Episode 09: Your Body is Your Brain (Part One)

For the first episode of our “Not All in Your Head” series, we each shared the many ways our anxiety, trauma and physical health keeps crashing into the other. While our individual sources of emotional pain may be different, we’ve both experienced the same type of physical manifestation as a result. We heard from many of you that this episode hit a nerve and meant a lot to you. So in this episode we even dig deeper into the science behind the mind-body connection - what’s the biggest misconception about this subject, why don’t more people understand it, what do we know with certainty, and what does a positive therapeutic experience look like?

We’re joined by a very special guest, Dr. Dan Ratner, a psychologist who specializes in the alleviation of physical symptoms deriving from, or exacerbated by, psychological causes. He’s also the host of his own podcast, Crushing Doubt. We honestly could have talked to Dan for hours about this subject, which is exactly how we ended up turning this into a two-parter.

Like our previous episode, trigger warnings abound in this episode about chronic pain, grief and trauma from violence. Be kind to yourself and listen with extreme care.

Discussed in this episode:

Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection, by Dr. John Sarno