By Jenny Peterson
The world is flooded with health advice. Its most likely one of the reasons you’re so confused and overwhelmed with trying to heal. Everywhere you look, there is some expert telling you what to do and what is at the root of your problems.
I’m probably one of those people. But I would like to separate myself from those experts.
I don’t want to be another person that puts limitations on you, just gives you information that makes things more complicated, gives you recommendations that just cover up or maintain your symptoms or teaches you to be scared of your own body.
You want long lasting healing and frankly all of the stuff you have been told will not provide you with that. The world, those experts, have made healing complicated by what they have told you.
There are some things that you have been told that are flat out lies when it comes to your health and healing. Like most lies, you don’t often know they are lies until usually after the fact. Until you have been told, or presented with different evidence.
Today, I’m not just telling you the lies that you’ve been told but I’m also giving solid reasons as to why they are lies.
I’m going to divide up the lies into 2 categories, the lies from the medical world and the lies from the alternative health world.
Now most of you have already sensed the lies that have come from the medical field. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time there but it's where I’m going to start.
MEDICAL
There are 2 lies that I see a lot of those with chronic illness still believe from the medical world.
Lie #1- Symptoms are a sign that there is something wrong.
From the time that we are young, of course depending on who your parents are, but for the most part, most people grow up going to the doctor whenever you feel bad. You get a fever, a sore throat and mom gets concerned and takes you in. Doc takes a look at you and says give her this for the fever and this for the sore throat or maybe an antibiotic for it all and sends you off.
Not at anytime does the doctor tell you that this is part of healing. You're ok, there is nothing to fear.
Instead it's, we need to kill that bacteria and stop the fever. 2 things that are necessary for healing, now are being killed, which stop the healing cycle.
Now I want you to think about a doctor visit with a cut. Now you typically don’t go in for a cut at least one that doesn’t need stitches. But let's say you did. The doc most likely will say, put a band aid on it and the body will do its thing.
Huh, interesting, right. There is no fear around the cut, no hurry lets kill the bad guys, it's let your body do the healing.
Now based on the training that a doctor gets, we really can’t expect any other result right? That's what they are taught.
But we can question it. We don’t have to go along with it.
Our bodies are a biological part of nature. They adapt whenever needed in order to survive. Everything in nature has a survival program. We are no different.
Symptoms are part of that survival program. They are not signs of there being something wrong, they are an indication that your body is adapting to something that it feels it needs to in order to survive.
Let's use anxiety as an example.
Anxiety is all about a person perceiving something in their life to be fearful and also feeling powerless at the same time. When you think this way, your psyche is sending a message of fear and powerlessness to your brain and body. Your body goes, hey, we are getting a message that there is a threat here. We need to go on high alert, our survival is at risk.
So your body isn’t going to be calm, able to focus and sleep peacefully. How can it when it feels this threat? This is your body adapting to the messages it's receiving. There is nothing wrong with your body. It's doing exactly as it's designed to do.
Now imagine if you went to the doctor and instead of getting a pill for your anxiety, he sat down and said, here is why your body is doing this and explained to you what I just did. Wouldn’t that feel different? You bet it would.
So when you have a symptom, there is nothing wrong. That is a lie. Your body is adapting. It's healing. Just like a cut, healing isn’t comfortable. It's going to be painful, there might be swelling, pus, blood, etc. It's all part of the process.
This is exactly how your body was designed. It's up to you to learn about your body’s survival program and work together as a team to support its natural processes rather than against it.
One of the best things you can do when you have a symptom and you want to head down that old rabbit hole of figuring out what is wrong, is tell yourself, there is nothing wrong, I am healing, this is my body doing exactly what it's designed to do.
The more you get your head out of the way, the better your body can do its job to complete the healing process.
Now this information needs to be used with common sense. If you break a leg or are having a heart attack, you need to ignore this. This information applies for those chronic symptoms that you have that never go away or come and go.
Lie #2: The second lie that you have been told by the medical world is the labels that you’ve been given.
You know, like Hypothyroidism, POTS, IBS, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, etc.
You’ve been labeled with a label, it's not the truth of what is really happening - the label is a lie, it's just a fancy name for your symptom. It doesn’t tell you the root cause. IBS, it is a fancy name for I have diarrhea and sometimes constipation.
We so desperately want the label because we want to know “what is wrong with us”, then we get the label and walk around identifying as the label. Saying I have this, I have that.
Does that really get you anywhere? It leaves you feeling like a victim to the label. The label has power over you because you give it power. It's a lie. That is not what is “wrong” with you.
When students join the MBR program, the first day I have them give me a list of their symptoms. I tell them to give me their actual symptoms, not labels. Because oftentimes the labels are not accurate. The symptoms are actually more important to me. Those tell me what body system we need to focus on.
My advice to you….. Get rid of the label. It's a lie.
Start seeing your symptoms as adaptations, like I talked about earlier.
Your body is adapting to something within your psyche, your nervous system. It's part of your survival program.
The labels only mess with your head. Keep it simple.
ALTERNATIVE WORLD
Now let's get into the alternative healing world. There are so many lies here.
I used to be a promoter of these lies as well. Granted that was all I knew at the time. I want you to take that into consideration when I tell you these lies.
Most holistic or alternative health practitioners don’t know these are lies. These are what they know, what they have been taught.
So don’t get mad at them for only doing what they know. Their hearts are in the right place.
Lie #3 - Your toxic
Your liver, your blood, your gut, its all toxic. You need to do a detox.
Seriously though….how many detoxes and cleanses do you need to do before they tell you that you are no longer toxic. I did detoxes for 6 months straight and went to a practitioner and she said, it looks like your liver still needs to be cleaned out. What? How the heck is that even possible?
How many times have you been told that if you clean up your gut, your symptoms will go away? Here again, you get all the enzymes, probiotics and kombucha that you can get your hands on and still after that your symptoms are still there.
Here’s the deal. Your body knows how to detox. Just like it knows how to heal a cut. Going back to what we learned in lie #1, your symptoms are adaptations.
Just something to think about, have you ever seen any part of nature go on a detox? My chickens don’t randomly stop eating and only drink their water to go on a fast in springtime. For real though, detoxing has been taken to the extreme and its not needed for healing your symptoms.
Detoxing the crap out of your body is actually causing more stress when you have chronic symptoms. Chronic symptoms indicate that your nervous system is bouncing back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic. When your brain and body thinks it's being chased by a tiger, the first thing on its mind isn’t going to be to detox your liver. Its sole focus is survival.
Once you’re able to stop the messages of unsafety to your nervous system, your body will be able to detox on its own. We have students that come to the program not able to sweat and after doing the work, they sweat normally.
You don’t need another detox. You are not toxic. Those are lies. The only toxicity that you have is within the mind and that doesn’t require celery juice to clean up.
Lie #4: A virus, mold, food, a bug, etc have caused your symptoms
I don’t think after discussing the last few lies I need to explain much of this. But I will tell you this…. Nothing outside of you caused your symptoms.
If you react to mold, it still started within you. It's a track in your subconscious. Meaning your nervous system looks to it as a threat based on the connections that it has to it. The mold is not the problem, the message within your psyche is.
Unless you have been poisoned by something or experienced physical trauma that damaged your body, your symptoms are part of your survival program.
The alternative world can really take this all to the extreme. So many people see a holistic practitioner and get worse from all of the diet limitations that are put on them and detoxing.
When we let go of the idea that something outside of us caused our symptoms, we have only one place to look, within ourselves.
Lie #5- You have a dysregulated nervous system
This is one of my biggest pet peeves.
A common journey that people with chronic illness take is going to the medical world, leaving the medical world looking for more answers, so they go to the holistic/alternative. Then from the alternative they go to brain work/nervous system work. Once they get to the brain retraining/nervous system world, they are told, this is all happening because you have a dysregulated nervous system.
One reason I despise this so much is that now this person is getting yet another label and message that there is something wrong with them. So maybe they have let go of the Lyme label or POTS label but now they have the label of “I have a dysregulated nervous system”.
This my friends is a lie. There is nothing dysregulated about your nervous system. It's acting and functioning exactly how it's designed. It's designed to function based on the messages that come from your psyche (subconscious).
If you're anxious all the time, experiencing chronic symptoms, it's because the message within your psyche hasn’t been changed. Not because there is something wrong or dysregulated with your nervous system.
Lie #6- You need to activate your parasympathetic nervous system
So nervous system work is starting to become more popular, which isn’t a bad thing. But there are some (actually a lot) of practitioners that are only doing short term, surface level work for it.
Or people are reading information that tell them that they need to activate their parasympathetic nervous system if they want to heal.
Just a small explanation here. Our body is naturally designed to move in and out of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. It does that throughout the day as we experience situations and at night our bodies are designed to move into the parasympathetic.
Healing takes place in the parasympathetic. So when people hear this, they say, what can I do to move my body into the parasympathetic?
If you google, you will find a lot of things that activate the parasympathetic ns.
For example:
Meditation
Breathwork
Yoga
Take a Cold Shower
Shift Your Thoughts to Positivity
Take a Hot Bath
Do a Visualization Exercise
Practice Gratitude
These are all really good things and I have met many people that have an entire day full of these activities and their symptoms still don't resolve. It's because they only last short term. They are only moving you into the parasympathetic at that moment.
After you're done meditating and get back to your day, boom the anxiety comes back! This is why so many people come to me saying they have done all this parasympathetic work and yet they are not better.
It's no surprise to me because they haven’t addressed the root issue.
For example, I had a client come to me with anxiety. She said I’m meditating daily, doing some new hobbies, doing yoga, taking baths weekly and saying to myself daily that I am safe and I still have anxiety.
As I have mentioned before, symptoms start with a message from the psyche. None of these activities that this person was doing to calm down was changing that message.
Anxiety is about feeling powerless and fearful. That is what needs to be addressed. Once those messages have been changed within the pscyhe and the person no longer gives into fear and instead uses their own personal power to shift what is happening in their life, the anxiety will go away.
You don’t need to force your parasympathetic nervous system to activate. When you shift the old patterns in your subconscious, your body will naturally move into that state on its own. That's when healing starts and comes to completion.
Those activities that I mentioned are great and I suggest you incorporate activities that activate your parasympathetic nervous system daily for maintaining good health, but they will not resolve chronic issues.
Like I said those are surface level activities and for long lasting healing you have to do deep level activities that include shifting old patterns within the subconscious.
So you don’t need to activate or force your body into the parasympathetic to heal. That is a lie. Instead you need to shift the message in your psyche so that your body is getting a different message which then allows the body to move into the parasympathetic on its own.
#7- The Last Lie
This lie is actually from BOTH WORLDS, the medical and alternative.
It's that you have to hand over your healing to someone else. Someone else can do it for you.
Doctors say, come to me, I’ll give you a pill, diagnosis, test. Holistic practitioners say, come to me, I’ll give you a safer pill, more in-depth test, tell you what foods you need to eat, what detoxes you need to do, I’ll clean up your chakras, I’ll do it all for you.
I used to be one of those practitioners. I would be booked solid with people that wanted me to tell them what supplements they needed. Then when I got sick, they were coming to me and saying, I don’t know how to help myself now that you don’t do this work.
I realized that people were coming to me to be healed. I never taught them why their body was doing what it was doing. How to identify what was causing their symptoms.
I taught them to depend on me.
I learned a lot from that experience and I told myself never again. Next time, I will be a teacher. Teaching others to put their healing into their own hands rather than depending on me.
The truth is that no one can heal you but you.
Your problem and solution are within you. Going to someone to “get healed” is only going to lead to a dead end.
You may need someone to guide you to be your own healer because most likely you don’t know what that looks like. That's ok and it's something that I highly suggest. But thinking that someone can heal you is only fooling yourself. Its delaying your healing. And it's a lie.
SUMMARY
Lets recap the 7 lies:
Symptoms are a sign that there is something wrong, not true they are a part of your healing
The labels you’ve been given are a lie.
Your body is toxic is a lie
Something outside of you caused your symptoms is a lie
You have a dysregulated nervous system is a lie
You have to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to heal, not true your body will do it itself when you shift your old patterns.
You have to hand over your healing to someone else.
If you notice, the order of these lies is the typical healing journey that someone goes on with chronic illness. Starting from the medical to that alternative world, then to the nervous system world. Jumping from one lie to another.
It's no wonder people are not getting well.
Healing really isn’t so much about learning as much as it is about unlearning.
You have to unlearn all the bullshit, lies that you have been told.
Honestly that is the first step to long lasting healing.
This is the first place to start. Unlearn these lies. Get them out of your life. Get in the right head space so you can focus on your healing. Get rid of all the noise. Keep things simple. Your body isn’t that complicated.
Its all about survival my friend.
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You are unique, your symptoms are connected to very specific patterns within your subconscious.
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