Reverse Thinking

Reverse Therapy can cure you even if you were hit by the Tsunami and went to Oxford

Today I am publishing an excellent letter from Sarah (not her real name) who recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome using Reverse Therapy.

I think the letter speaks for itself. It is also a moving, personal story.

The Tsunami

I applied to Oxford University and was invited to interview.  My family flew to Thailand the week before my interview so I got myself down there on my own, interviewed, got myself home and then travelled to Thailand to meet up with them.  We were on a beach on Boxing Day when the Tsunami hit.  Luckily we all survived but my sisters and I (they were 8 and 10 at the time) were separated from my parents and brother for some time, and had to run for our lives without them, not knowing where they were – I thought they were dead, until we found them again a while later.  We returned to England, where I found three letters had been posted to us; one to let me know I had got into Oxford on condition of 3 'A's at A level, and the other two from newspapers asking us for our story.  I returned to college to complete my A levels – it wasn't going very well and around three weeks before my exams 3 of my teachers independently advised me to defer for a year as they did not think I would get three As, so I sorted my head out as best I could and managed to do it.

Oxford

That October I started at Oxford.  I was never really truly happy there.  I'm a bit of an unusual combination of characteristics and traits; my friends have always been the people who dropped out of school although were wonderfully interesting, humorous and accepting of other people, but I was never totally satisfied with that life because my brain was never stretched enough.  When I got to Oxford my brain was certainly stretched and I loved being around people who were career-minded, ambitious and energetic, but the other side of my life was missing there; there was very little, if any, empathy, it was cut throat and cold blooded; people who fell behind were left behind, and lots of them did including many lovely people with personal issues like clinical depression and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to name a few.  There was no help there for anyone, and their peers turned their backs on them as soon as they fell behind – it was as though it was so stressful that no one had any time for any one else at all.  This really bothered me; I struggled to cope with the fact that some of my friends were so cold and uncaring.  The terms were only 8 weeks long and then we had to go home for 6-8 weeks and the transition between Oxford and home was especially hard – I would have a head ache for a week after I left, and it would always be terrible in the car on the way back.

In my first year there, it was hard to deal with leaving my sisters behind, and the atmosphere made this worse because it was so alien to me.  At first I would leave to visit my friends in Liverpool at the weekends, but I would feel so terrible when I returned that I made the conscious decision to give up that lifestyle until I had finished my degree.

In the second year I got very involved with sport and extra-curricular things – I trained six days a week, organised a black tie event, and gave a speech in front of some Law Lords, which was the most incredible experience (I love public speaking and debating – I was a member of the National Squad when I was 17 – but I gave that up when I went to Oxford because the other people who did it were generally the very worst sort of Oxford student, in my opinion, so they reminded me of all the things I disliked about the place and I suppose it was too hard for me to deal with).

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Halfway through second year I got ill, and just didn't recover.  6 months later they found out that it was Glandular fever.  After a year or so they diagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Despite everything I completed my degree on time and obtained a 2.1.  Every medical official and academic I had spoken to in this 18 month time period had told me that I would not be able to do it – apparently I was a very severe case and they expected me to be ill for years.  The National Health Service offered me nothing – for the first 6-12 months - they simply didn't care, then they started to offer me anti-depressants without even asking me whether I felt depressed!  I refused on every occasion, explaining that I wasn't depressed I was pissed off and frustrated, and that was a normal reaction to my situation.  I lost my ability to communicate and my fitness – I couldn't walk 50 yards without blacking out. This lead to a loss in confidence (something I had never experienced before!).  I was devastated and began to lose hope as there just didn't seem to be a way out - I hate sitting around waiting for things.

Reverse Therapy

After finishing my degree in summer 2008, I came home.  I had improved a lot at this point.  My Mum thought that there was something that still wasn't quite right in me, and she contacted Dawn, who had been recommended to us by a former client of hers.  I didn't want to go, because I didn't want to go over everything yet again (I had seen over 15 different medical people and not one of them had really helped me), but I went because my mum wanted me to.  I thought it sounded a bit fuzzy and daft from what my mum told me, and decided not to look into it because I knew I (or the bit of me that I now know to be my Headmind) would dismiss it.  As soon as Dawn explained it to me I was sold; well, my Bodymind was – Headmind was still a little hesitant, but I chose to give it a go because it was the first thing that anyone had said to me that made sense, and it gave me permission to go for a run instead of a boring walk, which was something I desperately wanted and needed.

Reverse Therapy truly and utterly reversed me; it took away all the excess baggage that had built up over the years as a result of my insecurities, fears and losses and gave me my zest for life back that I had lost along the way.  Today, after just a couple of sessions I feel like the person I was four years ago, and I love it!  Reverse therapy sounds like a miracle, but it isn't, it is the most logical approach to Chronic Fatigue that I have come across; in fact the only logical approach.  When I was ill doctors would look at me, some with pity, some with disbelief and some with irritation, and ask me what I wanted them to do for me. Every time I replied 'I want to get better, I want to know why this happened, and I want to know how to stop it happening again'.  None of them could ever give me an answer.  The best they could do was tell me to slow down and wait to get better.  Even holistic medical practitioners couldn't explain it – they would tell me that I had pushed myself too far, that I needed to 'slow down' and listen to my body more, but they never explained how to do this.  This served to confuse and frustrate me, in my opinion a healthy 20 year old should be able to train six days a week, do a degree and have a social life, and I was super healthy – I ate organic, home-cooked food, didn't drink or smoke and exercised regularly.  Reverse therapy has answered these questions – I now know why I got sick, I have already made myself better, and I know how to stop it happening again.  Now I know how to listen to my body; actually hear what it is saying and to interpret it.  Reverse therapy may be logical but it is a truly revolutionary way of thinking for the modern medical profession, and the most academically brilliant thing I have ever come across – it explains and allows for the link between body and mind which I think is the keystone that modern medicine is missing.

Reverse Therapy

For those of you who would like to read the newsletter from Reverse Therapy that came out to celebrate our 5th Anniversary a few weeks ago.

Here it is. Download Newsletter.pdf

Reverse Therapy in Melbourne

If any of my readers are in Melbourne next month then you are very welcome to hear me talk about Reverse Therapy on 17th November.

I will be talking about how it works and why it works. How the method is based on brain research and the interconnections between the limbic system, the glands and the nervous system. How de-pression of the emotions leads to symptoms of various disorders.

We are seeing more and more interest in Reverse Therapy in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne and I am told that tickets are selling fast!

Watch the video

Here’s another video interview with Alex Williamson, who recently recovered from a serious illness with Reverse Therapy.

Click here to watch.

How the body thinks

Reverse Therapy is part of a 21st century movement in which we are revising the very idea of what it means to 'think'. We argue that thinking doesn't just take place in the head but in the body too. In a way we are only redressing a wrong turn that was taken with Descartes and other seventeenth century writers who argued that only Headmind, or 'Reason', can think. Intelligence, for people like Descartes and philosophers like him, means thinking with concepts.

But our new take on intelligence is that it is shared by all forms of life and that it is much, much wider than thinking with thoughts.

An intelligent response occurs when a) information is received, b) the information is evaluated, c) an appropriate response is emitted d) the results are monitored and learning occurs. Even a single-cell creature like an amoeba is intelligent as it can change the direction in which it swims according to the information it receives about the amount of food in the area. A dolphin, going much higher up the scale, can not only change direction but communicate its reasons for doing that to other dolphins in the school. And amoebas and dolphins, like humans, make the vast majority of their decisions without any involvement at all from mental intelligence. Those decisions are taken by what we call Bodymind.

Here are some examples of the way in which Bodymind 'thinks'.

• The body can 'read' other people and simulate an emotion that person is having so that you or I can empathize with them. In that way a mother can quickly tell what mood her child is in. This is also the basis for the human quality of compassion for others, even animals. Our intuitions about other people work in a similar way. Using sensory information, the brain picks up signals from the other person's body language and - using a process that works in less than a tenth of a second - pattern-matches those signals against information stored from past experiences. That is why we can have a gut feeling that someone is not trustworthy within two minutes of meeting her without knowing why. The body is using coded signals to alert us to a potential problem.
• In collaboration with the thinking centers the brain can decide what is important or not important. If something is important to us we might get an adrenalin rush. If it is not we will feel nothing at all. Research into people with damage to the frontal areas of the brain (which decode emotion) show that they are unable to make decisions because they don't have a good or bad feeling that tells them the right decision to make. Knowing what is important also helps Bodymind conserve energy. We can go without sleep if we are trying to achieve something really important. Conversely, if there is little for us to do, Bodymind can send us to sleep early. Or it could turn on the emotion of boredom to signal that it's time to do something more interesting.
• The body can strengthen a relationship by creating emotions connected to love. Sometimes this is automatic, as when a a child is born. Sometimes it comes with time as we learn more about the other person. The emotions of love are, as almost all of us know, powerful and sometimes overwhelming.
• The brain uses sleep time to organize memories from the day just gone. It stores what is important and deletes the rest. It also creates dreaming states in order to work through the emotions that come with different experiences. This is one reason why insomniacs have poor concentration - they are overloaded with undigested experiences.
• Bodymind grounds us to life. It does this firstly through our moods. At any given moment the body is monitoring where we are, who we are with and what we are doing, and providing us with a running commentary on our relationship with the environment. Moods aren't emotions but they are feeling states which work closely with our thoughts. The most well-known mood is the depressed state, which goes with discouragement and sadness. But others include exhilaration, calm, determination, discontent and the feeling of being 'under pressure'. Most often, moods are hardly noticeable and form a kind of background hum which is constantly shifting as we go through the flow of the day.
• Another way the body grounds us to life is through the sense of awe: we are connected to nature, to the divine, and to life itself by the unspeakable sense that we are serving a purpose higher than ourselves. In that way Bodymind intelligently motivates us to make the best we can of our abilities and to serve others.

Why Cognitive Behavior Therapy doesn’t work

Many people with M.E. will know that they are continually being pushed towards Cognitive Behavior Therapy as the treatment. You may even have been told: ‘nothing else works’ or ‘this is the only thing that has any scientific evidence going for it’.

Er…well, the problem is that there is no real scientific evidence that CBT works for anything. There have been about three worthwhile studies on CBT for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome published in the UK and only one of those produced any evidence at all that CBT could be effective in reducing symptoms. Yet even that one study compared CBT with relaxation techniques which (as anyone with CFS will tell you) are practically useless. I wonder how CBT will look when it finally goes head to head with a really effective contender like Reverse Therapy?

Cognitive Therapy, as I never tire of reminding people, was developed to treat Depression. Since M.E. is not depression why should anyone assume that it will work for that condition? Cognitive Therapy works on changing peoples’ thoughts, beliefs and expectations. But since Chronic Fatigue symptoms are not created in the head there is no reason to believe the belief that changing beliefs will make any difference.

In fact, about twenty years ago it was realized that changing thoughts doesn’t make much difference to Depression either. Or Anxiety. Or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Or anything else. That was why Cognitive Therapy was merged with Behavior Therapy - because it began to dawn on one or two minds that getting someone to change their thoughts about their problems isn’t going to make any difference until they do something about them. The truth of the matter is that it is probably the ‘B’ part of the process that is effective for a few people, not the ‘C’ part.

Unfortunately for the moguls that run the National Health Service there is no evidence that CBT is effective for anything else either. In one recent study in Scotland over 1000 patients who had received CBT years before were followed up. Of the 489 who could be bothered to talk about the therapy (were the rest too ill to come to the phone?) over half of them were still unwell and 30% of them still had severe symptoms. That means – in plain terms – that less than 10% of the original number were reporting any benefit at all. If you were a taxi-driver and only managed to get 1 out of 10  passengers to their destination you’d soon be out of business. Yet the current Government wants to spend £600 million pushing CBT on the rest of us. With the absurd claim that it has all been scientifically proven.

So why is Cognitive-Behavior Therapy the number one most used therapy in the UK and the United States? Well, folks, the main reason is that it is promoted by the Psychology industry, which is now well-embedded in the universities, the health services, in business, government and the press. And because it fits in with what the powers-that-be think people should be like: rational, reasonable, normal workers who can control their thoughts, act sensibly and not get over-emotional. In that sense what someone who goes in for CBT is really getting is an indoctrination in mainstream psychology. Don’t forget, nearly all the research that has so far been carried out on CBT has been organized by – you’ve guessed it – other psychologists. This is one reason why most of the research is unbelievably biased.

Here are a few reasons why Cognitive-Behavior Therapy won’t work for M.E.

1. No evidence exists that CBT can eliminate symptoms, only that it can reduce them.

2. CBT has a high initial drop out rate. Over 20% of people with M.E. do not go back after their first session.

3. M.E. symptoms are not created by thoughts so changing thoughts won’t make any difference.

4. Sufferers who have headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, IBS, sleeping problems, etc feel insulted by the suggestion that they can get better through positive thinking. Another reason they are unlikely to go back.

5. Forms. CBT makes people fill out endless forms, questionnaires and journals. Doing which not only creates frustration but triggers brain fog too

6. Since symptoms are created in the brain, glands and nervous system only an approach – like Reverse Therapy – that recognizes and works with Bodymind has any chance of reversing the condition.

7. This in turn means recognizing that the symptoms are created because the organism – the body – is in crisis. And that we have to address the organic cause, rather than the negative beliefs that people have developed after becoming ill.

8. When CBT does help in reducing symptoms it is not because CBT is effective but because it is accidentally – and without realizing what is happening – encouraging the client to try new activities that reduce Bodymind’s need to create symptoms as a warning call. But Reverse Therapy does that anyway.

 

 

Stress won’t kill you but hopelessness can

Ever since Hans Selye came up with the idea of stress in the 1950s people have misunderstood what he meant by it. They think stress is something that happens to you. Well - no - shit happens and then some people get stressed and some don't. Selye's point was that people get ill because they have been unable to adapt to challenges. The emotional overload that comes with that eventually leads to a break down in body function.

You can put two people through the same circumstances - unemployment, break up, financial disaster, or fleas on their dog - and one person will  react beautifully and the other will get ill.

What that means is that the 'stressed' person will get stuck in Headmind, will overload with fear, frustration and grief, and the General Adaptation Syndrome will kick in - the stress response. This happens as Bodymind tries to keep things going and uses symptom-signals to kick start the person into action. While no action is taken we get the Resistance stage, then the Alarm stage (first appearance of stress symptoms) and then the Stalemate stage (symptoms become chronic).

One thing Selye got wrong was that he thought there were only two responses a person could make: fight or fly.  But those two are often dumb responses. There is no point in thumping the boss if she is exploiting you - that just makes it harder to get another job. Nor is there any point in running away from her - that just encourages her to abuse you some more.

The emotional subtlety of Bodymind cues you up for plenty of smart moves if you are aware enough to be able to decode the feelings that go with them. For example, you could use assertive language, find some allies, clarify what exactly is it she wants, or start looking for another job.

Now the reason some people get stuck is that they have no memory banks that tell them what to do about problems. If you have never learned how to say 'no' then you are not going to be able to defend yourself against unreasonable demands - so you have to start to practice doing just that. If your partner leaves you and that has never happened to you before then you are going to have to get advice, help and support from others.

Now this is where Headmind can create a road-block. When it focuses on problems  rather than solutions, past failures instead of future prospects, and when it assumes that learning something new or asking for a help represents 'failure', then you have a problem. You won't be able to adapt to the challenges, problems will mount up, the emotional overload will become acute, and you will get 'stressed'.

When Headmind gets stuck in hopelessness then you will just give up. The secret is to reverse that by focusing on the possible, not the impossible.

Let me conclude with a story about one of the most 'stressful' experiences a human being can go through - as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Now many people would think that undergoing starvation and torture in one of the death camps would be one stressful experience people could not survive. But Victor Frankl - who spent three years in one - found that it was not entirely so. Those who had not been gassed were put to slave labor and many died. Yet he observed one simple fact - people were more likely to survive if they had something to live for - whether that was a spiritual faith, another human being, or a vision of the future. On one morning when he had collapsed in the freezing cold and was near to death he imagined being applauded by an audience after talking about his experiences and his discoveries about the power of faith. That enabled him to get up and try to carry on. Over twenty years later Frankl was talking at a conference about this experience and the entire audience got to their feet to applaud him, many with tears in their eyes.

"When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves"

Victor Frankl 1905-1997

Are M.E and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome the same thing?

One of the things we have to get used to in Reverse Therapy is the weird arguments people come up with for why M.E. is incurable.

The argument goes like this: M.E. and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are not the same thing. M.E. is said to be an incurable genetic, or neurological, or viral, disease (take your pick according to which 'scientific' article you just read) while CFS is just a fatigue problem which comes and goes.

So - if you had M.E. and don't have it now then you never had it in the first place. The gob-smacking cheek of this circular argument is an insult to all those brave people who managed to find the way back to health. I've lost count of the clients we have seen who have gone back to their ME Maintenance Groups to announce the good news about their recovery and have met with blank hostility and the repetition of circular arguments.

The reason this argument keeps going the rounds has little to do with 'science'. No piece of scientific research carried out in 40 years has ever identified a single virus or brain fault that could cause M.E. The recent flavour-of-the-month idea that M.E. is genetic rests on a misunderstanding. It is not genes that have been identified as the problem - it is gene behavior. And gene behavior (or expression) changes in almost any illness. The one we know most about - cancer - shows that gene expression changes in a way that produces cancerous cells. That doesn't mean that genes cause cancer. The causes of cancer are multiform - and overwhelming life changes and emotional challenges are one of the most important.

The reason arguments like these are popular is due to the toxic link between medical orthodoxy and the mistaken Headmind ideas that some people with M.E. carry around with them. The core mistake is that if M.E. can be cured it must be all in the mind.

But M.E. is not all in the mind. The symptoms are atrociously real. And, yet, at the same time, M.E. can be cured by addressing the emotional challenges that triggered the organism to overwork the immune system, the nervous system and the endocrine system - as well as changing gene behavior.

No one, for example, says that Migraines, or Stomach ulcers, or High Blood Pressure are all in the mind. Yet all of these conditions are curable by paying attention to the situations that trigger symptomatic behavior. Why should M.E. be any different?

What they don’t teach you at Medical School

We most of us have had experience of consulting a medical doctor about an ailment and within a few moments a prescription has been written and we are out of the door.

Some of my medical friends will forgive me when I say that, much of the time, medical doctors might just as well be positioned behind the counter at Boots the Chemist. That would save us making two visits instead of one.

At medical school they teach you anatomy and physiology, a little bit of surgery, how cells work, how the embryo forms, pathology and drug action, and about infections and the immune system.

That is to say, they teach you how the body functions and what happens when people get ill. But they don't teach you why people get ill. And one important reason people get ill is that they are undergoing major life challenges.

The list of conditions which have been shown by research to coincide with upsetting life events (sometimes called 'stress') is surprisingly long. It includes cancer, stomach ulcers, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, neuritis, shingles, appendicitis, asthma, raised blood pressure, colitis and angina.

A medical practitioner will typically ask how what symptoms you have, how long you've had them, where the pain is and arrange for tests. The answers to these moves will indicate what is going on before the prescription pad comes out. But if you believe (as we do in Reverse Therapy) that symptoms are used partly by Bodymind to signal that closer attention needs to be paid to emotional needs then more useful questions would be:

'What's been going on at work/home/in your family?'

'Is there anything upsetting you?'

'How have you been coping with that?'

'What do you do when you have some time to yourself?'

Of course there are many enlightened medical doctors who do ask these questions - it's just that they won't have been taught them at medical school.

Opening up an investigation into illness along these lines takes you away away from drug prescriptions and towards a cure based on addressing the reasons symptoms were triggered in the first place. And restoring emotional balance will be a far more effective way to restore health in the long run.

Greed is good - yeah?

As Gordon Gekko once famously quoted Ayn Rand - in 'Wall Street' - 'Greed is good'.

Well, both Ayn and Gordon got it wrong. Greed isn't good. Passion is good. And Greed is a Headmind distortion of passion.

What goes on here is that Headmind (or Ego, if you prefer) substitutes Being for Having, and Emotion for acquisitiveness.

Now some people have a passion for making money. It's not one of my attractions but I can understand why some people get that way. And if they are living that passion then they may well be doing other people a favour by giving them something they want - or making jobs for them. But when passion is distorted by acquisitiveness then they get greedy - and obsessive - and lonely - and sad. They may even end up in the Penitentiary like Gordon did.

When you live in Bodymind (as I try to do) you realise that Passion is its own reward. Work, Love, Telling the truth and being Creative are exciting things to do. Its not a guarantee that you will be rich, famous, loved or powerful. That's Headmind telling us that we are unworthy if we are not in one of those categories.

As it happens I recently made up a list of emotions (passions) which get distorted by Headmind's need to have something rather than to be something.

Joy - Addictions (Headmind has to possess happiness rather than just being with it and then letting it go). The addiction can be to sex, drugs, love or even money.

Anger - Revenge (Headmind has to control the offender rather than just express and forgive)

Fear - Dependency (Headmind has to collect helpers rather than accept personal responsibility)

Awe - Religious mania (Headmind has to impose the truth on others rather than admit that Life is too tremendous to be understood completely)

Sadness - Grief (Headmind refuses to live without the lost friend, father, mother or child) and lives in the past, holding on to memories.

Love - it isn't really an emotion but it is a passion based on joy. But its distortion by Headmind is interesting because when the Ego tries to control it, then it becomes jealousy or possessiveness.