I clearly remember the week that we talked offline and then in the group where I felt she should stop working on learning more how to solve pain and just move forward into the life she wanted. Consistent with her ongoing commitment to learning, she not only listened, but she took off like a rocket. It is an important step to move forward with whatever pain you have and stimulate your brain to create circuits that are more enjoyable and functional. Her pain continued to decrease over time and whatever any residual she has is not slowing her down.

Moving away from your pain

There is a “C”quence of healing – connection, confidence, and creativity. There are two distinct but linked aspects of healing. There are skills needed to be with your pain instead of fighting it, and positive thinking only makes it worse. However, a positive vision is critical in order to move forward. The other skill set is nurturing  joy and  creativity. It is impossible to be creative while you are fighting off mental and physical pain. Moving into joy is where deep healing happens as you move away from pain circuits and stimulate more functional ones.

The movie

Today, I’m thrilled to share a free ticket to the heartwarming and enlightening documentary called “Love Heals.” I believe it will deeply resonate with you and support you on your healing journey.

This documentary shares her transformative journey, who bravely navigates chronic pain and is in search of healing after 2 unsuccessful spine surgeries. Her partner, Krisanna, is a filmmaker, and together they travel the country to understand how ancient energy practices have helped so many heal and to see what’s possible for those experiencing these practices for the first time.

“Love Heals” has been touching hearts and opening minds all over the world and will reach millions of people when it’s launched on both PBS and Gaia in the next few weeks. It’s not just a film; it’s a movement that celebrates the power of love, hope, and healing.

Visit lovehealsfilm.com to claim your free ticket now and watch anytime between Jan 25 – 31.

If you’re navigating health challenges, seeking deeper self-understanding, or in pursuit of emotional healing, “Love Heals” is a must-watch. It reveals how embracing love and inner strength can lead to profound healing and a renewed sense of purpose.

Featuring insights from various experts in the fields of self-healing and personal transformation, this film is a testament to the incredible power of the human spirit and the healing capabilities we all possess.

No matter the hurdles you face – be it physical pain, emotional struggles, or a search for deeper meaning in life – “Love Heals” offers a message of hope and transformation.

I encourage you to make watching “Love Heals” a priority. It’s available for a limited time, and it might be the catalyst you need to change your life! It is becoming increasingly clear that we spend a lot of time fighting darkness where the answer lies in simply turning on the lights. Good food, spending time with friends, engaging in your passion, giving back, and regaining perspective on life is the definitive answer to suffering.

Your body knows how to heal

You might feel that your problems are too severe to allow for healing. That is simply not true. My personal struggles with chronic mental and physical pain were epic. Dana was in a deep hole when I first met her. At one point I felt that maybe she was a person that couldn’t heal. At my lowest point, I had also given up on me. She not only experienced deep healing, but she has also thrived at a level beyond my expectations, and I think hers. We are not exceptions. This is what happens when you connect to your own body’s capacity to heal. Our stories are typical of what we see on a regular basis. Witnessing and experiencing this depth of healing is what led me to give up my spine surgery practice. I am excited that Dana has done so well and is actively creating the same opportunity for so many others.

Love = awareness and connects you to your own healing capacity.  Prepare to embark on a journey of healing and rediscover the power of love within you!

The post “Love Heals” – Moving into a New Life first appeared on Back in Control.

The post “Love Heals” – Moving into a New Life appeared first on Back in Control.

• Many people are focused on controlling anger and anxiety with behavioural approaches.
• These powerful reactions are not controllable and suppressing them increases threat physiology.
• We all need to be heard, supported, and taught methods to regulate and lower these responses.
• Avoiding or suppressing stress causes damage to our bodies and causes chronic illnesses.

How many of us have heard the phrase, “children should be seen and not heard?” Or what about, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” How often were your parents not really there for you when you were upset?

DimaBerlin/ AdobeStock

Kari is a woman who I met in 2018 when she asked me to speak at her company’s annual disability conference. I presented the nature of chronic pain and approaches to solve it. I did not realize that she jumped right in with both feet and learned the concepts. She contacted me about a year later, and shared how excited she was about how much her life had improved. We have remained in close touch and here is her recent email. I had told her about a remarkable turnaround of a 24-year-old gentleman who had broken out of his bipolar disorder, anxiety, major depression, and pain migrating around his entire body.

Her letter

Hi David, is this the young man with Bipolar you mentioned during our call?  What an incredible transformation! 

You know what hit me the other night, few children are taught how to process anxiety so they do the best they can on their own and usually create inaccurate perceptions of themselves and learn ineffective and often damaging behaviors to deal with it (the 7-year-old creates the 50-year-old).  Parents should be doing this, but many parents are trapped in their own heads with repetitive negative thoughts and don’t know how to teach their children these skills as they haven’t learned them either.  And the cycle of dysfunction continues….

A little personal story here….My aunt gave me my grandmother’s book of prayers.  My grandma was an extremely anxious woman and pretty OCD.  I was thumbing through her book and noticed my grandma had written in the margins, underlined certain passages, etc.  In the section on anxiety, she had underlined several times that “anxiety is a sin.”  My poor Grandmother thought she was a sinner her entire life because she was anxious!  How awful!

My mother was also very anxious – no surprise there.  In 6^th grade, I had a boyfriend, nothing very serious at that age of course, but I went to school one day and here my best friend was now with my boyfriend.  I came home and was crying in my bedroom, mostly because my best friend had stabbed me in the back over a boy.  My mom came in and asked me what was wrong and when I told her, her response was, “get a real problem”. 

My mom was very stressed at the time with my two younger siblings and my dad always being at the bar – he was no help.  From that moment on, I never told her anything about my life that wasn’t positive and became very depressed all through junior high and high school. Not having a parent to support me emotionally really messed me up and caused me to create all these negative perceptions about myself that took me 40 years to get over.

I am grateful that I have broken the cycle of dysfunction with my son – we talk openly about these things, and he is a very high functioning and happy person. 

It’s all just so insane and sad.  Anyways, thanks for letting me share.  It was the sequence of concepts you presented that broke the cycle for me. Kari

Anger and love

Anger is a trait that blocks openness and engagement. One aspect of flight or fight physiology is that your necortex (thinking areas) are down regulated from stress hormones, the limbic system (fear) regions are activated, and you don’t even have good access to your rational thinking. Frustrated people are not rational, and there are no exceptions. Even more disturbing is that you can become crosswired and pain can be connected to “love”.

Our friend Sheila was standing in the checkout line at a grocery store when she heard a young mother screaming at her young five year-old daughter to put something back on the shelf. She suddenly hauled off and slapped her with a full swing. Almost at the same time the young girl began to cry, she held out her arms and ran to her mother to comfort her. Who else was there to console her? Talk about becoming cross-wired – the girl’s source of pain was also her bastion of love and protection.

My childhood experience with “love”

My mother would fly into rages that would last for two or three days. We never knew what would set them off, although we imagined many possibilities. We thought it was associated with our behavior, but no matter how hard we tried to avoid upsetting her, it just happened. After every tirade she would profusely apologize, and tell us how much she loved us. It was quite confusing. What even seems more bizarre in retrospect was that I was convinced that our parents loved us. I recall telling friends of mine in middle school that although my parents had some faults, at least I knew they loved us? Really??

The answer really is yes. My mother spent hours driving us around, volunteering at school, and talked about us in glowing terms to anyone that would listen. What I did not know as a young child is how disconnected anger (she also had chronic pain) can make you. She essentially entered a different reality when she became upset. From our perspective this was all a part of parental support and love.

It was so mixed up in my head that I did not even realize that anger was part of my life until I was almost 50 years old. It was just normal for me to become “frustrated” and since I was “right”, I did not have a clue that this was what anger looked like. I don’t think those close to me felt the same way. But at the same time, I was experiencing over 17 different physical and mental symptoms. I was disconnected.

What is your concept of love?

When you are an infant or child your mind is a blank slate being downloaded from your environment. If your symbols of love and protection are combined with mental or physical neglect or abuse, your concept of love will be much different than someone who was raised in a warm, caring, nurturing, and loving environment. In retrospect it is disturbing to me that I was so verbal about how much my mother loved me in the midst of a violent environment.

Sviatoslav Kovtun/AdobeStock

We all need to be seen AND heard

The common theme of these three situations is that a child was anxious and upset. The interventions took the form of suppressing and attempting to extinguish these behaviors, which were caused by a powerful unpleasant survival reaction. Many of us are taught from an early age that, “it is better to look good than feel good.” The root problem causing the reaction is often not addressed. You don’t feel heard, and you quickly learn that suppressing your feelings is better than having to deal with them. Except, what you don’t realize is that suppressing thoughts and emotions is like turning the heat up on a pressure cooker. The consequences are usually severe. The hippocampus of your brain (memory center) both shrinks and malfunctions.

The solution lies in the saying, “you have to feel to heal.” And then using strategies to regulate your flight or fight state to safety physiology. By dampening the driving force, not only will behaviors improve, but you can also live life in awareness and freedom.

References

1. Hulbert JC, et al. Inducing amnesia through systemic suppression. Nature Communications (2015); published 3.15.2016. 7:11003 | DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11003

The post Threat Physiology Can’t be Controlled with Behavioral Approaches first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Threat Physiology Can’t be Controlled with Behavioral Approaches appeared first on Back in Control.

Life is stressful–for everyone. No matter how people appear on the surface, it takes only a few questions to understand how many burdens they are carrying. Even for those who have been highly successful in their careers or vocation usually find that their “success” doesn’t compensate for their stress.

You may be one of those people who were fortunate enough to feel loved and supported at most levels of your development, and your view of the world will be different. Your capacity to relax and enjoy life should be greater than someone who was raised in the midst of chaos. However, regardless of your upbringing, learning to truly relax is a learnable skill. The first step is to understand the powerful unconscious forces driving your behavior on a given day. The dividing line is based on becoming and remaining aware.

Recreation

I spent a weekend with a group of close friends on an annual ski trip. Many in the group had faced significant challenges over the last year and others were simply tired. They were in work situations that were incredibly demanding and it wasn’t clear how to make any meaningful changes.

Relaxing in a lodge setting allowed us all to unwind quickly. It was truly rejuvenating. For me, the best recreation is spending quality time with friends and family and sharing enjoyable experiences. As I was looking at this word, “recreation,” I realized that what I had done for much of my life was “wreck creation.”

The essence of healthy relationships is awareness. The antithesis of awareness is anger. It is impossible to be truly relaxed if you are holding onto anger.  Trying to relax while you are still angry is the essence of “wreck creation.” Using your adrenaline drive to be successful at work is also “wreck creation.”

Wreck creation on vacation

A few months ago, I was walking on a trail in Deer Valley, Utah. Around a bend, a couple was stopped, arguing over which direction was the right way to go. One was complaining about being tired and the other was saying, “You always do this.” They quieted as I went past, and then they started to fight again.

Last weekend, at the Alta Resort, a large, intense businessman-type appearing person was yelling at his daughter standing in the ticket line. She was on her cell phone, and as he stomped off, he muttered, “You never pay attention to me.”

I have seen similar scenarios play out on almost every vacation I have taken. Until I had some insight into all of this myself, I would become irrationally angry if my wife made me wait too long while she was shopping. There have been times where a five-minute delay would ruin the rest of our day together.

Wreck creation at work

A few years ago, I realized that I was so wound up at work, that I was spending a lot of my vacation time trying to recover. My relaxation skills were not that great, and I was not able to fully re-capture my energy and enthusiasm for my work and life. I made a distinct decision to “play” at work, and “play” at play. Since I spent most of my time at work, why not enjoy it more?

To me this meant listening more closely to my patients, enjoying my staff and colleagues, and viewing “problems” as challenges. It made a dramatic difference in my quality of life at work, home, and on vacation. I didn’t have to recover since I wasn’t being drained.

What kind environment are you creating at work? 

Here are some questions to ask:

• Am I leading by inspiration or intimidation?
• Are my employees or fellow workers ever “good enough”?
• I am contributing to my work environment so that it feels safe and nurturing?
• Do I gossip about co-workers or clients?
• Do I endlessly complain about work issues or am I committed to finding solutions?
• Are people happy to see me when I walk into the room?

If you are intense at work, how can you really switch gears and relax on vacation or at home? Where are we all rushing off to? Why are we moving so fast? How much time are we spending truly caring for ourselves and for those close to us? It is important to engage in recreation to allow yourself to regenerate and connect to your creative capacity.

Recreation or “wreck creation”?

Recreation is learning to bathe your body in a chemical bath of “play” hormones such as oxytocin and dopamine. “Wreck creation” results from continually being assaulted by stress hormones. It is well-documented that you’ll have a higher likelihood of becoming mentally and/or physically ill. Behaving badly can cause almost anything in its path to be destroyed—relationships, careers, and other’s lives.

The essence of healthy relationships and recreation is awareness. The first step in engaging in truly rejuvenating experiences is becoming aware of when you are “wreck creating.” Remember—it’s okay if you fail (and frequently) along the way. Every step you take along your path is valuable and will gradually and steadily contribute to your capacity to become and remain aware.

Dr. DeMello’s definition of love is awareness.

References

1. De Mello, Anthony. The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello. Doubleday, New York, 1995.

The post Is your Recreation “Wreck Creation?”  first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Is your Recreation “Wreck Creation?”  appeared first on Back in Control.

Anthony was a patient who I saw just a couple of times in his early 20’s. He was experiencing low back pain that was significantly impacting his quality of life. His MRI scan showed some mild degeneration at L4-5 and was not a problem that would respond to surgery. Here is his story:

Anthony’s story

I saw Dr. Hanscom after dealing with 3 years of chronic back pain and exhausting what I thought were all my non-surgical options. I had a bulging disc that was pinching a nerve and causing the left side of my body to tighten up. As a pianist and teacher this affected me quite a bit and at this point I was starting to feel quite depressed. I figured if the lesion was removed than the pain would go with it. I was somewhat surprised when he advised against surgery. I was even more surprised when he basically told me the pain was a neurophysiological problem. Coming from someone who made his living doing surgeries, I appreciated his honesty and knew he was coming from a sincere place. I didn’t really want to hear that my pain was in my nervous system; but I took what he said to heart. He also gave me a copy of his unfinished book and other reading material.

Four Years Later

Hello Dr. Hanscom,

I recently saw an article on NaturalNews.com about your work and felt compelled to write you.

I saw you a few years ago a couple of times. I was a young man with chronic low back pain and a somewhat hopeless attitude. You gave me a copy of your book and I read it. It made a lot of sense to me, but required a lot of reflection of my life, which was difficult. I wanted to let you know that something dramatic happened to me a few months after seeing you that changed my outlook on pain. I was given an opportunity to care for a newborn little girl with my girlfriend (now wife). The love that I had/have for this little girl completely changed how I view the world and my place in it. It also forced me to reflect on my childhood and deal with some things that needed to be dealt with. A few months after caring for this child my back pain started to decrease; a few months later the chronic pain was gone.

I really believe you are on to something and hope you continue your work. I also want to thank you as the timing of seeing you and the events in my life were almost serendipitous.

What changed? It wasn’t the lesion; it was simply my attitude. In particular, much more love. I am glad I had the opportunity to see a doctor that gave me some clinical affirmation to what I experienced first hand. I believe the subject should be explored more, and wish Dr. Hanscom all the best. Thanks again, Anthony

It is about connection

It is not possible to solve chronic pain until you can let go of anger. The neurological pathways of pain and anger are intertwined. It is only by truly letting go of the past through forgiveness, and connecting with the best part of who you are (love), will you be able to heal and move on.

I really appreciated his letter, and it was inspiring for me to hear his story.

The post The Power of Love – Anthony first appeared on Back in Control.

The post The Power of Love – Anthony appeared first on Back in Control.

ANGER

ANGEL

Love and rage are both four-letter words.

A

N

G

E

R  A  G  E

A

N

G

E

L O V E

The difference between the words anger and angel is one letter.

What a difference a letter makes.

The post Anger versus Angel first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Anger versus Angel appeared first on Back in Control.