Hope for Healing with Dr. Jennifer Huggins and Dr. John Stracks
Video: Watch the full session here →https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op1iF7EdMSw
Introduction
Dr. Stracks: Good evening, and welcome to Hope for Healing. I'm your host, Dr. John Stracks, joining you from my office here in Chicago. I'm a physician who focuses on the reduction and elimination of physical symptoms using mind-body medicine methods. If you'd like to learn more about my practice, I do offer telehealth, and my staff would be happy to talk with you about that. You can find information about our services at www.cormendihealth.com
This Hope for Healing video series is a joint effort between me and the team at Curable. For those who aren't yet Curable users, Curable is an app that offers science-backed techniques for chronic pain recovery. We've been working together for about six years now, and we created this series because we want to help people in pain understand the connection between what's happening in their life and what's happening in their body.
Tonight my guest is Dr. Jennifer Huggins, a clinical pain psychologist in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Huggins woke up one morning at age 23 with terrible pain and was eventually told there was nothing that could be done. After years on the medical merry-go-round, she found mind-body medicine and was ultimately able to heal. As a result, she became a clinical pain psychologist, and helping others heal through mind-body medicine is now her life's passion.
Dr. Stracks: Jennifer, I know people are eager to hear your story of healing and also about how you work with clients. Welcome to Hope for Healing.
Dr. Huggins: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to talk with you. You and I have both been in this field for many years now, and like so many others who enter this part of medicine, you got started because you had your own health issues that couldn't be solved through conventional means. I think it's helpful for people listening to know that we're human too — we have our own pain issues as well.
Dr. Stracks: I was wondering if you could talk a little about what happened to you and how you ultimately found your way out.
Dr. Huggins' Story: From Interstitial Cystitis to Pain-Free
Dr. Huggins: Sure. This is a story that feels imperative to my work, and it's really why I chose to go into this field and why I'm so passionate about it. I was in my early 20s, and I ended up at many doctors' offices for what I thought was a UTI. I had bladder and pelvic pain, some bloating, and eventually looked like I was pregnant, but no doctor knew what was going on. It was very discouraging. I went from doctor to doctor. It was scary — I didn't know what was happening. It felt like a really bad UTI, although nothing was culturing out, so it was very confusing. I was put on rounds of antibiotics even though nothing had been cultured, because my symptoms matched what would appear to be a UTI.
Eventually I ended up in a gynecologist's office, and she said, "It sounds like interstitial cystitis." I had never heard of that. It sounded like a big, fancy, daunting term, and I think a big part of what perpetuates persistent pain is the labels we receive. I got a lot of messages about what I could and couldn't do, what I could and couldn't eat, and how long I'd be in pain — which, according to nearly every biomedical doctor I saw, was going to be forever, because it was an "incurable" diagnosis, as they put it.
Of course, when you get a chronic pain diagnosis, or anything mysterious, incurable, or difficult to manage, the first thing most of us do is jump on Google. So I did, and typed in the diagnosis — that feels like a death sentence. It's a hopeless experience. What doesn't come up, usually, is mind-body treatment or mind-body understanding. What comes up is all the medical material — PubMed, Medscape, forums. The Interstitial Cystitis Network was a community I was involved with early on, and it was the same kind of messages.
Dr. Stracks: For you it was interstitial cystitis, but it can be any of these diagnoses — fibromyalgia, chronic pain, back pain, migraines, dizziness, stomach issues. You get so much information initially about how your life as you know it is over, and how so little can be done.
Dr. Huggins: Correct. That's really all you get. Then you get on forums with other patients in the same boat, in the same fear, and there's a colluding of that fear, which exacerbates it even more, because those other patients haven't gotten better either. Looking back, I know now I was just looking in the wrong places. There are a lot of other resources — which I eventually found — that allowed me to heal, and I've now been pain-free for about 14 years with no symptoms at all.
Dr. Stracks: To your point, it really doesn't matter what diagnosis or label we get — unless it's something like cancer, that's a different story. But when it comes to chronic pain syndromes — migraines, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel, plantar fasciitis, irritable bowel — these are what we call mind-body syndrome equivalents, or pain equivalents. We can't get tripped up on "if it's not pain, it's not a mind-body syndrome."
Dr. Huggins: Right. Irritable bowel, for the majority of cases. Tinnitus — I've treated a lot of that. Dizziness, lightheadedness. It can be lots of different syndromes.
Dr. Stracks: And lately, long COVID seems to be coming under this category too, along with some cases of post-concussion syndrome.
Dr. Huggins: Yes, all of those. So especially at the beginning, when we don't know much about mind-body syndromes, we have to be careful not to get attached to the label or the diagnosis.
The Long Road to Diagnosis and Healing
Dr. Stracks: So you had these symptoms — a lot of it bladder and pelvic issues — and it took a long time to find relief.
Dr. Huggins: It did, because I was on the medical merry-go-round. Looking back, though, if I had found mind-body treatment at the beginning, I don't know if I would have been open to it — it's just not in our paradigm. It doesn't make sense to our brain that we could have these raging physical symptoms and them not be "all in our head." We're not crazy — the symptoms are very real, very physical. What we're differentiating is the cause: whether there's some structural, pathological abnormality causing the pain, versus another explanation entirely.
If you asked 100 physicians whether pain means tissue damage, I think 98 or 99 would say yes. But there's so much evidence now that though the two can be related, they're not the same thing. You can have plenty of pain without tissue damage, and plenty of tissue damage without pain. Yet the medical system still largely operates on the model that if you hurt, something must be wrong that needs to be treated biomedically.
Dr. Huggins: Exactly, and the evidence just isn't there anymore. I worked at Kaiser Permanente, in pain management — and if you think about that term, "pain management," it's almost like there are flashing lights saying "manage, manage, manage." It's not pain recovery. And that influences us, even unconsciously — the idea that there must be something wrong. It's a very mechanical interpretation of the body. Not one doctor ever asked me what was going on in my life.
Dr. Stracks: That's mind-boggling to me. I've done a lot of these interviews and heard that so often. It would never occur to me not to ask someone what's going on in their life — and then actually listen to the answer.
Dr. Huggins: Right, and even when a physician does ask, they're often typing in the corner of the office, so who's going to be honest about the answer? It's not part of their training, even though we all know stress makes a condition worse. That alone could be a starting question — "What's going on in your life?" — as a first step, regardless of whether the doctor makes the full leap to a mind-body explanation.
Dr. Stracks: So you wandered for about a decade. What happened next — how did you find your way into this world and start to get better?
Dr. Huggins: It took really trying everything physically based first — checking the medical boxes, as I call it. I was looking for the quick fix, the magical specialist, the miracle diet. There was a lot of disappointment and hopelessness along the way. I also went through invasive treatments — antibiotics, even IV antibiotics.
Dr. Stracks: We've had a patient whose family flew her to South Africa to have holes drilled in her skull to try to relieve her headaches. That's how far it can go.
Dr. Huggins: Wow. I didn't have that done, thankfully, but I did have catheters, a painful hydrodistension with cystoscopy to explore my bladder and identify everything "wrong" with it — which, as you pointed out earlier, were likely incidental findings. I probably still have those same findings today, and I'm pain-free.
I got sick of being in the medical field and started becoming angry — angry that I was getting worse, and that I felt a lot of disrespect, like doctors were saying, "We don't know what to do with you." So I turned to alternative medicine, and that didn't work either. Eventually I came across a mind-body coach named Abigail Steidley, who introduced me to the late Dr. John Stracks, whose books are still on my shelf — my little shrine. Without his books, his advocacy, and his mission, I wouldn't be pain-free today.
I dove into his work and other mind-body books. I was committed, and I think that's required — I had a genuinely open mind, because I would have done anything at that point. Bring your doubt and skepticism with you, but do your best to stay open. If you've been doing physical treatments and they're not working, maybe it's time to look elsewhere.
The Turning Point
Dr. Stracks: Was there a specific moment when you thought, "I see how this applies to me"?
Dr. Huggins: One thing was that Abigail had had my diagnosis, along with other pain conditions — there was a kinship there. I trusted her, and she gave me examples of other clients she'd helped; I even spoke with some of them. What really clicked for me in the readings was noticing the inconsistencies in the beliefs I was holding, along with understanding how the nervous system responds to stress.
I noticed that when I became more preoccupied and afraid of my symptoms — I now discourage clients from even using that word, "symptoms," which I can explain — I would end up in what I call a flare, sometimes for days. I'd also been told to avoid a long list of foods and drinks by the medical system because they "weren't safe." The opposite response is to fear them, and pain is fear in many ways. I became obsessed with food. What didn't make logical sense is that I could take a bite of an "unsafe" food and, within seconds, have raging symptoms. Abigail helped me see that inconsistency and start questioning what I'd been believing — to zoom out and look at the facts.
Certain personality traits common in mind-body syndromes also described me to a T.
Dr. Stracks: What did you recognize in yourself?
Dr. Huggins: The main ones are perfectionism, people-pleasing, and self-criticism. Perfectionism doesn't require having everything perfectly in order at home — it can show up at work or in just one area of life. People-pleasing means putting others' needs before our own and having difficulty saying no, which builds resentment and tension and can create symptoms. Self-criticism is being hard on ourselves — having an inner bully. People-pleasing was less prominent for me, but perfectionism and self-criticism were rampant in my life at that time.
Dr. Stracks: Was recognizing the connection enough, or did you have to actively work on those traits?
Dr. Huggins: I definitely had to do the work, because they can feel like your personality — clients often say, "That's just who I am," which I reframe as, "That's just what you do." A big part of it is awareness: noticing when we're in perfectionistic mode, people-pleasing mode, or beating ourselves up, since we're usually on autopilot and it feels so familiar. We can generally tell when we're not feeling calm and relaxed, and check in with ourselves — "What's going on? Am I being hard on myself right now?" Building that awareness can be 15% of the work, or more. Once you can step back from a thought pattern, you can consciously choose a different response — like telling yourself a report is good enough rather than spending ten more hours on it.
How Long Did Healing Take?
Dr. Stracks: What do you remember about how your symptoms went away — quickly, or gradually?
Dr. Huggins: It took a long time overall, because I didn't learn about mind-body syndromes for seven or eight years. I also had to go through the medical boxes and physical treatments first, to essentially disprove them to myself. There's a level of desperation that leads you there.
Once I found Abigail and entered this world, I was open and excited, but I'd had years of being told a certain thing and living in fear, with a very angry, adversarial relationship to my own body. I had to learn to feel safe and comfortable in my body again. All told, it took roughly two years before I was symptom-free — though things kept improving along the way, in step with my level of fear and preoccupation going down, and my stance of neutrality toward the symptoms getting stronger.
Dr. Stracks: Everyone is on their own healing journey. I've interviewed people whose symptoms went away quickly, and others — we call them "two-percenters" — where one patient got about 2% better each month for five years. Wherever you land on that spectrum, as you start to feel better, that progress is invaluable and restores hope.
Becoming a Clinical Pain Psychologist
Dr. Stracks: Were you already practicing psychology at this point?
Dr. Huggins: No — I took a leave from grad school. I was at my worst, felt so tied to the physical symptoms and emotionally distraught that I couldn't continue my daily life. Looking back, allowing the pain to rule my activities and behaviors — out of fear and attachment to it — was one of the things that kept me stuck.
One tricky, non-instinctual, paradoxical point: we have to be careful not to make "getting rid of our symptoms" the driving, moment-to-moment goal. On the big-picture level, yes, that's obviously the point of doing this work. But on the day-to-day, applied level, if the goal becomes "I have to get rid of these symptoms" — so I meditate and meditate and get frustrated when they're still there — we end up preoccupied and resistant again, which is stressful and counterproductive.
Our brain is always trying to protect us. If we interpret our sensations as dangerous — "I have ulcers in my bladder, that's bad" — then when the pain shows up, we go into fear, and the brain keeps generating pain to prompt us into action, because it believes there's a real problem in the tissue.
Dr. Stracks: It's a big conceptual shift. Conventional medicine talks about disease in terms of battles and weapons — the "war on cancer." Sometimes that framing is appropriate, like with cancer or an infection. But with symptoms like these, healing looks different. The symptoms aren't the enemy. We don't need a war on pain — we need to understand what the brain is trying to protect us from. If the brain feels the need to create a painful symptom, what is it protecting us from — a feeling, a relationship, a memory, an uncomfortable task or conversation? What's the message?
Dr. Huggins: Exactly. I'm very particular about language. I encourage clients to say "sensations" rather than "symptoms," because "symptoms" is a medical term that implies something is physically wrong. And I discourage talking about them at all when possible, because it reinforces preoccupation. The body part in question is really just an innocent bystander — it's fine. There's nothing wrong with the body in a mind-body syndrome. We want to develop a relationship of trust with our body and move our attention instead to the brain — our thinking and our emotional reactions.
Emotions happen in the body, but the brain labels them — "I'm angry." The brain may generate a sensation instead, so we focus on that rather than on rage, grief, or a truth we're afraid to admit — like someone who's married but not attracted to their spouse, or a Harvard law professor who secretly wants to be a stand-up comedian and fears the shame of admitting it. This is part of why journal writing helps: it gives us a safe place to let those inner truths out, put them somewhere real, and look at them instead of holding them inside.
What Dr. Huggins Does With Stuck Clients
Dr. Stracks: A lot of people listening have been working on this for a long time, with mixed progress. When someone comes to see you and isn't making the progress they want, how do you help them get further unstuck?
Dr. Huggins: First, I want to understand why they're stuck — what's missing, what hasn't been addressed. It matters what kind of therapist someone works with; I'd look for one trained in a mind-body syndrome framework. Related terms include psychophysiological disorder (PPD) and TMS (tension myoneural syndrome), the term Dr. Stracks coined. If a therapist says, "Yes, I do Stracks work, PPD work, mind-body disorders work," you're generally in good hands. If they do CBT for pain management, that's different — we don't want management. One of my patients was told by her previous therapist, "How many times have I told you that you have to accept your pain?" That's a classic nocebo effect. The placebo effect is belief in good leading to good; the nocebo effect is belief in harm leading to harm, and messages like that are exactly that.
Dr. Stracks: So people find their way to you, often already familiar with some of these concepts through resources like Curable. What strategies do you use?
Dr. Huggins: Often cognitive behavioral therapy is the first step — though again, not CBT-for-management. I first get clear on how much doubt or skepticism someone is still holding about this treatment model. Even 5% doubt is worth working on; we need people close to full belief in what's going on, which involves addressing pain beliefs, nocebo effects, and finding counters to the negative messages they're holding onto.
Dr. Stracks: How do you help people work through that remaining doubt?
Dr. Huggins: I remind people this isn't a belief-based cure, but a science-based treatment — though you do need to understand why it works, and have some belief that it can help you, or it won't. That's part of the science too — the placebo effect, neural pathways, nervous system up-regulation.
I look at clients' cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to their pain. Often something's amiss there — are they doing this work with "one eye open," watching to see if the symptoms are gone yet? That won't get us where we want to go. I look at how neutral and outcome-independent they are with respect to their sensations. I teach them about that concept and help them learn to apply it day to day — because clients often know the material intellectually but don't know how to use it in the moment.
I also look for trauma, which is often unaddressed — and trauma doesn't have to mean combat or overt abuse. It can be "little t" trauma, or many little t's that add up to a big T, still stored in the nervous system and contributing to a heightened fight-or-flight response and emotional suppression. I sometimes use EMDR for this. And I look for what's called secondary gain — usually unconscious, not something people are "trying" to have, and often not what caused the pain originally, but some way the symptoms are unconsciously serving them, like more attention or kindness from a partner. It's amazing how often clients realize, "The only time people were nice to me growing up was when I was sick."
Using CBT to Address Doubt
Dr. Stracks: Let's say a client says, "I understand mind-body medicine, I'm fully on board, but I don't think it can work for me." How would you use CBT with a thought like that?
Dr. Huggins: I'd start by looking at how that belief is serving them — does it keep them focused on their symptoms? Then it's more of a conversation, gently challenging the thought: if you're thinking that all the time, what's the emotional response likely to be? Probably discouragement, hopelessness, or fear — and that shapes how you react when sensations come up, often with resistance. I might have them build an evidence list — evidence that they have TMS, and evidence for why they believe it hasn't worked for them so far. Usually there's something in their relationship to their symptoms that needs to be cognitively reframed, or sometimes we need to move past reframing altogether and develop real neutrality, where the sensations simply stop mattering. That comes from really understanding the literature — mind-body syndromes don't discriminate; they're not "good for you but not for you." I also assess their stage of readiness and whether they've been doing any work on emotional suppression, because sometimes people approach all of this cognitively while still suppressing anger and sadness and fearing their own emotions — and the symptoms will continue as a result.
The Role of Emotions — Especially Anger
Dr. Stracks: How do you help people get comfortable entering that emotional space, given that most of us get little instruction in emotions growing up?
Dr. Huggins: It's a process, and often becomes a huge part of the work. I use a technique called ISTDP for this, which can work alongside CBT. The first step is getting rid of the labels "positive" and "negative" emotions — because if we call something a "negative emotion," of course we're not going to want to feel it. Most of us, myself included, weren't encouraged to feel our feelings growing up, whether the reason was overt, covert, abusive, or even loving. But we're feeling, thinking beings — we can't escape emotion. If we feel it in a healthy way, it moves through us. Right now, though, many people are just stuffing it down, and that's causing much bigger problems than the discomfort of actually feeling it would.
There's a book series I like called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. The author describes clients saying, "I can't let myself get angry or sad, because it'll go on forever" — and her response is that it does have an end, they just haven't had the chance to find out yet. Once emotion is allowed to flow, it peaks and comes back down, often within a couple of minutes, if we're not resisting it.
Anger is probably the most misunderstood and avoided emotion. People think anger means yelling, screaming, throwing things — that's actually anxiety about anger, which causes us to discharge it outwardly. Real anger, when we learn to feel it properly, is a quiet, internal process — heat in the body — not the "roar" people are afraid of because they saw it modeled that way growing up.
Dr. Stracks: I have a story you'll appreciate. I graduated from residency and fellowship in 2009 — the worst year in recent history to be job hunting. I flew to Madison, Wisconsin to interview at the University of Wisconsin, in the middle of a freezing February, an hour ahead on the clock so I couldn't sleep. I went down to the hotel gym at 4:30 a.m. with an interview five hours away, and I had toe pain I couldn't shake. I'd been reading about emotional expression and embodying emotion, so on the treadmill I thought, "I wonder if I'm angry — about what, at 4:30 in the morning during a recession with no jobs anywhere?" I decided to try it — to let every cell in my body feel the anger, to become it. No sound, just an internal awareness. The tooth — the toe pain melted away. I'd taken a physical sensation and turned it into an emotion, and then it was gone. I didn't get the job, though.
Dr. Huggins: You got something better. I've seen that happen in session too. I had a client recently who was talking abouther sadness — intellectualizing it, narrating the story — rather than actually feeling it. Her pain had increased that week, so I gently pressed for what else might be going on. She described a situation from childhood involving a family member she'd been mean to, and she felt a lot of guilt — but she'd been about four years old at the time, so it was inappropriate, self-attacking guilt, not something she'd actually done wrong. As we talked, we got to what was underneath: she was actually really angry at that family member. I had her feel the anger in her body — anger shows up physically as heat, as a nonverbal, experiential process, not a verbal one. She was able to access it, and said, "My pain is gone right now."
Dr. Stracks: When the emotions really get flowing, it makes a huge difference.
Advice for Anyone Still Feeling Stuck
Dr. Stracks: We're coming up on the hour. Anything else you'd want to say to people who understand the mind-body medicine concept but still find themselves stuck?
Dr. Huggins: A few main points. First, look for unaddressed trauma — work with someone who can properly assess for it, whether it's a TMS/PPD-informed psychologist, psychiatrist, or MD. So many clients say, "My childhood was great, I don't have any trauma," and when we really look, there's real material there that needs to be worked through.
Second: are you obsessed with getting rid of your symptoms? If so, that has to shift — becoming outcome-independent is difficult and counterintuitive, but essential.
Third: check your pain beliefs for lingering doubt, and notice whether you're mixing physical treatments with mind-body treatment at the same time. In my experience, that combination tends not to work well — going to a chiropractor for a physical explanation while also doing mind-body work sends your brain a mixed message. I can't tell a client not to pursue a physical treatment, but in my experience, it's usually best to pick one lane.
Finally, pay attention to your response when sensations increase — what you think, do, and feel in that moment. There's often something there that needs a different approach.
And last: go live your life. Don't assume a "sick role." Don't talk about your pain constantly. Ask your family and friends to stop checking in about your symptoms. Build a different identity — do things that make you uniquely you. Don't let your identity become your pain.
Dr. Stracks: If people want to learn more about you or your practice, how do they find you?
Dr. Huggins: My website is painpsychologistla.com, all one word, lowercase. If you go to the contact page, you'll find my email and phone number — that's the best way to reach me.
Dr. Stracks: Are you currently taking new one-on-one clients?
Dr. Huggins: I am. I do virtual appointments, though right now I'm limited to clients located within the state of California — I can't cross state lines at the moment, but I'm working on that.
Closing
Dr. Stracks: We'll wrap up there for the evening. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your insights and experience — I know how much people appreciate it when practitioners are willing to do that.
For those of you listening, the Curable app has a number of exercises related to what we discussed tonight, including CBT tools for catching thought traps like all-or-nothing thinking and fortune telling. Thank you to everyone who joins us for these episodes — I'm reminded each time how lucky I am to be part of this community working on symptoms this way.
Here in Chicago, we've expanded our own telehealth options. If you're interested in meeting with me or one of our clinical psychologists, now licensed in 28 states around the country, reach out through our website, www.cormendihealth.com. If you enjoyed this video cast, you can find previous episodes and information about upcoming ones at www.curablehealth.com/hopeforhealing, where you can also sign up for our newsletter.
I'll be back in three weeks, Wednesday, March 9th, at 5:00 p.m. Central time, for another episode. Until then, stay safe and healthy, and have a good evening.
Dr. John Stracks practices mind-body medicine via telehealth nationally and internationally. To learn more about working with Dr. Stracks or the Cormendi Health team, visit cormendihealth.com. You can find more interviews on the Cormendi Health YouTube page.