Episode #74- Client Success Stories

In this Episode I am joined today by 3 former clients, so you can hear first hand how Body and Mind Lifecoaching with me has transformed their lives.  

 

They started with chronic hamstring pain, SI pain, 10+ years of chronic back pain, foot neuropathy, and chronic fatigue.  

 

Now they are all chronic pain free.  

 

They learned:

• What kinds of thoughts or feelings were contributing to their physical pain.
• Strategies to calm their nervous system, and rewire their brain to produce less pain.
• How to identify and reframe thoughts that were causing chronic fight or flight.
• How to tune into, and make peace with their bodies.
• To understand that when old or new pains come up, it is a message to check in with themselves.
• Tools to identify, process, and move through their emotions and physical pain.
• Confidence in their ability to handle the unknown in the future.

Curious to see if coaching could help you?  This fall I will have a group coaching option available, as well as a few 1:1 spots.

 

For fresh content on healing chronic pain or disease, follow Betsy

on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Here is the contact information for:

Martha Doornink - https://www.facebook.com/martha.doornink

 

Jane Springer- website https://www.janespringer.com/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jane.p.springer.9 contact Jane https://www.janespringer.com/contact/

 

Transcript-Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 74, Client Success Stories. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become unstoppable body and mind. Welcome today. I have three special guests on the show today, people that have coached with me and I am going to talk with them and let them introduce themselves a little bit.
Let's start with Jane. Maybe just introduce yourself a little, what your symptoms were when we met and what drew you to coaching with me.
My name is Jane Springer and I started coaching with you, Betsy, because I had read the book by John Sarno about back pain a while back. And so I was already familiar with his principles. And then I heard you on Katrina Ubell's podcast.
And so from that, that's why I contacted you, but I had had hamstring pain for over a year. And I thought that I had injured it with a trainer, but then it just kept on and on. And I did all kinds of things.
I went to physical therapy, and I did all kinds of remedies. I went to different doctors and they wanted to inject me with stuff. And so I just said no.
And so, I mean, I was open because nothing that I was doing was helping. So that's why I contacted you.
Yeah, that's I think a common thing where you've tried lots of physical treatments and nothing has helped. Okay, great. So Vicki, how about you?
What kind of symptoms did you have when we first talked and what drew you to mind-body coaching?
Yeah, yeah, my name is Vicki Rowe. I'm a pediatrician. And actually tomorrow as my 25th, I'll celebrate 25 years having done private practice.
So, and a lot of my mind-body issues are related to that, that circumstance. But yes, I also learned about you through Katrina Ubell. I was in her Weight Loss for Doctors Only program.
Over about a year ago, I finished when COVID hit. And then my income was kind of taking a hit. So I kind of just laid low out of coaching, listen to her podcast.
And your episode just really, really clicked with me because I just feel like, I got the weight and the eating under control, but I have a couple of pain issues, mostly a neuropathy in one of my feet. And that had caused me a lot of trouble, especially with my call schedule. But the primary thing, I felt like I'd learned to work around that.
But the chronic fatigue was just something that I, just for years and years, could not get a handle on. I felt really good if I'd slept a lot, but I'd seen, done three sleep studies, all kinds of work on that. And so I thought, yeah, this could really help me.
All right, Martha, what about you? What kind of symptoms were you having and what drew you to coaching?
Yeah, so I knew about coaching because I'm a certified health coach as well as a Life Coach School certified coach and a back pain sufferer for 10 or 12 years. And it was getting worse and progressively more life-affecting and life-constraining. I was starting to feel really worried about certainly big things like working out or taxing my body, but even like leaning over to pick up a pencil because my back had gone out so many times with such a minor situation.
And we're retired, so we're a little nomadic, COVID notwithstanding. We have a place in the Napa Valley that we've had for many, many years, and we happened to end up being at that location during the fires last fall. And our old, old house was, I mean, people all around us were burning, and it was truly terrifying.
And I came back from that eight days, we finally left and said, we need to breathe air, we need to go somewhere clear. And when I got to the next location, I was like, wow, even I can tell there is a huge connection here between the fact that I am in full back rest, I cannot move, I'm in dire pain. And I called a medical office that's nearby, and they did inject my back.
And then I spent the rest of that day almost fully asleep. And I just thought, no, this is not a way forward in my life. This is getting worse.
I can see there's a stress connection, a psychology connection here. So being a coach, we're on a common Facebook group. And I have read Dr. Sarno, and this episode led me back to Dr. Sarno, thinking this is it.
This is what's really going on here for me. I have a chiropractor in every location, every port. It only ever works for a few days.
So I had texted you, I emailed you on Facebook for a consultation right as Katrina Ubell, who I listen to every week. That episode had come out. So I was like, okay, this is definitely a confirmation.
I'm going in the right direction. And it was really miraculous. Awesome.
After that, because we started my body coaching right after that.
Yes. And we could talk about that maybe first with you, Martha, because you had quite a quick turnaround. Do you want to talk about some of your quick success that you had?
I feel like I was, yeah, it was kind of a perfect storm of really miraculous, amazing success. And because I was trained in coaching the entire year before, and I had done self coaching scholars as well for a year before that, my self-awareness was definitely in a new place. Hopefully I haven't stopped and I'll continue to grow in that, but it was a combination of self-awareness, being very open to the likelihood that there was a mind-body connection at the foundation of this.
And really, truly for me, believing there is no separation between the mind and the body. This is just one structural system and that it's really very artificial to separate the two. So I was very open to that.
And everything that you and I coached on at the beginning, it was clearly just a bunch of thoughts. And I started actually turning around my belief, that my dad was a doctor. He lived to almost 102.
And because he was elderly for so long, I really remembered him saying, hey, if you want to become weak in your elderly years, just go sit in that chair over there and don't get up. Don't use your body. It was like, no, my body becomes more strong.
Like a weight lifter becomes strong when I use it. I'm getting stronger by using it. So that was a real turnaround for me.
What other kinds of results did you have from coaching? And then we'll talk to the other ladies.
Well, okay, I haven't been. Betsy, this happened within a month of you and I starting coaching.
And the results are not typical. I'm gonna even say that because everyone is on their own path. And I'm just gonna interject just a tiny bit too, Martha, with your story, because I love this.
You kind of alluded to some traumatic things in your childhood and like, I don't really wanna go there and I don't wanna dig that up. And kind of in my own head, I was like, oh yeah, we'll have to go there for this pain to resolve. And you didn't, which is another kind of, not typical result, but it did happen.
And I will say, parenthetically at this time, I haven't been to a chiropractor since last October. That is a miracle for me. I have not had low back pain at all.
I do respect that my body and my brain were very used to handling my stress and my emotional life by putting it out through my body. It continues to try that. I think there's sort of a little whack-a-mole, like get one side fully hammered down, and there's another area that might be trying to come up, but I'm on to it now.
Yeah. Yeah, it can be information.
I use the tools. I know what, I can see what's happening.
If there's specific things that, like specific results that you gain from coaching that you maybe didn't expect.
I did not expect the ease. I believed that it was fully possible that the whole thing was resolvable through the understanding this mind-body connection.
Yeah.
And we know our mind is that powerful. But that really truly, that was not an attempt. That was a legitimate belief on my part.
I truly still feel that way.
Yeah.
I do coaching on my body now because it's so amazing and so dramatic. To me, to understand that I did not have to go back and parse year by year, we're retired now. My life is, I'm well through at 66.
That would be a lot of going back, right? And I didn't have to do that. So that has been amazing to me to realize the power of just understanding the mechanism of the emotional life on the body, and acknowledging that the emotions are there.
Which as a people pleasing person, as a good girl, as a nice person, that doesn't even live on my island normally, right? I had to get a new place to appreciate that.
Oh yeah, that's some good stuff. All right, Jane, what about you with kind of what you learned from coaching, the results that you had with your body?
I had been struggling with this for a year. And when we started diving into the mind-body stuff, I mean, we started talking about things that might be bothering me, what's going on in my mind. And it turned out that I had been obsessing about my coaching business and picking a niche and figuring out what I wanted to do for five years.
And so, my body just decided that it had enough. So, I kept saying, oh, it's the trainer. She just started something really fast and I just injured something.
But then after we started working together, I was learning that I can talk back to my back, to my leg and say, it's okay, it's all right. We got this, you don't have to stress about it. And so, I've gotten so I'll talk to my body.
And then in the middle of when we were coaching, I had a very disturbing and upsetting situation with my sister. And we became estranged and it was not a good situation. And the hamstring pain was gone, but then I was getting SI pain bad, and particularly on one side.
So we explored that, like talking to it and figuring out what's the color and letting go and those kinds of things. And so now I know that if my hamstring or my SI joints or some other thing that all of a sudden pops up in my body, then I say, wait a minute, what's going on? Okay, so there must be something going on.
I'm stressing about something. I'm thinking about something. And it's funny because since we scheduled this, my SI joints, and I haven't talked to my sister in months, and I'm not stressing about that, but we're leaving for North Georgia tomorrow.
And so I've been busy running around, trying to buy all the groceries and pack all the stuff and figure it all out. And so today I was thinking to myself, okay, now we can just calm down about this, and it'll be okay. It'll be okay.
We'll leave tomorrow. And if they have stores up in North Georgia, I'm pretty sure we forget something, it's okay. So I just take a good look at what is going on right now in my brain, what am I stressing about?
And generally, you know, now I can figure it out. I don't automatically assume, oh, I need a Tylenol, or oh, I need a heating pad, or something like that.
And so you don't have chronic pain of any kind, but you have some...
Not anymore. No, it comes and goes.
And then you kind of check in with yourself when you get that pain as kind of a reminder or a red flag.
Yeah. One of the things when coaching with you, you'd say, okay, honey, what's happening? And so I try and say that kind of stuff to myself, like, okay, dear, what's happening now?
And gently and with compassion, instead of like, oh my gosh, it hurts so bad. Why does this have to happen? That kind of thing.
Yes. All right, Vicki, you've had some amazing results with your foot and your fatigue.
Yeah, it's, yeah, definitely beyond, a little beyond what I thought would be possible even. Cool. So yeah, because especially with my foot pain, I, you know, is some one of those things that was just gradually improving after 12 years.
I was like, fine. You know, I just kind of worked my life around it. I just, you know, didn't stand a lot.
I actually have a motor scooter for my hospital rounds. But yeah, even just now I'm to the point where I'm even seeing some improvement, and that has been really huge. But I kind of started out, I think, you know, listening to your podcast for a while before we started coaching was great.
I started, you know, especially doing like, you know, the somatic tracking and the pen vent and some of the things that you've taught. And, you know, doing a little bit of self-study on mind-body stuff, you know, like Dr. Sarno and some things like that. But yeah, I still remember one of the first times I coached, I woke up with a headache, which was really common for me to wake up with headaches.
And usually, I just, it would happen on my days off. And I think it's because as I put, I think I even told you at the time, I would just, well, I slept really hard. And when I sleep hard, you know, then I've got all this tension, residual tension in my head, you know, after 10, 12 hours of sleep.
But once the headache's gone, then I feel pretty good. So I was so used to taking ibuprofen, and I remember you coaching me through the headache. And I, honest to God, have not, I think maybe once in the last nine months, have I taken ibuprofen for a headache.
It's like, I'll just maybe have, you know, if I have one at all when I wake up, I usually can just, you know, knock it out. So I think that gave me the confidence to start tackling some of the other things. Like I had an old SI joint injury that, you know, was still flaring up and I was able to practice on that.
But fatigue seemed, it was harder for me to get my head around that because it wasn't just pain, it was, you know, just emotion. And well, sometimes you're just like, well, maybe I really didn't sleep enough this night, or maybe I did. And so, yeah, so we just basically, as you know, we've done a ton of work on, you know, accepting it, but also not being so fearful.
And for me, a lot of the fight or flight, you know, getting out of fight or flight so that I don't have so much residual exhaustion at the end of my day has been the huge part.
That's such a great thing to point out, right? Like it takes a lot of your resources to be in constant fight or flight. And as a doctor, you kind of thought you had to be in fight or flight all the time to be on your best, just to not miss anything.
Yeah, and that was really probably when I, even when I listened back to the first time I talked with you, I was still like kind of convinced that, well, that's what they train you in med school is, you've got to be just on top of it because a patient, if you make a mistake, you can write a bad prescription or miss a diagnosis. So my way of coping with that was always just to stay like super highly focused. And I think through working with you and then even exploring some other things that ER physicians and with some military people do, how it's like, yeah, maybe your fight or flight is good for two seconds, but then you really got it, even if you're in the middle of a battle, you got to calm it down and relax.
And just that going from hypervigilant to vigilant and trusting that I was actually going to do a better job if I kept just vigilant and kept my parasympathetic nervous system engaged, which as a doctor was good too, because I'm like all about the parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system. All of it made so much sense to me from a medical standpoint too.
Yeah, and it made sense cognitively, but then it took some practice to really not be revved up.
Yeah.
So it does take some practice sometimes, and that's totally normal, especially if you've been kind of primed for that anxiety and hypervigilance, like you said.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, and now it's funny because we kind of coached earlier today, so you know this. So I feel like I've gotten better with some of that hypervigilance at work, but now I'm kind of dealing with the anxiety on my days off.
And originally, I was having that. We did a lot of work about the to-do list and accepting just getting a little bit out of fear about the to-do list and trusting. So we did a ton of work on that.
But yeah, now it's, you know, I think just I'm still having that time when I'm not at work. I'm like, oh gosh, what's going to happen? So but I feel more trusting that I feel trusting that I'm going to get there because I feel like we've come through so much else.
Yeah, I think the progress you made with fatigue was so phenomenal because it seemed really impossible for you to believe differently when we started. And I remember how much you argued for, you know, I need this much sleep and how bad it was. Yeah, I didn't get the sleep.
And once you started actually kind of allowing yourself to sleep the amount that you needed to, you actually found you needed less sleep than you thought.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I had days where I didn't, I, you know, just didn't freak out about it. And I still came home like even a couple of days ago, I came home just, you know, pretty tapped out after it was a good day after vacation.
But I kind of knew what to do. And, you know, I did a lot of, I do a lot of your meditations. And, you know, it kind of helped me to conceptualize my fatigue as I would say, well, it's kind of like a migraine.
It's like, you know, it's and so sometimes, you know, one thing migraine sufferers do is sleep. And sleep a lot of times cures their migraine. So sometimes when I would do the somatic tracking and get into the actual symptoms of the fatigue, there are a lot of times I'll actually fall asleep doing it.
And I'm like, well, that's fine. You know, that's a great way to fall asleep for me. And other times I can let it pass.
And, you know, it's like get to the end of it and look at it much more neutrally than, oh, my gosh, it's a catastrophe. I'm like, so tired. I'm gonna fall asleep driving my car or something.
Right. Yeah, there was kind of this like everything seemed like survival mode or life or death. And just showing your brain that it doesn't have to be in fight or flight all the time.
Yeah.
So good. I'll just open up to any of you to take this leap of faith. Were there some doubts that you had about if this mind body stuff would work?
And maybe what helped you decide to do coaching that might help someone else?
I personally don't want to coach anybody who has zero belief that my body is part of their symptom situation and their pain situation. So if they have zero, no. But if someone has even 10 or 20 percent of an open mind, that yes, that amount, even if they have a diagnosis in their hand, if they also reserve the possibility that the mind-body component could be in play, this is pay dirt.
This is where you can really begin to see some resolution that you have not been able to get through other sources.
Yeah, that's such a good point, because I think sometimes people think, well, I have to believe, you know, believing is a huge component of having your pain actually go away. And I have to fully believe and I don't.
So I think just having an open mind and a willingness to that's the possibility that that's what is.
What about you, Jane or Vicki?
Well, I was, you know, to the end of my rope, so to speak. And when I heard you on Katrina's podcast and reminded me about Dr. Sarno, whom I'd read years ago, it clicked all of a sudden, like, I really need to investigate this because everything else has not worked. And I'd much rather work on my brain than get injected or take medicine or anything like that.
So I would encourage anybody to at least be open to the idea that there is a connection and that it's worth exploring.
Yeah. With Vicki, do you have any comments on that?
You know, I kind of felt like I was ready to roll like after listening to your podcasts and everything, and just, you know, doing some self study, I think just because I'd seen so much of it, even in pediatrics, you know, it's definitely not an area that I'm trained in is, you know, pain management. But, you know, just having seen for years and years, you know, just with myself and my patients, you know, how much, you know, biofeedback, desensitization, things like that help. And I was kind of ready, you know, I'm like, hey, you know, this is like, after all the money I've spent on, you know, my deductible for, you know, different orthotics for my shoes and, you know, tens units and, you know, CPAP, I even did CPAP for a while, even though my sleep studies didn't even actually show significant sleep apnea.
I tried CPAP and that didn't work. So, yeah, I'm like, and even just like, you know, seeing if, okay, maybe there's some vitamin things that, you know, maybe there's something like that out there. But yeah, when I think of how little money I have spent on any of that in the last year, I was like, okay, that definitely was a good investment, you know.
Yeah.
And same thing with like doing the weight loss. I kind of learned that through the weight loss coaching too, that it's like, okay, it's an investment, but I look at it as the semester I never had in medical school. And, you know, it's just stuff I really need to learn for myself and my patients.
So that kind of motivated me. So yeah, so I was pretty sure I would get results. I just wasn't exactly sure what it would be, but it's, you know, definitely has exceeded expectations.
Oh, fantastic. Yeah. Amazing.
All right. What was it like for you to work with me? My ears are burning.
No. But as far as did you, what was the atmosphere like? Did you feel supported?
What was it like? Martha, do you want to start?
I so admire your light approach. You have a very light-hearted approach. I always felt completely supported and contained safely.
So let's just start there. And that was really quite a good start out of the gate, right?
But then the sense of your humor and your light-heartedness and your warmth really comes through when you coach. And I think when we're talking about people who are having pain and dealing with painful emotions and things they haven't acknowledged or confronted maybe yet or are processing, very, very, very helpful. Really, really helpful.
Thank you. Yeah, that is beautiful to hear. I know you said after, I think after our consult, you said, I can already feel you holding space for me, which was such a cool, cool compliment.
Jane.
I mean, I totally agree with Martha. I think it was kind of your gentle spirit that, you know, all these things that I've been obsessing about and the thing that I went through with my family member, it was very painful and not just physically, but emotionally. And I just felt really very much supported.
And, you know, you even helped me see the other side too. And I just think that you have a very healing kind of spirit.
So that was what my big takeaway about coaching with you was, no matter what kind of condition, how much pain I was in or what I was going through, that you were supporting me, supportive.
Thank you so much. Vicki, darling.
Well, I think as you guys, the other two are saying, you're dealing with someone that's in quite a bit of physical and emotional pain. So I think just really being able to empathize without just saying like, yeah, you're right. Your life's awful.
That's terrible. Get out of that. You would listen and then be like, okay.
I still remember you saying, you'll go, okay, we can make a case for that.
It starts to kind of poke holes in things. And sometimes it's still, even after a session, I'd have to kind of go back and be like, okay, what do I really believe? And as you know, sometimes I couldn't come up with a thought right there on the call, but after a few days, I'd be like, okay, I think I've got a new thought that will help me through this thought model.
So yeah, so that kind of really like in-depth supportive coaching, I think has been huge for me. And I have gone back into the group, you know, kind of the group setting too, to continue to work on doctor things and eating and stuff like that. But yeah, this was definitely, you know, definitely a good piece of it for me was working with you.
Amazing.
You know how they say, a very famous coach has said her first coach, she would tell her first coach, you think you live in New York City, but you actually live in my head. So I have to say, there is a good Betsy tape in my head where I can hear you saying, no, that is just a thought.
Good. I'm glad to have that lasting effect on you too. What did you think about the frequency having weekly sessions?
Martha?
Yeah. Well, you know, because my physical pain resolved so unexpectedly early, to my expectation it was early, and I think it was kind of early anyway, we were able to move on to other components of coaching for me that anyone would need continued coaching on relationships. Probably that was the main focus that we worked on and continued to work on.
But I found having the luxury of one-on-one coach for an hour every week really kept me on track with my own work in between. It may not have looked like that to you, but I feel like we covered a lot of ground.
Yeah, no, you did great work. I think I covered a lot. No, yeah, I do think there's that time and space in between sessions, and sometimes it goes by fast, and you're like, oh, another session already.
But you don't necessarily have to prepare anything or do anything between sessions, yeah?
And what you find out, no, you don't. And what you find out really quickly, even while, for me, I think this is a generally speaking thing, but certainly for me, I would show up at a session thinking at the first moment, I really don't have too much to coach on. Ha ha, watch out, those are the ones where you really will find out you probably have them.
That is the truth.
A bunch of things you haven't been willing to really consider that are on the table that you can benefit from coaching on.
And just cause you get coached on it once doesn't mean it's like a one and done necessarily, so.
Really highlighted the process for me, for sure.
Yeah, oh, great.
Yeah, same for me. You know, some of the sessions would be about the pain and exploring that. But then I knew that I could bring relationship stuff, business, you know, the whole thing about, you know, what I wanted to do with my business.
And we coached on everything. So I think that was a very much of benefit that we had in a whole hour to explore that every week. So I had something every week that I could bring forward to talk about and get coached on.
So your versatility was super helpful because it wasn't all about the mind, body stuff. We could coach on anything.
That is true. And, you know, you too know who are trained as coaches. You know, you can coach on those different things because you're just helping show people their own mind.
And that's what we're trained as coaches to do, is not to necessarily tell them everything to do and walk them through it and be accountability partners. We can surely help with that. But the main thing is just reflecting to you what's going on in your own brain.
And then you can choose if you want to keep those thoughts or not, but at least you know what our thoughts and, you know, what you're doing, how it's affecting your reality. Yeah, Vicki, what do you think?
Yeah, I agree too. Yeah, I feel like sometimes what I would have chosen to coach on the day before would have been totally different than what I did with you. But I think part of the journey is, you know, you teach your clients to self-coach too.
And so sometimes I'd be like, yeah, I kind of made some progress with that issue by myself the day before. And yeah, sometimes it was kind of nice because I felt like I didn't have to be like, be completely ready with the topic and, you know, know exactly what I wanted to coach on. Usually, you know, just talking about how the, you know, what had been going on, what the day was, you know, there was usually plenty of topic to spin off on.
So yeah, so I did like that approach.
The really good thing about the timeframe, because when you're talking about resolving, like really, really making progress and resolving chronic pain, that's been around for a decade or years and years. Yeah. I was very fearful about, and we coached on this a bunch, and you really supported me through this.
What would happen if this happened again? What would happen if twinges, I call them twinges, came up, but they got, you know, worse? Or what would happen if, you know, basically you're looking at success or failure, and you know that it's up to you, and you know that it's something that would be like, okay, my brain is spinning off on something again, and it's causing pain in my body.
Yeah.
But I ended up feeling fully confident, 100% confident that if I do encounter, and I will, twinges will happen, for sure. They've already happened.
Yeah.
That I would have the skills to deal with it and work with it and contend with it and know what it was. Because the fear, when you don't know what it is, just rolls the whole thing into a full-on, you know, my back is fully out, or the person's foot is, you know, they can't walk or whatever, into a much more serious condition than you're in when you have a twinge.
Yeah, like it starts with that twinge, and then it can be very predictive in this way of like, oh, this is how I throw my back out, and this happens once or twice a year, and it's very predictive, and then it happens. Or it can be that twinge, and then you have that realization, and you use the tools that we worked on, and the twinge goes away, right?
Yeah, and it took time to build the confidence. And so that was you. You helped me through that too.
Yes, yes. What would you have as last remarks or last comments you would say to anyone about coaching with chronic pain, if they're on the fence about if it would benefit them?
I would say to listen to your podcast, keep an open mind. That's what I think is the most important is to just keep an open mind about the possibility that there might be a mind-body connection that can be worked on and corrected without medical intervention. And just keep an open mind and explore, just explore thoughts and feelings and what's going on.
And I think that it's definitely worth spending the time and exploring on.
Yeah, you can always listen to the podcast and see if you kind of resonate with it, if some of that brings true to you, if it kind of draws you in, if listening to the podcast helps you feel a little bit better that day, you know? Yeah, yeah. Vicki?
Yeah, well, I try to convince as many of my, you know, the parents and of my patients that I think would benefit and, you know, family members, you know, I tell them about you. I think a lot of times it's a journey of self-discovery because there is, you know, it is kind of what in medicine, we talk about a diagnosis of exclusion. And in a way, I do think, you know, TMS, mind-body stuff, it is a diagnosis of exclusion.
So, you know, but usually once you've kind of gone through, you know, is it an infection? Is it some tissue injury? Or even if it is tissue injury, we can heal it faster with doing these things.
So, yeah, obviously, since I, you know, strongly recommend it to a lot of my patients, I think it's worth it. And like I said, I really think, you know, just the, not just the health that I gained, but even just the outright money that I've saved has been fantastic. And it is, there is something to be said too for, you know, they say in the Bible, where your treasure is, your heart will be.
So there is something about having put my money into it that I'm like, okay, I am doing this. This is gonna, I am really gonna make the most of this, you know, cause this is where I put some of my life energy is into learning this stuff and coaching.
Yeah.
Amazing. Martha?
Yeah, I totally agree. If you have non-structural pain that you don't feel that you've gotten an adequate answer for or anything definitive as an answer for, or it comes and goes, or you wake up one day and it's nothing and you wake up another day a week later and it's on a 10. That's indicative that it's mind-body pain.
Don't wait. And you will have to be proactive. You will have to have an open mind.
You will have to be willing to put in the time to do the work. And, you know, it's not going to be like getting a pill. You're going to put some effort in here, but so rewarding and so reassuring to understand the connection and to really begin to work with both sides of yourself.
Yeah, more of a kind of healing from the ground up or finding the root cause, but better effects than a pill, too, I would say.
Yeah, no side effects.
No side effects, yeah. Are there any other last comments or questions or things that you'd like to say, ladies?
I guess one, you know, it just, this one just kind of crossed my mind because I was listening to a medical podcast and I think this psychologist has been on Cureable as well. I forget her name. But she does a lot of chronic pain stuff and explained it.
But yeah, and I don't know if you've brought this up on your podcast, but the concept of phantom limb pain really struck a chord with me as far as like understanding that, okay, like even if the body part is not even there, there's all these centers in your brain that are still feeling the pain. So that the pain, like you feel it in the body, but it's really going on in the brain. So that, and then when you kind of discuss some of the work Dr. Sarno did with how many people have just random arthritis or torn meniscus and things like that when you do an MRI, some of them have pain there, some of them don't.
I think just knowing kind of those medical things to me just was a really big convincing.
Right. So helpful because probably when you went to medical school, definitely when I went to physical therapy school, they weren't talking about chronic pain being different than acute pain. It was kind of like pain means there's something structural going on in your body.
For a physical therapist, is there an asymmetry or an imbalance or some structures that are degenerating? It's so physically based. But now they are teaching different things.
I know at least in physical therapy school, I talk to my friend and they talk about central sensitization. And that if your pain is lasting more than about three months, your tissues do heal in that time. So there are predictive neural circuits and these patterns of pain, and they feel like pain, just like phantom limb pain.
What I have heard, what they say, is it feels really like the limb is there. Yes, that's such a good example.
Yeah.
Because I think a lot of times when people actually are feeling the physical pain, they doubt that it could be from anything other than a physical injury.
I think it's really important for people to understand that all kinds of pain, no matter what kind of pain it is, it all starts in the brain.
Right.
Right. Yeah, if you didn't have a brain, you wouldn't feel pain. I mean, that's what brain death is.
All pain is real. It is real pain.
Yes. Yes. Well, and Martha does some coaching on this as well.
So if you have some specific questions or want to reach out to her, I'll have some information about her in the show notes. Do you specialize in a certain area of mind-body coaching, Martha?
I am specializing on back pain.
Yeah. So she is the back pain expert. She goes through it.
And Jane, you're doing some coaching as well, not related to physical chronic pain, but tell us about what you're doing.
No, I do wellness coaching for people with prediabetes and helping them to reverse that because I've been through that myself. I also do some relationship coaching on people who are divorced or later in life and would like to get married again because I've been through that as well. Yeah, so I diversify.
I do a few different things.
Yes, well, it's fun to see you doing those things that light you up and not struggling with the hamstring pain slash niche drama, which we could tell was about the same thing.
Yes, thank you. You encouraged me to go with what lights me up.
And Vicki is a pediatrician, so if you have babies in the area.
If you have babies in the area, more teenagers.
Yeah, yeah. But there might be some changes in the future with the direction that you said you were going as far as being interested in more mental health with those teenagers than prescribing.
So that.
Yes, so many doctors are branching out into coaching and getting out of the traditional medical practice, the turn and burn model of medical practice.
Yeah, there are a lot that are.
Yeah, so many.
Yeah. Well, I do think that's going to be so super helpful with, you know, it is already helpful with the patients you are working with. So.
Well, what an honor.
What a great honor it would be to participate in even a small way in a change, a metamorphosis in how chronic pain is conceived of and how services and help and aid to people who suffer chronic pain gets rewritten, gets recreated. That's kind of my meta goal.
Yes. I mean, it's such a message of hope. Yeah.
Because I think everyone who practices, you know, medicine or whatever it is, coaching therapy, we all want people to feel better. We would love that. And it's hard sometimes when you see people struggling with chronic pain and feel helpless to help them, you know, through the medical system or as a PT.
So it is nice to be able to just offer people that possibility of healing, that hope. And then from there, it can just exceed expectations sometimes. It's amazing.
Well, it has been so great talking to you. It's so fun seeing you all together because none of you have met before.
Thank you so much for having us on.
It is really great.
I appreciate it. And I think this will be really helpful for other people who are interested in coaching and changing their life and seeing what's possible with creating different thoughts and different results. All right.
Thank you.
Have a good rest of your night.
Thanks, Betsy.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review.
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