Limiting Beliefs, Hope and Healing
By Lilian Sjøberg, Danish coach and trouble shooter, good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with chronic diseases such as Parkinson's Disease (PD) from a practical perspective for five years.
Stress and Symptoms
It is in the nature of chronic diseases, such as Parkinson’s Disease, that symptoms manifest most when our survival instincts (fight, flight, freeze) take over our body's function. This is why the severity and range of symptoms can vary moment to moment, hour to hour, or day by day, according to how stressed or how relaxed we are in that moment, for most chronic diseases. Here, I use the word stress in its widest possible interpretation, to denote anything which may be troubling us in the present moment, e.g. feelings, accidents, trauma, troublesome relationships, financial problems, small unresolved situations from childhood that may seem insignificant to an adult.
It is not possible to glean these most essential clues, unless we stop looking at the problem as just a brain damage issue, or as simply a disruption in chemical systems which are, in fact, more complex than any scientist can get to the bottom of in an entire lifetime. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of wild animals, and to the real world, lived experiences of people with chronic issues.
The current approach to PD and other chronic diseases won’t change until enough people understand this real world evidence, new text books are written, and the old knowledge passes out of memory, maybe thirty to fifty years from now. Most people can not afford to wait for the clinic proof to be in place, so have a choice to make:
give this real life evidence based knowledge due thought and attention, change habits, and continue to make this choice every day for life;
stay with whichever devastating symptoms manifest, and fulfil the current belief that there is nothing that can be done but degenerate.
How Symptoms are Situational
It is easy to prove this idea by studying one person at a time, but there will probably never be support for large scale trials, or the millions of dollars that these would cost. Instead, we must use our logical skills, do our own research, and test out on ourselves.
One of the principle tests we can perform on ourselves, or with anyone affected by PD or another chronic disease, is to observe whether symptoms vary over short timescales, either hour-by-hour or day-by-day. If they do fluctuate, then there is a reason for this, and it is probably stress-related. We can investigate this for ourselves by keeping diary notes to see which factors provoke the change in symptoms, e.g. diet, sunlight, weather, moon, temperature, humidity, the company we keep.
If it is genes or previous toxin damage which are causing the symptoms, since these don’t change, the symptoms would be fairly constant too, like the color of eyes. If the weather is extreme, we will see some correlations. However, under otherwise stable conditions, symptoms do still vary by a significant factor during a day or week. Maybe it is only the minute before falling into sleep that symptoms are lower, but that is also a clue.
Indeed, many people with PD will have encountered the experience of tremors becoming more significant in restaurants when people are watching, or freeze in crowds when there is a need to hurry. What is then behind the change in symptoms?
Diary notes are our own proof of concept, and we will soon have our own handful of examples before a week has passed, with careful notes. In my online course, I provide a tailored diary format that I designed specifically for the purpose of keeping such records, which can be printed out, together with instructions on how to fill it out for optimal benefit. Keeping notes is also critical for evaluating if an intervention is working, because we tend to forget the past and think that current problems are the biggest. A video is the best way to record and remember the pre-intervention status.
Another place to look is to the changing prevalence of chronic diseases, such as PD, in the population. Indeed, one can find many articles which say that the percentage of people with PD is increasing, and it is becoming an epidemic. This is also an essential clue to the root causes of the disease, especially when we look at it from a global perspective, we see that industrialized countries are hit the hardest.
While it could be due to the food we eat or pollution, one other factor is obvious. The character of our lifestyle has changed markedly over the last century. We have developed from hardworking farmworkers and labourers, to sitting still as office personnel. From producing our own vegetables by digging our garden, to online orders. Even the elevator and television can be operated without the force of muscles.
As our bodies and brain are still essentially the same version 1.0 from 100,000 years ago, in this modern environment we can get out of our natural balance due to lack of movement and exercise. Daily physical hard work once provided a mechanism for reducing stress.
While we are now more aware of lifestyle diseases, such as being overweight and smoking, we have turned a blind eye to our instinctual stress responses. Hard physical work and exercise helps because it burns off the excess adrenaline that people produce during a hectic day at the office. It helps us to fulfil the cycle of instincts towards a calm body, which the animals do by running away or fighting. See my article on survival instincts for more information as to why we produce excess adrenaline, and why this is a problem in diseases like PD.
The Placebo Effect - Believing Better is to Come
If we take all the medical studies made after 1960, we will see a phenomenon called the placebo effect that relentlessly teases scientists creating new drugs worldwide. Rather than seeing this as something which gets in the way, it is better to actually see it as a superpower that is an essential factor in diseases. It is the innate power in the human body which is so significant that it can often out perform a medical substance. Indeed, a lot of potential medications are dismissed in the clinical trial phase due to the participants finding just as much relief and healing from a sugar pill given to them in the study, instead of the medical compound.
On average, one in three people can let a pill with no active ingredients influence their health just from the belief that they are getting help from experimental medication. What is happening here is that the person is getting hope and faith in the possibility of getting better, and this hope and belief actually facilitates the healing.
When we are caught in our survival instincts, we get all sorts of symptoms. When we can totally relax out of survival mode, we have less symptoms, just wellbeing, and we can even seem to be "cured" for minutes or hours until our instincts again react, and put us back into survival mode. Examples include people with PD under hypnosis having their tremors stop, or having notably less symptoms when enjoying the company of good friends. The placebo effect works because it allows the person to relax and hence, at least temporarily, to emerge from being stuck in survival instincts mode. So, the most essential step to becoming better is to start believing that you can become better.
The Nocebo Effect - No Hope for the Future
The way in which some doctors deliver diagnoses, and also some existing medical beliefs about diseases, give us the opposite of a placebo. This is called a nocebo. It occurs when doctors unfortunately tell us that there is nothing we can do and that our condition will only worsen over time. This in itself can trap us in our survival instincts, due to the fear of degeneration hanging permanently over us.
Some disease diagnoses even come with an estimated schedule on decreasing health. According to the nocebo effect, this results in a self-fulling dark prophecy and becomes true simply because we expect it to become true. indeed, If we stay in the stressful state of hopeless and inaction, we will be blocked from ever escaping out of our survival instincts, so symptoms will indeed get worse, as expected, and, as symptoms get worse, we will become even more chronically stressed about our situation.
I had a client who slowly reduced her PD symptoms. Her doctor then gave her an even darker diagnosis as he believed that healing from PD was not possible, and hence that he must have gotten the original diagnosis wrong. The absurdity was that this new diagnosis gave 8 years of life, and as she had the PD diagnosis for 5 years, he told her that she would die in 3 years. No witchcraft could have done a better job of creating a nocebo doom. Luckily she believed me, and is now only taking medication in the morning, with no symptoms for the rest of the day. It took 4 months before he withdrew the new diagnosis.
Trusting Internal Validation
Even after such a turbulent diagnosis, the people who eventually become better are the ones who chose to trust in themselves, and the innate ability to heal. They have noticed that their symptoms vary with situations, and have chosen to do more of the things that make them calm, symptom-free, less stressful, and less stressed.
This skill of self-sensing can come more or less intuitively. The sense called interoception, which help us feel what is going on inside us, can come in handy here. Still, this sense is often detached when we are caught in our survival instincts. Hence many people with PD are seldom capable of using this at first, but with the right practices can learn to tune in better.
Blame and Shame are also Limiting Beliefs
When I start talking about this, the first thing I often hear from people is that they feel like I am blaming them for their disease, and am saying it is their own fault. I am definitely not saying this. In the same way as I would never accuse a child of being the root cause of neglect, abuse, or bullying, even later in life, no one is to blame for, say, picking the wrong partner or the wrong job that became toxic after a long time.
Certainly, as long as no one learns about any of this in school, no one is to blame.
My Way into This - Pattern Recognition
I have for five years used my biological knowledge, and collected information about how people around the world became better from various diagnoses, such as Parkinson's Disease. A few of them had the skills to put their knowledge into web pages and in videos. They made long recipes for their journey towards better health. At first glance, I could not see any similarities, but reading more and more of those stories, the patterns emerged which were common in their journeys to recovery.
The Way Out - via The Patterns of the Recovered
My studies revealed that we need to learn to relax and be calm in order to get out of the diseased stage, and the common approaches all include:
elimination of the reasons for going into survival instincts mode;
using up the surplus adrenaline that, by nature, is produced every day, via exercise and physical work (new belief: dopamine production is not the problem, it is that when we are stuck in survival mode, we convert dopamine too fast in to adrenaline);
doing more and more of the activities which help to remain in a calm state or help to escape from survival mode.
People who have already helped themselves heal via taking themselves out of prolonged stays in survival instincts, also have in common that they search for information, methods and resources which can help them, and continue until they find the techniques which work for them.
They continue relentlessly until they have reached a far lower amount of symptoms, and a regime that makes sense for them. They spend whatever money is needed and will always find a way that matches their economy. Their health is the top priority. They have no doubt about this.
It is from these recipes which I have investigated in depth, that I can provide the overviews given above, and also in my survival instincts article, and I go into much more practical detail in my online course.
Summary
Symptoms are situational.
The severity and range of symptoms often vary considerably with the situation we are currently in. Examples include the differences in symptoms when we are in crowds, or in good company, in summer or winter, and in particular, in stress or in relaxation.
Any good theory of chronic disease needs to explain these fluctuations, and I propose that getting stuck in survival instincts mode, or defensive stress states, is in the majority of cases the greatest factor that negatively impacts on symptoms. Likewise learning how to relax and how to get unstuck from our survival instincts is the most beneficial factor and quickest route for reducing symptoms.
Part of my own "HOPE-shortcut" method is keeping track of symptoms with meticulous diary records, giving the ability to connect the fluctuations with the situations. This is the most practical way to make sense of our real world, lived experiences of symptoms, and hence for moving towards healing and progressive symptom reduction.
In alignment with the placebo effect, the main purpose of the self-observations is to focus the attention on the positive things which reduce the symptoms, and realising the situations which makes things worse, so as to eliminate the root causes . The more often a symptom occurs, and the more it varies according to a given situation, the easier it is to find the root cause. So by using the most varying symptoms as a guide to what to investigate first, a much faster result is achievable.
About Me
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