The Body Doesn't Lie (8 page)

Sarah got pregnant within a few months of the all-clear from her gynecologist. Ten months later, after a full-term pregnancy and a blissfully uneventful delivery, she held a beautiful little baby girl in her arms. But perhaps the most wonderful gift of all was the internal strength Sarah built when she had the courage to reflect on her fear, face her pain, and release her anger. She had finally regained her trust in herself. She healed herself, reignited her Adaptive Response, and started living in the positive once more. Now she simply radiates with mother love—and her lower back pain has left her for good.

Your own experience with lower back pain may not be nearly as traumatic—you may simply need a new desk chair! But you owe it to yourself to find out for sure. In general, I’ve found that releasing deep-seated
emotional
pain releases lower back pain more powerfully than any other treatment.

Upper back pain, or the variant of neck and shoulder tension, is another common complaint made by my patients. The people experiencing this type of pain have to listen to their body and reflect for a moment:

Am I feeling anger or fear? Insecurity perhaps?

Could it be that the bonus I was expecting never came?

Does that make me feel inadequate?

Does it leave me feeling scared about myself and my family’s future?

Does it leave me feeling out of control?

Neck pain and upper back symptoms tend to occur in people who suffer with present-day problems. Their emotions are typically centered on current worries and anxieties, which together have a compounding effect that ultimately triggers the physical symptoms. One emotion leads to another and then another, and the emotional pain and fear accelerate until they become overwhelming and finally manifest as physical distress. In addition to upper back pain, these people may have neck pain, sinus trouble, headaches, panic, flaky nails, and hair loss.

Do any of these symptoms resonate with you? If so, think about your situation. Sometimes these upper back issues stem from having endured something like a car accident and whiplash, and of course such things have to be investigated. More often, though, the pain arises from feeling unsettled, scared, or even panicked about life. Does that sound like you? Perhaps your mouth guard is your best friend—without it, you might clench your teeth so hard that you’d fracture them. Fear of financial loss may consume your thoughts; you may find that you can’t have sex with your partner because you’re thinking, “How are we going to pay the bills?” The stress of the present situation may be standing in your way of enjoying life.

My number-one piece of advice to people with upper back and neck pain is always radical stress relief and parasympathetic rehab. You need to improve your body’s response to stress, and the only way to do that is deep relaxation and self-care—a lesson that my patient Adam finally learned for himself.

When I first met Adam, he’d just come from a breakfast meeting, and he was scheduled for an international conference call in ninety minutes. I had come to treat him in his office due to his busy schedule.

“Let’s just focus on my shoulders,” he said, his eyes on his iPhone as he did a final scan of his e-mail. “I’m really tight right now.”

Tight would be an understatement: His shoulders were completely seized up, and as my hands worked over his upper back, I found several clumps of accumulated tension—what felt like years of blocked bloodflow in his tissues. “How long has it been since you’ve had a massage, Adam?” I asked as I gently removed his Bluetooth device from his ear and reached for my acupuncture needles.

“About two days,” he said.

I was grateful that his eyes were closed so he didn’t see my jaw drop open. Turns out that Adam had a steady rotation of massage therapists, physical trainers, executive coaches, nutritionists, chefs, and doctors coming through his office. A whole army of professionals constantly circling, on call to help him manage his stress level! At forty-seven, he’d recently been given a stern warning by his cardiologist that his blood pressure and cholesterol were dangerously high. His dentist had told him that he might have to get crowns because his back teeth were being damaged by all the tension in his jaw. Despite his legion of caretakers, Adam still hadn’t enlisted the help of the one person who could make a real difference in his health: himself.

When I inserted the needles, I could see from the way they reacted that some of that upper back pain and neck pain was also masking referred pain from his heart. Working twenty-four/seven, always pursuing the next big deal, Adam told himself he thrived on the “rush” of business—but I’d seen enough adrenaline junkies to know when the rush had become an unhealthy addiction and was headed for a crash. That was Adam in a nutshell.

At the end of the session, Adam grabbed his phone and started scanning his messages. Without looking up, he said, “Vicky, I feel fantastic—I’d like you to come every day.”

I smiled. “I’m really flattered, Adam,” I said. “But I’m not coming back here until you do something for me.” He looked up, dumbfounded. I guess he wasn’t used to hearing the word
no.

I explained to him that I didn’t think I could do him any good until he slowed down a bit and gave his sympathetic nervous system a rest. “Otherwise, it’s like using a water gun to put out a burning house—there’s really no point.”

I told him that I wanted him to do a couple of Reflect exercises for me, and I described the Time Audit and the Food Diary. I asked him to take a week to reflect on how he was treating himself; once he had that information gathered, I said, I’d come back and we could work together to tackle the Release phase and release some of his pain.

He took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. I hear you.”

A week later I came back, and we took a hike together—no phones, no Bluetooth—while he told me about his week. “It was an eye-opener,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much espresso I was downing—it’s a wonder my heart hasn’t exploded!” He told me that completing the Time Audit was the first clue he’d had that he wasn’t sleeping seven hours a night: “If I’m lucky, I sleep five,” he said. “But I’m usually awake in the middle of the night, my mind racing. I hate to waste time just lying there, so I get up and do something.”

The hours in between weren’t much calmer. The only time he had “relaxed,” he discovered, was when he made love to his wife—just once in seven days. “Definitely need to work on that!” he joked.

We talked about his Release plan. Clearly, his biggest issue was his electronic leash—but what was he so afraid he would miss? And, more important, how much of his real life was he missing in the process?

Adam begrudgingly agreed to turn off his phone for three hours a day, in order to have evenings with his family and really engage with his kids and his wife. He also agreed to dump the white bread and pizza, cut way back on the espresso (he said he couldn’t go cold turkey), and start each day with a Liver Flush Smoothie. He also agreed to make love with his wife at least two or three times a week. “Now that’s what I call a prescription!” he said, grinning.

By the time I saw him the following week, Adam’s shoulders looked about a foot lower than the week before. When I got him on the table, sure enough—his neck felt loose and some of the long-standing knots in his shoulders and back melted under my touch. He confessed that he hadn’t told me about chest pains that had previously been coming and going. “I think I was in denial,” he said, adding that he hadn’t felt anything alarming in at least five days.

We ended our session with his promise to continue to look for more ways to disconnect and to baby his nervous system—and despite his still-strong urge to go-go-go, Adam has thus far stuck to that promise. Rebuilding his Adaptive Response is a work in progress. Adam is slowly but surely learning to value himself, even when he isn’t dashing around making deals, producing, being “successful” every moment. He’s learning to take a longer view and develop a new definition of success. He’s also learning how to feed his soul with rest, relaxation, and health-supporting anti-inflammatory foods; how to connect with people he loves; and, most important, how to face his demons. Adam’s upper back pain still comes and goes, but it no longer defines him—and neither does his work.

As you read through the descriptions of upper back pain and lower back pain types, did anything resonate with you? Did you see yourself in one or both of those stories? Are you starting to understand how the Reflect process can help you face and understand the root of your pain? Once you understand it, you can begin the work of ending the negative spiral and strengthening your Positive Feedback muscles.

For many of us, whether we realize it or not, Negative Feedback is an entirely voluntary state. We make conscious and unconscious choices on a day-to-day level that keep us in the negative. But our dissatisfaction bubbles beneath the surface.

Figure 3.
Positive Feedback Cycle

On an intuitive level, often even on a conscious level, we know we can’t live like that for very long—but still we stay disconnected from our body and we deny our basic physical needs until we hit a breaking point. However, once we’re ready to make a change, change comes thundering toward us with open arms.

Many people spend months or years stumbling around in Negative Feedback while their will to change is bubbling under the surface. All it takes is one moment to shift that energy. It’s like the precise moment when hot water finally comes to a boil: We’re suddenly ready to make the transition into the self-care of Positive Feedback.

The Positive Feedback approach recognizes that we are complex beings and require multifaceted approaches; it allows us to use multiple strategies at once, each one bringing us further into the Positive Feedback cycle (see figure 3).

If you’re drowning in the negative, you can choose to acknowledge and listen to your pain and make it a transformative experience. As social worker and
Daring Greatly
author Brené Brown puts it, you can make your break
down
a break
through
. For every negative choice you make, you can make the opposite choice. As you begin to make those positive choices, your body will spend more and more time in Positive Feedback, waking up your Adaptive Response, tamping down your inflammation, and getting your body closer to its natural state of self-healing.

I was incredibly fortunate to learn the basic components of the Positive Feedback approach from my parents as a little girl. But even with my mother’s and father’s guidance, I didn’t always follow the positive path—that is, until I had my own Negative Feedback breakdown. Let me tell you a bit about my story so you can understand why I’ve become such a passionate believer in the power of the Positive Feedback way of life. Maybe you’ll recognize a bit of yourself in my story, too.

2

Living in the Positive

Mindfulness should not be thought of as a technique but rather a way of being. It is practiced for its own sake and cultivated daily, regardless of circumstances.

—Jon Kabat-Zinn

W
hen I was a young girl, every night before bed my mom would sit on the floor with me, both of us with our legs crossed and our backs up against the wall. We would close our eyes and start breathing in a very deliberate way. In soft tones, Mom would say, “Think in your third eye point. And now, slowly, keep breathing in and out. And count: three-three-three, two-two-two, one-one-one.”

My mom would then do a guided meditation with me, mentally taking me to a secret place I loved as a child, a beach near our home in Greece. She would help me to visualize myself carrying a younger version of me in my arms. In my mind, I would carry myself as a little girl and protect her, all the while saying aloud, as Mom coached me to say, “I’m strong, I’m happy. It’s positive; there’s no negative here. I’m the best.” When I came out of that meditation, I had those positive thoughts in my head as I drifted off to sleep.

Mom and I did this practice for years and years. I could
feel
that it helped me, and that intuition is now supported by science. Researchers now know that meditation lowers blood pressure, decreases risk of depression and anxiety, improves immune-system function, and lowers pain sensitivity. Brown University scientists believe that meditation works because it allows a person to gain control over certain alpha brain rhythms that manage how the brain processes and filters sensations and thoughts, including pain and sad memories.
¹
Even just brief bouts of meditation can change the very structure of your brain in ways that can eventually help you become more engaged with the current moment, more content and grateful for your blessings, and more empathetic to the struggles and triumphs of other people.

Of course, Mom didn’t know about the cutting-edge neuroscience that would prove the benefits of meditation decades later; she was simply following her intuition. She knew on some level that our thoughts create our reality. To this day I’m still reaping the benefits of those early meditations and the strength I got from my mom.