.

This is the relational aspect of healing, focusing on another paradox of healing- “You can heal yourself AND you can’t do it alone.” If you believe you have to do everything involved in healing all by yourself- and if you can’t dare to rely on anyone else’s love and support, that’s a recipe for illness. People in narcissistic abuse situations often feel this way, as if their needs are a burden and their only value comes in caregiving others, not being cared for. Some people don’t even feel safe challenging their physicians if they’re not getting nurturing care. But those who have exceptionally good health outcomes typically are embedded in a community of support- not just from doctors, nurses, therapists, and other healers, but from friends, family, neighbors, and spiritual communities. When we know we’re held and loved and that we matter, our nervous systems are more easily able to wind up in the ventral vagal parasympathetic state, where healing can happen.

Step Four: Diagnose the root cause of illness.

This is not the diagnosis your doctor writes in your medical chart. This step is about diagnosing why your nervous system is firing stress responses, why your body might have chronic inflammation, and why the self-healing mechanisms have broken down. What that means is that most people have to face the elephant in the room they’ve been trying to avoid- the abusive spouse, the toxic work environment, the excessive busyness, the lack of reciprocity in your friendships, the creative desert, the martyring caregiving pattern, the song still unsung- or maybe all of the above. The Whole Health Cairn was designed to help people structure this diagnostic process, to root around in all the aspects of your life that could be medicine or could be poison. Once you get out of denial and can spot the poison, you can start to heal it.

Step Five: Write The Prescription for yourself. 

Once you’ve identified what’s activating your nervous system or putting your body at risk of disease, the next step is making an intuitively-guided action plan. This might include doing what your doctor recommends, but it might also include making changes in your relationships, setting clear, firm boundaries with people who aren’t treating you right, changing your diet, giving up bad habits that might be harming your health, or hiring a therapist to help you heal your trauma. You don’t have to know the whole journey before you take the first step. One intuitively guided action step may lead to the next, and if you trust the process, all you need to know is your next right step. 

Step Six: Treat your resistance. 

100% of the people I’ve worked with, myself included, have at least some bit of resistance to the Whole Health healing process. You might be afraid to follow through on what your inner guidance is telling you to do. You might have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brakes because of the secondary gain you’re getting from your illness. You may also see a whole series of steps that overwhelm you. This is fine. Most of us have resistance to change, even positive change. 

That’s where the trauma healing method Internal Family Systems (IFS) can be very helpful. Part of the model acknowledges that we all have inner polarizations between parts of us that want to self-improve or get well and parts that have very different ideas about such things. Just look at News Years resolutions! We have parts that want us to join a gym, eat better, lose weight, quit the bad habit, becoming enlightened, etc. And then we have parts that hate the gym, love Ben & Jerry’s, are bored by meditating, and like wearing our stretch pants. IFS helps us love and become intimate with all of our parts, not just the well-intentioned ones, but the parts that might threaten to sabotage the healing journey. 

Some of our parts will be really motivated to get better so we can be free from pain, live longer, feel well enough to do what we love doing, and stick around for our loved ones. Other parts might not want to upset the apple cart, change the status quo, learn to set boundaries, dig into past pain that needs healing, or let go of benefits we might be getting by staying sick, like a disability paycheck or an excuse to say no if you struggle to set boundaries any other way. It’s no small thing to decide to end a marriage and interrupt a family, leave a soul-sucking job and the security of that paycheck, or finally delve into your painful past, so it’s no wonder some of our parts would prefer to avoid doing so. That makes sense!

It never works to bully our parts. But if we work with all of our parts compassionately, without shaming them or pretending they’re not there, we can mediate between these polarized parts and help get all our parts negotiated to be on the same page. This can help us achieve the best health outcomes without overriding parts that have legitimate fears, hesitations and resistance.

*Hat tip to Jeffrey Rediger, Shiloh Sophia & Jonathan McCloud for helping me process this list and giving me ideas. And also to my teacher Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, who taught me nearly everything I know about healing.

If you want a deeper dive, I’ll be revealing 29 more revelations about healing with our students in a new online course INSPIRED.

Learn more and register here.