Video: Watch the full session here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twYyOLJnMRE
Dr. John Stracks: Hello, and welcome to Episode 8 of the Hope for Healing video podcast. I’m Dr. John Stracks, joining you from my office in Chicago. I’m here with my former patient and now good friend, Jill Rydell, who’s joining us from her vacation cabin up in northern Michigan. Hi, Jill.
Jill Rydell: Hey, John. Glad you’re here.
Dr. Stracks: Hope for Healing is a joint effort between me and the Curable app, which most of you are familiar with. For those who don’t know one or the other, I’m a physician who has a mind-body medicine practice in the Chicago area, focused on the reduction and elimination of physical symptoms using mind-body medicine methods. Curable is an amazing app focused on the same goal. We’ve been working together since their inception, about five years ago, and we started this series at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We both thought about what we could do to help support people in this trying time.
Before I formally introduce Jill and we get started, there are two housekeeping items I want to go over. First, I want you to know that our office in Chicago has been able to expand our telehealth capabilities significantly since the pandemic started, and we’re working on sustaining that indefinitely once the pandemic is over. So no matter where you are, if you’re feeling stuck with your symptoms, feel free to reach out to our office at www.doctorstracks.com. We can give you details about what it would look like to work with me directly on your situation.
Secondly, just a quick note on terminology. Many of you who are listening know what we’re discussing as mind-body medicine, which to me means that our body can express for us what’s going on in our lives. That’s universal. It’s not bad. It only becomes, quote, “bad” if you enter a medical system that doesn’t understand this and assumes that all physical symptoms are physical in origin. I really believe that humans have always expressed our lives in our bodies and will always do that moving forward. So our goal, my goal, Curable’s goal, Jill’s goal, is to help you understand more about that and to learn what to do about it, so that when it happens, it’s no longer physically uncomfortable or painful for you.
Both Jill and I initially learned about this concept from a physician named Dr. John Sarno, who many of you have heard of as well. Dr. Sarno was a physiatrist in New York City in the 1960s who really understood the connection between mind and body, and he was the first one to really popularize this work at that time. He coined the term tension myositis syndrome, or TMS, which is a term I have used for years. Now that we have a much better understanding of the whole concept, we preferentially use the term mind-body medicine, but occasionally I slip and call it TMS. So just note that no matter what I say and no matter what I call it, I’m referring to this concept that what happens in our lives shows up in our bodies, and that doesn’t make us bad and it doesn’t make us sick. It just makes us human.
So with that, let me introduce Jill. I first met Jill in late 2014, when she came to me suffering from 40 years of migraine headaches. I was interested in taking a more holistic approach to her pain. She’s done extraordinarily well since that time using mind-body medicine methods, having gone from roughly 200 migraines a year down to about four. She frequently speaks publicly to my patients about her experience, both individually and in groups, and she’s such an inspiring speaker that I wanted you to have a chance to listen to her as well.
In the real world, Jill is an adjunct professor of writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She writes stories and essays and articles. She’s working on a nonfiction book about her quest to find a species of plant or animal that’s never been seen before. She also runs the Office of Modern Composition in Chicago and is the host of The Shape of the World podcast, which she describes as being about cities, nature, and people. She lives on the south side of Chicago in Hyde Park with her husband and, during COVID, possibly her two delightful college-aged daughters. She likes gardening, tennis, and talking, writing, and thinking about mind-body medicine. She and I have collaborated on some writing projects about this topic, and over the years she’s become a good friend. So, Jill, thanks for being here on Hope for Healing with me.
Jill: Thanks so much for inviting me.
Dr. Stracks: You’re welcome. You and I were talking a little bit before we got on. I like to often start with a non-mind-body medicine topic, so can you tell us a little more about The Shape of the World podcast?
Jill: Yeah. The Shape of the World came out of my long career in things related to environment and science. I started off as an environmentalist, thinking that wilderness was way over here and nature was way over there. I’ve spent this time living in the city of Chicago and really understanding how nature is all around us, and inside of us, and is us, and I wanted to have a podcast about that. There’s a lot of dire news about the environment, and rightly so. Not everything’s going perfectly, by a long shot. At the same time, there are things that have made great improvements in the environment, especially around nature and biodiversity in cities. Cities have become incredible places for finding nature and getting in touch with nature. So I talk to people like the architect Jeanne Gang, who incorporates a lot of nature into the designs of her buildings. I’m actually working on editing our podcast episode right now. That’s what I’ll do after I get off the phone with you.
Dr. Stracks: She’s a big deal. Good for you.
Jill: I have David Sibley from this season, who has written all the bird guides, and different people who talk about wildlife in the city, nature in the city, and how to access it. We also just talk a lot about their lives, and what it is to see the world in that way.
Dr. Stracks: Nice. How many years have you done it now?
Jill: It’s my third season. I’m just completing the third season.
Dr. Stracks: Nice. The Shape of the World. I think I botched the title earlier. And people who want to listen to it can find it on iTunes?
Jill: Yeah, the usual spots.
Dr. Stracks: Okay, good. So let’s talk about mind-body medicine for a while. You and I first met when you came to my office when I was working at the hospital at Northwestern, and you’d been dealing with migraine headaches for many, many, many years at that point. Can you give everybody a sense of what life was like for you leading up to that? You had gotten your first migraine when you were young, right?
Jill: Yeah. It was horrible. I had migraine headaches for 42 years, I think, before I set foot in your office, from the time I was 10 or 11. It was the worst aspect of my life by far. Even if I didn’t have a headache and wasn’t in pain at that moment, my life was really organized around the possibility that I could have a headache at any moment. So I needed to get something done right now, because who knew, three days from now I might be laid low by a headache. It really monopolized a lot of my thinking during that time. It wasn’t as though it was always steady. I did have some periods where they were lighter and less impactful on my life, and times when they were worse, but they were a consistent thing for over 40 years.
Dr. Stracks: And with typical migraine symptoms, the splitting headache? Did you have auras and other pieces, nausea, vomiting?
Jill: My experience of migraines was that it felt like a malevolent weather system that would move in. It could be precipitated by pain in my head, but it was more than pain in my head. Specifically, the biggest symptoms I had were the headache itself, and then I would be sick to my stomach as well. So nausea and headaches. Sometimes I would also feel almost like I was getting a tiny fever, that kind of achy sensation. So it really was systemic, and I think that was one of the things I was always confused by and never got a good answer for. I have the pain up here and I’m calling it a headache, so why is my stomach also hurting? My chest is fine, my throat is fine, everything between my head and my stomach is fine, so what’s going on with that? Mind-body medicine suddenly made sense of that, that it wasn’t about a pain in my head.
Dr. Stracks: Somebody, and I can’t remember the author, wrote a nice book called The Headache in the Pelvis, about just that. We call it a headache because it’s there, but it’s the same process that’s going on all over our body. So this had been going on for 40-plus years in you. You had tried a variety of medications. Was that the primary treatment you had tried leading up to it, or had you done a lot of other things as well?
Jill: The medications thing now seems funny to me, but at the time, when you’re in it and you’re struggling for any kind of help, it wasn’t funny at all. When I was young and at home, my parents both got migraines, and I think a big part of it was that they really modeled for me that having headaches was part of being an adult. They would occasionally disappear into a dark room with a cold pack on their head, and when I was an adolescent I was like, okay, I guess I’m signing up for that same program, and something in my body triggered it so that I started getting headaches too. The medicine du jour of our household was Excedrin Extra Strength pain reliever, and I would wash it down with a Coca-Cola, which also had caffeine in it. I thought getting that caffeine was somehow helping the headache.
Then, I really didn’t go to see a doctor about my headaches. I think my parents also viewed them as inevitable, so long as I was living at home. But as a young adult, if I was seeing a doctor about something, I would ask about the headaches. I had a variety of things over that time. Let’s see what was on the list. I tried some prophylactic medicines, like a beta blocker for a while, something to lower blood pressure. In 2010, when they had gotten really bad, I remember one doctor recommended messing with the hormone levels, like maybe taking estrogen. I didn’t do that. There was also an anti-seizure medication that was recommended that I never took.
And I tried all kinds of alternative medicines. In my 20s, or I guess my early 30s, I started doing acupuncture and Chinese herbs in a really serious way. I spent a lot of appointments and a lot of money on that, and it really didn’t make my headaches any better. I really liked my acupuncturist, and I felt very calm going there, and I felt like I was doing something good for my health by going there, but it didn’t change my headaches. I still got the headaches just as much as ever. Other things that were recommended and that I tried were chiropractic, massage, shiatsu massage, and energy healing. I also read in a yoga magazine one time that the color green is good for migraines, so I spent this time period trying to look at trees more, or if I was in a room and felt a headache coming on, I would stare at somebody’s lime green throw pillow on their couch, hoping that was going to cure my headache. It might surprise you to know that it did not cure my headaches, but it sounded good.
Dr. Stracks: So your parents both got migraines and you got migraines, and it feels like sort of an inevitable happening for you. People ask me regularly how genetic this is. Do you have any thoughts, or have you had thoughts over the years, about that question? How much of this could be genetic versus learned versus something else?
Jill: Well, the fact that I could get rid of them by going through the cures involved in mind-body medicine made me think it wasn’t genetic, because if it was genetic, I’d still have them, right? My DNA hasn’t changed.
Dr. Stracks: Your DNA has not changed. Now, interestingly, do you know much about epigenetics? Do you know that term?
Jill: Yes, that idea that your DNA does record some events and environmental factors from parents and grandparents and ancestors.
Dr. Stracks: It doesn’t change the DNA. Your DNA remains your DNA over time, but the DNA strands in the chromosomes get marked in various ways, and then how you express your DNA is different. Somebody may be prone to cancer, say, but if they eat really healthy and exercise regularly and live a clean life, they’re much less likely to get cancer than somebody who’s eating processed foods all the time and living next to, say, a toxic waste dump. Over the last 10 to 15 years we’ve found this concept that our DNA is not our destiny, because there’s a lot that goes on in our lives that changes how we express our genes and our chromosomes. So it’s really nice for the kind of medicine I practice to know that even if we’re prone to certain diseases, there’s nothing that says we can’t change our destiny that way and do something different. So yes, your DNA has not changed, but the way you express your DNA may have a little bit.
I’ve been talking about this because I’ve been telling some of my patients in the last week or two that you and I are going to have this conversation, which they can watch in a couple of weeks when we release it. One of the things we end up talking about is whether there’s a genetic component to migraines. I say, I don’t think anybody’s destined to get migraine headaches. But what I say, and I think I’ve probably said to you before, is that there’s always been a place in society for the people who knew that the storm was coming, because they’re sensitive enough that they can sense the change in the weather, or they know somehow that the neighboring town is getting ready to invade. It shows up in people’s heads. They get this physical warning that something is going on, and in our society we’ve labeled that as migraine and we’ve called it something bad, but I’m not sure that it always was. So I have a sense that maybe you and your family are actually kind of good at knowing what’s going on in the world around you. If you and I lived in a town in central Europe 550 years ago, it may have been great to have your family around to know what was going to happen before it actually happened. These days, we call it migraine and we treat it with medication and everything else. But I’ve talked with a lot of my migraine patients about the possibility that what shows up as migraines is part of their sensitivity and their ability to see and notice what’s going on in the world.
Jill: That’s interesting. It’s both an attractive idea to me and also sort of a dangerous one, in that I think it’s a lot to put on somebody with a migraine, that they’re the barometer for a social system. I don’t know. A lot of my thinking around it has been rotating around, in part, my thinking a lot about science and nature, which is that I know human beings are intensely social animals. That’s why our intelligence has been so much more effective in altering the world, for better and for worse, than any other mammal or cephalopod or any of the other intelligent animals on the planet: we learn from one another. If you have a tool and I see you using that tool, I’m like, oh, that’s a cool tool, I’m going to make myself one of those. Then I think of something else I could do with it, and somebody over here sees me doing that and imitates that. So we grow from learning from one another. Far and away, that’s our advantage over other species on the planet. I just think we’re extremely influenced by the actions and behavior of the people around us. That’s been tracked in things you wouldn’t think would have any kind of communal component at all, even people’s weight. We tend to try to match the weight of the people around us. I think we also tend to try to match the intelligence or wit of the people around us. If we’re with a group of people who are really firing on all cylinders, it ups our game a little bit. We really adapt to fit in with whomever we’re with. And in the world I was modeling myself on, the world I was sensitive to was a much smaller world than the World with a capital W. It was the world of this little house in the country with the three other people who were living there with me. They had headaches, and in solidarity, I had headaches too.
Dr. Stracks: Kids want to fit in. They want to do what everybody else is doing. And just to be clear, I was not suggesting that people with migraines would save the world. I’m not putting that on you. So by the time you and I met, you were having, what, three or four headaches a week? Is that what the pattern was like?
Jill: It was really bad. I really think that period had started a few years before I even saw you. Around 2010 they started getting really bad, to about three a day at points. And I will say now that I understand the relationship to stress, which I didn’t at all at the time, I perceived myself as somebody who didn’t suffer from stress, because I felt like I had a lot of advantages that gave me, not the right to feel stress, so therefore I didn’t. If doctors did ask me about stress levels, I’d be like, no, I’m good, I don’t have any of that. But at that time I was working full-time running exhibits for a natural history museum and had a pretty big staff, with all the attendant things that happen when you’re part of a big organization like that, in a responsible position. I’d also retained a part-time job teaching creative writing to graduate students at the School of the Art Institute. So I had those two jobs. I had two young, school-aged children, and a husband who had recently changed jobs from the nonprofit he had started to a business working on something related to climate change. My parents were aging, and I was the go-to person for them. So in retrospect, I guess you could say I did have stress.
That was the time I got to a doctor who prescribed Maxalt for me, which is a kind of triptan, and that actually worked well for me. I had relief from my headaches during that time until I saw you a few years later. But the problem was that the pills were very expensive, like 30 bucks a pop, so insurance doled them out judiciously. They weren’t a pain reliever or narcotic, so I didn’t have any kind of negative side effects from it, and it wasn’t anything I needed to avoid using for health reasons. I was just down with it. Oh, great, I can get rid of a headache in two hours instead of an entire day, or losing two days to it. That was awesome. That’s how I know how many headaches I was having, because I would get nine of those a month, and I needed all nine of those in a month, and really I needed ten. I wouldn’t have the tenth, and I would get nervous near the end of the month, so I had a lot of anxiety around that medication at that time too.
Dr. Stracks: That’s 120 migraines a year at least, if not more. It’s funny that you mentioned the stress, because there are definitely times when people come into my office and I meet them the first time, and I always ask people about stress, and there are times when I ask and they say, no, my life’s pretty good. Something makes me say, if your wife or your husband, your partner, was here and I asked them if there was stress, what would they say? And people generally laugh. All right. In my memory, either the first time we met or maybe you told me this afterwards, or maybe I’m just totally making this up, you had said at some point, early, maybe in 2014, that this was the year you were going to heal your migraines. You and I talked in November, so you had gone through a lot of the year. Among other things, I think you had taken a mind-body stress reduction course. Do I have that right, that you had made this pledge at some point that the migraines were going to end?
Jill: I had made that pledge plenty of times before, frankly. They really were just awful. I went to see a colleague of yours at Northwestern who was my general practitioner, and I went in there resolved to have one more conversation about migraines. I mentioned to her that I was taking this mind-body stress reduction class, which was essentially a meditation class. It did change my relationship with the pain, but it didn’t make the pain go away. I still had the headaches at the same frequency, but I just felt better about it. I felt like I was a little bit more of an agent in it, that I had some agency and some ability to control the way I reacted and responded to the pain. That did make the situation better, even if it didn’t get rid of the pain.
When I mentioned that I was taking that class, she said, oh, well, we could try this. I think she was actually the one who was talking about the anti-seizure medication as a possible prophylactic. She wrote out the prescription and said, you can decide whether you fill it or not, but it might help, so if you want to try it, here it is. And she said, I have a colleague, Dr. John Stracks, who works with mind-body, and you might want to set up an appointment with him. Thank goodness I did that. Honestly, now that I know you, it sounds sad to say, but at the time I thought, well, this will be hopeless, just one more thing, but okay. Then I saw you just a few weeks after that.
That was the appointment where I said, I want to get 20 percent better. Instead of having a headache once every three days, if I could have a headache once every four or five days, that would be amazing. If I could just reduce it by 20 percent, I would consider that a huge success. I’d come in with my journal, because every doctor always says you need to keep track of when you get the migraines, and what you’re doing when you get them, and what you’ve eaten, and how you’ve exercised, and whether you got sleep, and all of this. I’d been doing that for a long time, not absolutely every day, but intermittently. I had periods where I would take everything “bad” off the list: no cheese, no chocolate, no wine, no alcohol, no caffeine, no sugar, no dairy, no gluten, anything that was in the zeitgeist of our culture at that time of what bad foods were. Sometimes I would remove them all at once and then track the results. Sometimes I would do one at a time and try to see what I was reacting to. I hoped I would get 20 percent better, and I told you that. But I remember one of the things I said was, I do know one thing that’s a trigger: alcohol is definitely a trigger. I felt really proud of myself for having figured that one out. I said, if I drink, I definitely get a headache. And you said, whoa, well, how often do you drink? You got kind of interested. I was like, well, I don’t drink. I haven’t had a drink in 18 years. And you’re like, oh, but you still get headaches.
Dr. Stracks: It’s funny, in my memory, and I don’t know if it’s just become lore in my mind over the years of talking about it, you brought in your list of triggers, and you had 18 triggers or 22 triggers, and you gave it to me, and I was like, huh, that’s interesting. I threw it over my shoulder.
Jill: It was totally like that. It was like, oh, that’s sweet that you’ve been keeping track of all those completely inconsequential pieces of data. That is really sweet. You didn’t say anything like that, but I definitely had the sense that I was on the wrong track and you had a different track in mind. I remember that after I said that about the alcohol, you said, oh, you’ll be able to have a glass of red wine again, picking the one thing that’s always the number one cause of migraines, red wine. Something about you doing that shook me free of the narrative I’d had. And that was when you said something, and this was the phrase that really changed my life. I’m actually going to read it, because I wrote it down exactly the way you said it to me at that time, because that was the point at which I really started getting better. It was in that first appointment that you said: “Your pain is real, but you’re not sick. There’s nothing wrong with your head.”
It seems in retrospect like I should have known that, or somebody else should have said that to me, but all my conversations with every other doctor, and every little bit of the narrative I had spinning in my head, was: what’s wrong with my head? What’s wrong specifically with this part of my head where I really get the headaches? I would intermittently decide for sure that it was a huge tumor, never mind that I’d had it forever and it had always been the same. No, this time, definitely, something had gone wrong. And then I would think it was something I was doing, so I had a lot of guilt. Oh my gosh, maybe it’s because I ate something that had sugar in it at 4:30, and the headache came on by six o’clock. Maybe it was this, maybe it was that. So I had a lot of guilt and shame that maybe I was doing something wrong, because frankly the literature tells migraine sufferers they’re doing something wrong. There’s so much of that.
Dr. Stracks: Medical education is taught in the sense of, here’s how people get sick and this is what’s done to make them better, so there’s just not a very good model in the medical world for honoring people’s strengths and seeing their health.
Jill: I’m lucky, I think, from both nature and training, that you’ve learned to do that, but it’s hard to enter anywhere in the system where somebody can say that to you, like, I don’t really think you’re sick. And there’s a lot of blame that goes on.
Dr. Stracks: What you’re talking about, I hear from my patients regularly, that physicians and practitioners will blame them too, and it hurts my heart when I hear that. I can’t think of anything that somebody who’s not feeling well needs less than to hear that they’re doing it wrong, and that’s why it’s not working, or that they have a bad habit.
Jill: I think that’s why I eliminated alcohol, frankly, because it was the clearest thing that was a bad habit. I didn’t smoke, so there were a lot of things on the list of health things. And hearing that maybe it’s because you’re eating cheese, it’s like, oh excellent, I’m going to be an even better person from now on, I won’t eat cheese.
Dr. Stracks: Right. I hear people say that about migraines or other things too: don’t eat cheese, don’t eat sugar. But it’s not like the physicians are there eating a vegan diet and being pillars of health. It’s this challenge to do things that are super hard, as if you should just whip it off and live without all those 18 triggers and everything else.
Jill: For me, that whole concept that I wasn’t sick was really revelatory. It was a way for me to redefine who I was, because I felt I was sick. I felt like a headache is a sickness and a stomachache is a sickness, and I get those and I get them often, and therefore a third of the time I’m a sick person. It was really tied in with my identity, and I know I let it hold me back from a lot of things that I wanted to do or participate in. It was really detrimental in so many ways. Even though I was functioning well in so many ways, the fact that I was often functioning well while experiencing a really bad headache, that’s hard. I think anyone with chronic pain like that has those experiences where it is really terrible and you do manage to get yourself off to crawl into a hole for a little while until you feel better, but there’s tons of time when you have some kind of chronic pain and you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, but you’re doing it with that chronic pain. You’re sitting in the same meeting as everyone else and you have a migraine. So there’s that additional burden of so frequently having to do all the ordinary activities I still had to do, but doing them while, in my mind, I was sick.
Dr. Stracks: Absolutely. So you and I met that first time, and I think we probably talked about joining my class. It was late in the year, so we may not have had one until January anyway. But did you break your foot after that? I have a memory that something happened.
Jill: Yes. I went out to Vermont to see a favorite young cousin in his senior high school play, and I slid on a mountain. It was already snowy there, and I badly injured my leg. But it was interesting, because I had seen you and I had taken Dr. Howard Schubiner’s book. After that appointment I got his book Unlearn Your Pain, which was available at the counter at the office at Northwestern on my way out, and I bought that one and You Can’t Find Anything Wrong with You by David Clarke. I started reading those books immediately. So there were a couple of months between when I saw you and when I joined your class, and in the meantime I had this trip where I injured my leg. Even then, I was able to control the way I felt about that pain. I was like, oh, but it’s only a pain in my leg. There’s only one thing wrong. I don’t have to let it affect all my other parts. Every other part of me is working just fine. So even then I had this little breakthrough of how I handled that injury.
Dr. Stracks: And then was it that January that you took the class with me?
Jill: Yes, it was that January that I took the class with you, and I think I responded right away. I was really ready and hungry for that change of narrative about why I was sick, and really eager to understand it better. I did the exercises you would assign in the class. As a teacher myself, I always hope that everybody does everything exactly the way I want them to, and that it gains the maximum amount. To be honest, I was a little bit half-hearted about how I did the assignments. I would write the thing I was supposed to write, but sometimes my attention would be caught by something else in the book and I might work on that. So I guess that’s one thing I always like to tell people: you can do this work extremely imperfectly and have it be highly successful. That was my experience, and the experience of the other people in that group. There was something about making that effort, having that intentional time, an hour or two hours once a week, and coming in to do that for six weeks straight. It was really great. I started to have these different visions of my pain that I could work with and handle, and I started to be able to create things that I could think through in my mind when I would feel a headache coming on. I just learned a whole new set of skills through that process.
Dr. Stracks: That was a really fun class too. Three of you in there were some of my most successful patients ever, including, I think, Jessica Dixon, who was the first Hope for Healing guest. Whatever we did, we need to somehow go back and bottle that for everybody. I think you’re probably doing that in all your classes now. I will often use you as an example, anonymously of course. I say that you took the mind-body stress reduction class earlier that previous year, and that it really set you up nicely, even though it didn’t make the pain better, that it puts you in a space. But actually, as I’m listening to you talk, that was just a little piece of it, because you had a lot of other skills that you brought in. Sometimes I think of people as being supersaturated, an old chemistry term where the solute is dissolved in the liquid but it’s over-dissolved, so all you need is one more drop and it all comes out, and it happens very quickly. There are patients of mine who have been working on this for a long time and get better very slowly, and you made a lot of progress very quickly. Looking back, do you have a sense, in addition to the MBSR class, of what else set you up to be able to understand this very quickly and very intuitively?
Jill: I had reached a place in my life where I understood the importance of narrative and the fluidity of narrative, and how many different takes there are on the same story. I’d become more suspicious, in a really good and playful way, of whatever the dominant narrative was. Oh, that could be that way, and let’s talk about the five other ways it could be too. So I wasn’t somebody at that point in my life who was completely locked into thinking I knew everything there was to know about myself, or about my family, or about societal stressors, or about what it was like to be a young female person growing up in the late 20th century. I’d come to understand those social pressures in a different way, like, huh, that was going on, well, that was pretty messed up, rather than thinking, oh, this is just the way the world works, and that’s a great world and everything’s fine. So I was less willing to continue to support the propaganda machine that had been given by the dominant culture and by the folks around me. There are things that were valuable in that, and valuable lessons. I actually think that denial of problems is an effective tool. It can be a great tool at certain times. The problem is if you look in your toolbox and that’s the only thing sitting there. You’re going to need more than a hammer. A screwdriver would be nice, and some Allen wrenches would be pretty good, and it wouldn’t hurt if you had a box cutter in there, and some magnets and a few other things. That’s what I was left with. “Buck up and suck it up” was pretty much the only thing I had in my back pocket to pull out.
Dr. Stracks: In the past I’ve asked you the flip side of that question. Because you took to it so quickly and so intuitively, I was listening to you talk one time and I thought, why did it take 42 years to recognize that? I don’t even know if you remember this, but one of the things you talked about was getting far enough away from the way your family dealt with it, which essentially was to have a migraine. That was part of the family business, to have migraines. Does that ring true to you at this point, that it took a while to get out of the system where that was the correct response into a different system where there are other responses?
Jill: I think it helped for me to be able to take a more critical look at my own wonderful parents and see the other sides of them as they aged. Those sides became more apparent for me to observe, and I had just become more flexible and looser. There’s something about having kids that makes you realize, oh, they can be raised a whole bunch of ways and be okay, and that made me look at my parents in a different way. It’s hard for me to pin down exactly what that was. I do think it had a lot to do with story, and as a writer I understand story. I’ve been going at it both in a cognitive way, in a formal study of story and narrative, and also in this personal study of my own narrative, and those two things have informed each other. Because I had that, I think it made me more receptive to the idea. Basically, what you did is you totally blew my boat out of the water. I could easily have exploded and knocked all the papers off your desk and stormed out of there.
Dr. Stracks: That has happened. My record was 30 seconds into an appointment one time. Not this kind of appointment, but that’s happened.
Jill: I think it was the right time for me to come to you. I could have used it probably 10 years before that, and I do feel like I would have been receptive to it earlier. But I definitely think the fact that I was an adult at this stage, and I knew that human beings write the stories and construct the narratives, they don’t exist in time and space as a fixed entity. It’s up to you to claim your own story, and to understand it and interpret it and change it, and you may look at it differently at different times in your life. I was ready for a story in which I was not a sick person.
Dr. Stracks: It’s interesting to me too, what you said earlier about us being such social animals and wanting to be in the group. By the time you came to me, as you said, you had your own life and your own family. You and I were talking before we got on about my patients who are in their late 20s and early 30s, just starting out into that new life. I do think that pressure, maybe not the right word, but just wanting to fit in. If you come from a place where illness is part of the narrative, it is a very brave and bold step to move out of that. You’re saying you’d had a fair amount of time to practice that and get ready for it. I think some of my patients are trying to figure out how to compress that process and move out of it very quickly, and I think it’s hard and scary, and maybe not necessary. Maybe their path is going to be a little more circuitous and soft, a sandy-bottomed stream winding its way, and that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be moving from A to Z and skipping all the LMNOPs. It’s all right if it’s slow, and the more gentle you can make that process, the better. You deserve gentleness. You deserve a gentle path.
Jill: Yes. Everybody deserves kindness and gentleness, and especially when they’re not feeling well. I think you probably have people, maybe even the person who walked out of your office after 30 seconds, where a little something entered that maybe changed a little bit, entered a little bit of doubt about what their dominant narrative is, and then you just play around with that and travel with that question a little bit, and something else adds to it, and something else adds to it. For some people, like me, who happened to be in your office at the moment, you were that lightning bolt that made me see something in a completely different way. Maybe for other people you’re a gentle little nudge, and the lightning bolt happens at some other time in some other way. It’s hard to know.
Dr. Stracks: I like that idea, because a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves, and they work on it and they struggle and they’re not getting better, and then they start self-shaming because they’re not better. So I love what you’re saying, that the gentleness and the gradualness is okay.
Jill: I’d like to say one thing about this. I think this mind-body medicine cure is the only thing I ever did that didn’t have any negative side effects. Every medicine you take has some little zinger to it that’s probably doing something that’s not quite so great. The Maxalt that I liked so much actually did make me feel a little bit loopy. My brain wasn’t functioning exactly the same way. It wasn’t bad, but it was a little bit that way. It also had the bad side effect of costing money and causing anxiety. The acupuncture really did drain my bank account of many thousands of dollars over that period of time, and I had to drive a long way to see that acupuncturist. It’s just part of the process, and I don’t regret it. I don’t think I was taken advantage of or that anything bad happened. But the major side effect of mind-body work is that you get to know yourself a lot better. I really do believe in that edict from the ancient Greeks that the whole purpose of life is to know thyself, and by knowing yourself you understand more about the human condition and about the meaning of life. There are all these beautiful things that come along with doing this work, and no bad side effects.
Dr. Stracks: I was talking to a patient about exactly that topic yesterday. He’s still trying to sort it out, it’s only been a few weeks, but he recognized exactly that. I’ve learned some more about myself and relationships, and how bad can that side effect be, right? Even if you didn’t end up getting rid of your pain forever, instantly, with a lightning bolt, it’s great because you’re learning more, and that’s what we’re here on earth to do. So okay, you took my class, and I think you’d already started getting better even by the time you got there. Can you talk a little about what you noticed in that time period after you and I talked, and what happened to the migraines over, say, the next six or 12 months?
Jill: When I was getting ready to talk to you today, I looked back at my records. I remember I even said something to you, like, I want to be one of your big successes, when I came in to meet you, and I didn’t even know that you had success panels where people talked about it. You said, oh yeah, you’d probably be able to talk on a success panel by maybe April or something like that, a few months away. I was like, wait, what, that really is a thing? But I did in fact talk on a success panel just a couple of months after I finished that first class. I used my records from Walgreens to track the number of pills I had taken. At that point, using the Walgreens records, I’d wanted to have 20 percent fewer by April, so that was five or six months from when I’d first seen you in November, and only a couple of months after the class, my headaches were 84 percent better. It’s amazing. I was taking 16 percent as much medicine as I was taking before.
The other thing that had happened is that it had this unexpected benefit in that it cured everything else that was wrong with me that I hadn’t even thought was wrong, because I was so focused on the headaches. I’d been having gallbladder attacks, and I’d been told I needed to have my gallbladder out, and here I am several years later with my gallbladder still working just fine. Those were terrible. I would get up in the middle of the night with just excruciating pain. I had foot pain, weirdly, that just went away. I was getting up in the middle of the night a lot with these weird digestive distress attacks, spending some time awake just feeling uncomfortable. I’d been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome when I was maybe in my 20s, which had been intermittent but had been bad during this time period building up to it, and my digestion just moved to being pitch perfect. So I had this whole other set of things that disappeared during that time period.
I should say too, that was the first six months of extraordinary difference. At this point now, I do still feel migraines coming on. I’ve had a lot of luck with either just taking a couple of Advil and they go away, or with a prescription bottle I got from you. I actually got this prescription bottle from you when I had to take doxycycline because I had a tick that I was worried might be Lyme disease, so I got one dose of doxycycline. I recycled that bottle and put a prescription label on it for a made-up name for a drug that doesn’t exist, but it looks super official, and I filled it with orange Tic Tacs, so they’re the same flavor and color as Advil. Sometimes I’ll just take one of those, and I’ll be like, I don’t know if I should take this, this is really strong, and I hesitate over it the same way I used to hesitate over taking the Maxalt. I just don’t know, but maybe I really need it this time, and I’m going to take it this time. I’ve had a lot of luck convincing my body, oh, this is the thing we really respond to, and feel better. Oh, I see, my prefrontal cortex is paying attention to what the rest of us are saying, that we’re in pain. Okay, we’re all feeling better now. It’s almost like you treat a child, giving them attention, giving attention through taking pills. I’ve kept the prescription refilled. I’ve got a generous amount. I still carry it in my traveling kit and I still have it at home, but I take maybe three or four a year, something like that, and usually even then I take a half of one at a time, which I could never have imagined doing before. The fact that I don’t even know exactly how many pills there are anymore would have been inconceivable to me five or six years ago.
Dr. Stracks: That’s a nice point too, because we were talking earlier about the pressure people put on themselves to get better. When people get better and are doing well, oftentimes if they get a migraine, they’re back to blaming themselves, feeling like they’ve done something wrong. But you still get them occasionally, you still take medication occasionally, and that’s okay, right?
Jill: That’s okay, right. And it’s funny, because I do realize that the narrative around me now, since other people know that it’s this mind-body connection, I’ll often have my husband say very anxiously, what do you think’s causing this one? There’s a certain anxiety, and he kind of wants a clear answer, like, oh, it was the conversation I had with this client. He probably doesn’t want to hear, oh, it’s the argument we had yesterday. But I don’t know. It’s not like I know exactly what it is. I have worked out a lot of things that don’t involve taking Tic Tacs or Maxalt to help with them. I have certain things that I visualize that help me calm down the headaches. I have habits that I’ll do, like I’ve described for you before. I’ll turn a piece of paper sideways and make a circle in the middle of what I think is the stressor, and then make little bubbles out from it: oh, I think it’s this, but it’s also related to this, which is also related to this. I won’t necessarily write a whole big long thing about it. I do sometimes do MBS writing, where I’m journaling, but sometimes I’ll just take a real shortcut and try to work it out another way.
Dr. Stracks: And the visualization that you do, is there any one in particular, or a combination? What’s helpful in those moments?
Jill: There are a couple that I rely on. One of them I came up with when I was in your class, because we had a new puppy at home at the time who was a total whirling dervish of terror, like this wild creature that was always on, always on, always on, and always frantic. I think I got it from the fact that we had that puppy at that time. I would picture my amygdala and my limbic system as being like this animal that was all emotion, responding to every little interaction with fear, excitement, thrill, constantly in an emotional state. I started picturing my amygdala like this little wild animal. That class was in the winter, so I would think about it climbing onto a little ledge in the back of my brain and lying down, and I pictured another part of myself covering it over with a little blanket and then snow falling gently on it, just cooling it down. I would think about caring for my amygdala, putting it to rest, letting it cool off in this gentle, pretty snow. That still works for me when I’m in that kind of state, where I feel like there’s something really buzzing in my head that I just can’t calm down.
Another one that’s good for me is that I think about the fact that the same circuits in my body that carry pain, if I actually do hurt something, like my leg sliding on a mountain, are the exact same ones that hurt when I’ve had a bad conversation with the chair of my department at the School of the Art Institute. It’s the same pathways. So I picture those pathways as really hot and all fired up, full of signals going back and forth rapidly. I imagine my amygdala having these little crankshafts, like wheels, that I could turn to slowly close them down, and I ask my amygdala to close them down and cool them down to this icy teal blue. I picture those circuits in my body calming down into this peaceful color, the color of sky and water and ice. I’ll take a quiet moment and picture that and imagine the pain circuits calming down.
Dr. Stracks: That’s nice. It makes me feel calm just listening to you talk about it. So these days, for people who are listening, it sounds like it’s rare that you get what you consider a full-blown migraine, but it probably happens occasionally. I think you’re describing that you get what starts to feel like the beginning of what a migraine used to feel like. Is that right?
Jill: Yes.
Dr. Stracks: And at that point you say to yourself, and I’m thinking this through too, okay, something’s going on that I need to address one way or another. What goes through your mind when this happens, and what can people who are listening take from your experience?
Jill: Well, first of all, I should probably be completely honest and say that my first reaction is identical to what my old reaction always was, which is a sense of panic and dread. Oh no, I’m getting a migraine. I’ve got this, this, this, and this to do. I cannot afford a migraine. However, I’ve gotten really good at letting that be a really short period of time, because I’m so familiar with it now. Oh, that’s happening. Okay. I don’t let it spin out of control and become the only narrative. But I still get it. That’s almost always my first feeling, this feeling of dread, and a little bit of shame. Really? I thought I was done with that. I thought I’d moved past it, and now I’m having a headache. So I bring some consciousness to that, and I usually decide I’m just going to wait a little bit and see what happens. I don’t necessarily do anything right away. Generally it happens at a time when I can’t do something right away either. It’s not like my day is full of leisure, when I’ve got a lot of time to immediately go journal or sit out by the lake. But I’ll monitor it for a while. It’s rare, I would say, that they just go away on their own by my bringing that consciousness to it. Generally I need to do something.
Often, for me, getting away from my house is helpful. I’ll get into my car. I live pretty close to Lake Michigan, so I’ll drive to one of the parks and sit in the parking lot with my notebook for a little bit and do that diagram I was describing, or do a little bit of writing. I always write “MBS writing” at the top, so I don’t mix it up with my professional writing, because my MBS writing can be more of a rant: she said that, and he did this, and why am I so oppressed, and that kind of thing. But sometimes I’ll have moments of genuine insight in that too. I’ve actually saved pieces of those writings, because I’m like, oh, that’s what that was about all along, maybe I could use that in a story someday. So it’s a mix of things. Sometimes I’ll just put a timer on it. I’ll say, I know I don’t want to do this, but I’m just going to do it for 20 minutes, and at 20 minutes I’m going to stop no matter where I am and move on with what I need to do today. And sometimes I’ll just sit quietly. I’ll go to someplace where I can be alone for a little bit and do one of those visualization exercises I described.
Those things don’t always get me over my headache right away, but I always feel calmer because of doing them, and I think they lead to my headache going away. I can’t say that everybody will have the lightning bolt experience where they get better starting at that moment. I don’t necessarily get rid of the headache in that moment, but I feel like it’s the start of it, and then there’s a little meandering path that might involve my taking some Tic Tacs, or taking the actual Advil, or eating something, or sitting down for a little while and doing something gentle and mindless, reading something that’s not the newspaper and not the news feed on my phone. It’s like I have to get off of whatever the current is that I’m on and take a little step off to the side. That seems to be one thing that’s always a constant. It might vary in what that is.
Dr. Stracks: So the initial signal, what feels like a migraine, is a sign from somewhere that something needs to happen, and your initial response is that panic response, which is almost everybody’s initial response. But you’ve learned enough to know that you can bring that down quickly. So now it’s kind of like a knock on the door, whereas maybe in the past it was like your brain was bringing a sledgehammer: hey, I’ve got something to tell you. But it turned out there was never a sledgehammer, though it felt like it.
Jill: I was afraid of a sledgehammer even when one didn’t exist. I think that’s a really great way of putting it. The other thing I would do is run away from the sledgehammer at the door, and now instead I’m like, oh, I can just open it up a little bit and see who’s there, see how scary it is. Oh, okay, there’s that. Actually, I’m going to close the door right now, because I don’t want to deal with that, or I don’t have time for that. But now I know a little bit, and I can take another step a little bit later. There’s wisdom in every cell of our body, so sometimes it may not even have so much to do with what I put on a piece of paper. It has to do with my having turned and looked at it dead on for a minute, and then my body’s calm enough to do that work in other cells of my body. It’s not necessarily happening all from my prefrontal cortex. It’s happening in other parts of me that are doing that healing.
Dr. Stracks: And sometimes there’s something to be learned. You get into a place where you jot some things down, and sometimes there’s something really important in there. Other times I hear you say it’s about just taking a breath and stepping back, even if it’s not in that moment. Maybe it’s later that night or three days later, but this becomes a signal that maybe you just need a breath or a little bit of space, and you’ve figured out ways, over time, to respond to it. Not necessarily in that moment, but you can say, I’m just going to go for a walk, or a drive, or just close my eyes for a second.
Jill: Yes, that’s exactly right. And I do feel badly, in a way, because I feel as though I let my prefrontal cortex, the rational side of the brain, the newest side of the brain, the one that sets us apart as humans, I propped it up as the authoritative leader when it just wasn’t, and it isn’t, for any one of us. It’s one member of a really big team. I let this tyrant of a boss be mean to everybody else on the team. It was mean to my poor feet that had foot pain, and it was mean to my poor head, and it got really angry with that part of my forehead for experiencing pain. It was always punishing everyone for weakness instead of celebrating strengths. It was just an awful boss. I think even my prefrontal cortex feels good that it doesn’t have to do that anymore. Oh, thank God, I don’t have to be such a jerk all the time, and I can let some of the other members of the team, let the amygdala have its say.
I was going to mention this, a recent one for me. I heard an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, who does a lot of really wonderful writing about the creative process. In fact, she’s one of the people I think is doing some of the best writing now about what it’s like to live a life as a writer, as a creative person. She was on a podcast with Tim Ferriss where she talked about an exercise she does when she’s feeling very uptight. She lets fear have its say. She’ll say, okay, just tell me everything that’s on your mind, and she’ll jot down notes and let fear talk for a while. Then she’ll say, thank you so much for that, I appreciate it, now I’m going to have you step out of the room, you’ve had your say, and I’m going to invite wisdom in. Wisdom is going to talk for a while, and then she listens to what wisdom has to say. I don’t do that exact exercise, but I feel like it’s a more formal way of saying what I’m saying, which is that I look at my amygdala and my limbic system, the things that are reacting to small stresses in my environment or my social situation, and I let them talk, instead of just shutting them up and saying, you don’t matter, and that’s not true, and I’m fine, we’re fine, you’re fine. I just listen and let them have their say. They don’t get to call the shots. She had another phrase in her book Big Magic, something like fear is always going to be along for the ride, but just keep it in the back seat. You’re not allowed to fiddle with the windows, you can’t fiddle with the radio dial, whatever it is, you can never drive, but you’re welcome to come along on the family trip.
Dr. Stracks: You want it on the bus, you just don’t want it driving.
Jill: Exactly.
Dr. Stracks: I love that. So much of this is about listening. When Jessica was on, one of the things she told me fairly recently is that after she learned about this, the very first thing she did, on an airplane going to South America, when she had a really bad migraine, was remember that I, or Dr. Sarno, or somebody had said you should ask the migraine what it’s doing or what it wants. So she fastened her seatbelt, shut her eyes, got comfortable, and said, migraine, what are you doing here? She said she was shocked that not only was there an answer, but there was a clear answer, and just in asking the question, she said it reduced the pain by about 50 percent. I had another conversation with a patient fairly recently who was struggling, and we were talking about that concept. She said, I do ask it what it wants, it never tells me. I said, well, what do you say? And she said, come on, what are you doing here? I’ve got 30 seconds before my next class. It’s the bad boss or the bad parent, instead of one that actually wants some genuine answer that might provide some illumination.
Jill: Right. So just taking the time, getting settled, putting our seatbelt on, closing our eyes, taking a few breaths, and then waiting. And not being afraid of it. I also think about the same time period when I was going through that healing, I was literally cleaning my basement. We had a basement with whatever the previous occupants had put in it, and other things people had stored there, as well as our own junk, and every morning for 20 minutes I was going down there and cleaning things up. It was such a great metaphor, because there was really nothing that terrible in the basement. I did find one dried-up dead mouse. It certainly didn’t hurt me. That was probably the scariest thing in that basement. I think we have this sense, because there’s a lot in our basements, especially if we’ve lived in a state of denial and haven’t looked there in a really long time, that it just builds up and feels like it’s all terrible. But if you take it apart one by one, none of the individual parts are actually all that terrible.
Dr. Stracks: There are a couple of questions that I frequently get asked that I always want to bring up for people. Before I do that, is there anything else about your experience that you want to bring up, or that it would be good for people to know?
Jill: Just that it really is life-changing, and I feel incredible most of the time. I’m able to do the things I want to do. I don’t make plans around, oh, what if I can’t do them anymore. There were so many barriers and obstacles in other parts of my life that dropped away along with the headaches, and I do feel very free. It doesn’t mean that I won’t have pain, or genuine pathologies, or injuries, or things in the future. It’s not like I’m made of steel. In fact, I feel like I’m made of a more fluid material, where those things can flow into me, and hopefully I’ll still have the gateways for them to flow back out again. So it’s not a recipe for immortality or never feeling sick or never feeling pain again, but it’s massively, massively reduced, and it doesn’t occupy part of my psyche anymore in the way that it used to.
Dr. Stracks: I tell people that all the time, that knowing about this doesn’t mean no more pain ever. It just means there are so many more tools in the toolbox when it shows up. Something I’ve been saying frequently on these video casts and to patients and groups is that my patients who know about mind-body medicine are light years better at dealing with the pandemic than my patients who don’t. I’ve gotten calls from my mind-body patients during this difficult time where they say, I’d like to set up an appointment, I need to talk this through, or, do you have a resource where I can read about what to do about this? But my non-mind-body medicine patients are calling and saying, can I get more Vicodin, or can I have the number of a spine surgeon, really going to places that probably aren’t going to be helpful for them down the road. But those are the tools they have. So knowing about this has not only been helpful for managing the pain, it’s been helpful for managing this difficult, difficult, difficult time.
Jill: That doesn’t surprise me at all. I definitely feel that. You start to have confidence in small things working, small things put together in even a haphazard, idiosyncratic, artisanal manner as opposed to an industrial solution, and you start to understand that those really do work.
Dr. Stracks: So, a couple of questions that I know had come in. One is travel. I get that question regularly from people whose migraines show up on trips or when they go to visit family. Any thoughts about things that have been helpful in managing that particular set of migraines?
Jill: Yes, the travel one is an interesting one, because I’m actually right now in a place that used to be a really big trigger for me. I’m in a family cabin that belongs to my husband’s family. I love my husband’s family, and I love this place. It’s a really pretty spot and I get a lot of access to the outdoors, but there were a lot of social stresses up here that I just didn’t acknowledge. It’s about 400 miles from our house, and almost always when I would arrive here I would get sick right away with a migraine. I thought, it’s the food, or I got dehydrated on the drive, and I had a whole bunch of other reasons for it, instead of understanding that there were social stressors leading to it. So I think it’s not different for travel. Travel does exacerbate it, because oftentimes it is traveling to be with family. One of the great things about this whole practice is that I’ve understood that things that are considered happy, and are happy, often have embedded in them little moments of sadness or loneliness or other things. And things that tend to be sad or bad, like the pandemic, often have some moments of lightness in them too. Things aren’t one solid formal block. They consist of myriad different strands. So the work that you do to understand that, which is the basic mind-body work, is going to help with travel too. It’s not a different set of things for travel, it’s that same set of tools. But I do think that oftentimes we think of the travel as being the stressor. There is such a thing as place lag, I think. It’s not completely normal for our bodies to be in one place and then in another, but it’s one of the things in the mix. It’s not the thing that’s triggering everything. Bringing that same awareness that you bring to your chronic pain in other respects is going to apply when one travels.
Dr. Stracks: I also talk with people about what a migraine does when we travel. It gives us an opportunity to go away, be by ourselves, shut out the rest of the world, close the windows, close the shades. I think when we travel, oftentimes that gets lost. Whatever alone time or decompression time we usually have isn’t there, and the migraine reminds us to take that. So I’ll talk with people before they travel about where the holes in the schedule are going to be and how they’re going to get some alone time. Can you say, you know what, every day between three and four I’m going to go out and take a walk, I’m not going to be here with everybody else? That’s especially for people who are more introverted and find it harder to be around people all the time, or my patients, a lot of whom are really sensitive and start to pick up on everything that’s going on. So I frequently talk with people about putting those breaks into the travel, so that there’s never an opportunity for the migraine to say, hey, I’m going to make you do this. And not associating those things with weakness, but with being your strength and knowing yourself. Especially for international travel, make sure you build in that extra day before you have to be in the important meeting. If your important meeting is on a Tuesday, don’t show up Monday night and expect yourself to be excellent on Tuesday. Go ahead and go through the motions of having a migraine a full day ahead, even if you’re not sick. Rest, maybe even just stay in your hotel room, even though you’re in a beautiful new city that you feel obliged to explore. Go through some of the steps you would take if you were feeling sick, and let those roll. Then maybe you don’t have to get sick, because you’ve done that self-care. It’s like a prophylactic migraine, instead of prophylactic migraine medication.
Jill: Exactly.
Dr. Stracks: Two other thoughts. One, for people who are listening and just getting started, any thoughts about good ways to get started learning more about this, so they can get on this road toward having fewer migraines?
Jill: Honestly, I think making an appointment with you is a great first start. There’s something about talking to an individual and not being hesitant about doing it. Before I had children, I was always very hesitant about bothering doctors and asking for help with small things that came up that I was worried about. Then with my children I learned, oh, call somebody right away. There’s a person who knows the answer. Go and ask the smart person who studied this, instead of pondering all the possible things that could be wrong with your child. Go ask somebody who actually has a really good chance of knowing the answer. I think it’s the same thing here. Dr. Stracks has a really good chance of being able to give you that gentle nudge in the right direction, and you’re going to feel a thousand times better for having done that. There are other doctors who work with this, but this happens to be the one I know and the one I’m recommending. It doesn’t mean Dr. Stracks is the only person, but I think having a conversation with another human being is a great first step, I really do. Then the books are also great. For me, being a big reader, those work really well, because it is like being in conversation with another human being. But you know yourself. Maybe you’re better off with a YouTube video of somebody talking intelligently about this, or maybe you have another medium. Again, take this strength we have of being social animals, by availing yourself of other human beings who can influence you in a direction on your path to health. There are a whole lot of people willing to keep us sick. There’s a whole lot of financial incentive in keeping us sick. There’s also a great camaraderie in being sick. Sometimes it’s hard to give up an illness because you’re with other people who have that same illness or that same chronic pain, and there’s some solidarity in that. It can be hard to be the one who sheds the problem, because then you’re not part of that group anymore. So do use that instead to try to be around someone who can put you on a path to health.
Dr. Stracks: Obviously there are so many resources out there, Curable being another that people can tap into very easily. What I say to people is that there’s no one right place to get started. I’m happy to talk with anybody who wants to talk with me about it, and tapping into the app is a great thing to do too. But reading the books, and jotting down some ideas, and what Jill was talking about, just putting stressors out onto paper. One of my patients just takes out a piece of paper and writes down everything she’s mad about. There’s no one pathway, which is one of the reasons I love doing this work. It’s individualized, and there are so many different options and things to do, so oftentimes the right first step is just to get started.
Jill: That’s right. And also using your own wisdom about yourself. If you’ve had something else that’s worked really well for you in solving another problem, maybe there are lessons implicit in that. Maybe there’s a way to apply it to this too, and you’ll come up with your own little something that works really well, the prescription just for you.
Dr. Stracks: And then the flip side of that: for people who have been working on this for a long time, who know that it’s out there and aren’t having a whole lot of success, any thoughts about ways to get unstuck for people who have been working hard and not seeing the results they want?
Jill: That’s a great question. The little phrase in there that I’m going to fixate on a little bit is “working hard.” I think some of us got this way with chronic pain by working hard and feeling that was the answer to everything, so I’d be a little cautious around that. For me, perfectionism, and trying to be very diligent at all times and always moving forward, were part of what helped make me sick. There were things in me that wanted me to turn to the side and look out the window instead of looking just at the computer screen all the time. I don’t have a great recommendation for exactly what that is, but I think being wary of the idea that if I put in more hours on this it’s going to make the difference. Maybe it’s a conversation with a different person. Maybe Dr. Stracks or someone else could put you in a conversation with somebody who’s had something similar to what you’ve had. Maybe it’s trying something radically different, maybe mastering a new skill that suddenly puts you in a different kind of meditative state. I think there are metaphors implicit in many different things. For me, writing has generated a whole lot of thinking around narrative. I don’t know what field of endeavor every person listening to this is in, but maybe there’s something within your own field, or something you’ve been interested in growing into, that might end up holding some answers to this. It’s not an esoteric kind of knowledge, in some ways. It’s like baking bread. You can make sourdough anywhere, because the yeast is actually everywhere in the environment, just waiting to become sourdough bread. I feel like this is sort of like that. There are a lot of clues to this in a lot of different places, and maybe opening up your mind to where those are, in unexpected places that others haven’t found yet, would also be a possibility, rather than just working hard.
Dr. Stracks: I was never a big migraine person, but I would get them occasionally, and since I learned about mind-body medicine I’ve had one in the past 22 years. It was coming back from Wisconsin. I had gone on a 100-mile bike ride and overhydrated, and driving back to Chicago it started feeling like an ice pick through the back of my eye socket. I knew what to do. I’m Dr. Stracks, I was like, migraine, go away, I don’t need you. And I almost vomited. It just didn’t help at all. So I got home and thought, well, that strategy evidently didn’t work. I may have even taken an Advil, but I just sat and watched. That was all I could do. I observed and I breathed, and as I got calmer I noticed it wasn’t a monolithic ice pick. There was some texture to it and character. I started noticing that it would roll out and then come back, and over time it could go out for a little bit longer, and it wasn’t quite as bad when it came back. Over 45 or 60 minutes, ultimately it rolled out one last time and didn’t come back. But just what you said, fighting with it made me vomit.
Jill: Yeah, and my migraines are often like that as well. Sometimes I’ll notice there are moments when I’m distracted and the headache has gone away. I’ve had some success also with imagining what it feels like to feel without a migraine and then lengthening those periods, and eventually they do lengthen and I don’t have the migraine anymore. It sounds like the same kind of thing you’re talking about, recognizing that there are waves instead of regarding it as a monolithic thing.
Dr. Stracks: Anything else you want people to know? We’ve talked about a lot and we’ve been here a while, but anything else you want to add?
Jill: I’d just say, consider this too: if you’re not having rapid success, don’t buy into the whole capitalist idea that you have to hurry. Let things evolve as they evolve, but always keep some amount of faith, being willing to hold on to this as a traveling question that you’re moving along with, and being a little bit excited to find out some new answers rather than despairing that you haven’t already.
Dr. Stracks: Thank you so much for being here with me. I’ve heard you talk about this a dozen or more times, and I know how much it helps people to hear your experience and your wisdom and your calmness about this. So thanks so much for being here today.
Jill: Thank you for inviting me. I really enjoyed it.
Dr. Stracks: Good, and thanks to everybody who’s been listening and who has taught me about this with their insights and questions over the years. Every time we record an episode, I’m reminded how blessed and touched I am to be part of this community that’s working so hard and in such inspiring ways on healing, being brave and creative, and tapping into cutting-edge ways to heal. As I said earlier, I’ve been able to expand telehealth options during this time, so anybody who’s interested in talking to me directly can get in touch with my staff through our website, www.doctorstracks.com. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find this recording and all our previous episodes at Curable and on my Hope for Healing page at www.curablehealth.com/hope-for-healing. You can sign up for our office newsletter to get updates about upcoming episodes and anything else going on in our practice. I’m on vacation through the middle of August, and I’ll be back in my office on August 24th, seeing patients and running classes from there. We’ll be back live for a Hope for Healing episode on September 9th, at a special 6 p.m. time, with Dr. Alicia Batson, who is a Curable board medical advisor and a psychiatrist down in Nashville, Tennessee. So until then, thanks for watching and being here with us. Have a great last few weeks of summer, and everybody please stay safe and stay healthy.
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.