Status Updates From How to Do the Work: Recogni...

It’s hard enough experiencing disappointment alone; it’s even harder to have a witness to your perceived failures.

The shame spirals and reactivity had become so familiar and predictable that they became a reliable part of their relationship.

You can begin to move forward by consistently engaging in the following activities: Witnessing the ways you remain “stuck” in your past conditioning Setting a conscious daily intention to change Setting small, actionable steps that support daily choices aligned with a different future outcome Empowering these daily choices despite the universal experience and presence of mental resistance

The first way to create change is to begin to practice imagining a future that’s different from your past and present realities.

The practice of making consistent, small, daily choices through these push-and-pull resistances helps empower us to maintain change.

choice enables healing.

Healing is a daily event. You can’t “go somewhere” to be healed; you must go inward to be healed. This means a daily commitment to doing the work. You are responsible for your healing and will be an active participant in that process. Your level of activity is directly connected to your level of healing. Small and consistent choices are the path to deep transformation.

When our body expects to get better, it sends out messages to start the healing process. Hormones, immune cells, and neurochemicals are all released. The placebo effect provides proof that when we believe we are going to get better or feel better, we often do. It’s a testament to the power of the mind to affect the body with mere suggestion.

We can provide ourselves with the nurturing we may not have received as children. We can learn to give ourselves secure bonds and the ability to create a sense of safety. We can change what we eat, how often we exercise, our state of consciousness, and the thoughts and beliefs we express. Take us away from, ‘You are the victim of life,’ to introducing the fact that we are the creators of our life.

children of trauma survivors, including those who endure ongoing systemic racism, have shown health issues similar to those of their parents as well as increased rates of many diseases.

genetics are not destiny.
I believed that because my family was sick, I was destined to be sick, too. The epigenetic perspective gave me the tools to reframe my perception of my own body. I may have inherited certain propensities from my family, but that didn’t mean I had to become them.

everything from the amniotic fluid that surrounds us in the womb to the words we hear from our parent-figures as children to the air we breathe to the chemicals we ingest influences our genes, causing some to switch on and others to switch off We do have a genetic code at birth. But gene expression and repression are influenced by our environment. In other words: our life experiences alter us at the cellular level.

When we don’t ask how we can contribute to our own wellness, we become helpless and dependent. The message we learn is this: we are totally at the whim of our bodies, and the only way to feel okay is to put our health into the hands of clinicians, who have the magic bullets that can make us better, who have all the answers, who can save us.

The idea of harnessing the power of the body to help heal

We are not merely expressions of coding but products of remarkable arrays of interactions that are both within and outside of our control. Once we see beyond the narrative that genetics are destiny, we can take ownership of our health. This allows us to see how “choiceless” we once were and empowers us with the ability to create real and lasting change.

By assigning a genetic cause, we naturally imagine our sickness to be part of who we are. When we become a diagnosis, it decreases incentive to change or try to explore root causes. We identify with the label. This is who I am.

Medicine became a field of intervention. When symptoms emerge, a physician is there to manage them, either by eradicating them, or by treating them (with prescription medicines that come with known and unknown side effects). Instead of listening to the body—after all, symptoms are its way of communicating with us—we seek to silence it. In the process of suppressing symptoms, we often suffer new harms.

clinicians treat the mind (psychology or psychiatry) or the body (every other branch of medicine) and rarely incorporate treatment for both at the same time. This arbitrary separation of mind and body holds medicine back from its potential for healing and sometimes even makes us sicker in the process.

Sometimes she is smart and healthy goirl

Listening to this and it's really interesting and helpful

You are your best healer.

Might dropb this one... lots of magical thinking

Hmmm comienza a sonar a chamanismo y pensamientos mágicos....

Diving into the Process of past trauma and childhood trauma and how it unfolds in our adults lives.

Ok she’s just straight up lying here, claiming that „Western medicine“ treats body and mind as completely separate. The reason why you go to different doctors for different ailments is because it often takes specialised care and not because they believe in „mind body separation“?? Also, the ENTIRE FIELD of psychosomatic medicine exists??? Why is she lying about this?

What she describes here really baffles me. Using mindfulness in therapy is a universally accepted and practiced intervention, especially within CBT. Also, we have had the biopsychosocial model since the 70s?? And we’re using it in psychology alright. What she says here is simply not true, that everyone but her ignores the deep connections between body, psyche and our environment.

No, emotion addiction isn’t a thing. Yes, we are biologically built to seek out certain emotions, but that doesn’t turn emotions into addictions. This is a potentially harmful concept that turns something we can’t help (i.e. seek out certain emotions that make us feel good and at peace) into something to be ashamed of and to be controlled.

Also agree with her critical view of CBT. The best guess that we have on how emotions are made doesn’t support the thesis that only changing thoughts can sustainably change the way we feel. Would have actually loved to see a bit of the recent research in this field reflected here.

Deeply empathise with her here.

Loving this book! Such an interesting read with actual ways to take action. Very well written and easy to understand. I’ve been following her for a while on Instagram so I’m glad i got my hands on her book!