Dr. Erin Hayford [00:00:29]:
So the big question is this. We know spontaneous remissions and so called miracle cures exist. We also know they aren't so spontaneous after all. I'm living proof of this. Having cured my quote unquote incurable illness, there's something to how this happens. So how do we as humans with chronic symptoms, tap into the so called miraculous healing capacity? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Dr. Aaron Hayford, and welcome to the Sacred Illness podcast.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:01:03]:
Before we begin today's episode, just my standard medical disclaimer. This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only. The content should not be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any medical concerns. And welcome to this episode of the Sacred Illness podcast. I'm Dr. Erin, and joining me today is Oriana, who is a coach and kind of co facilitator of this work that we do together. So she's going to be co hosting with me for the foreseeable future, and I'm really excited to have her on board.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:01:38]:
I think it's going to bring some layers of richness and just more interaction and energy to these podcasts and this work that we're doing. So welcome, Oriana. I'm glad to have you here today.
Oriana Broderick [00:01:48]:
So happy to be here.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:01:50]:
So today's topic is this idea of intellectualizing the work that we do. So this work is all about mind body medicine, connecting the mind with the, you know, there is a body component to this. And so while the mind is obviously important because we need our mind to learn and to take in new information and to understand things, there is sort of a thing that I have seen in the people that I have worked with, and it's been coming up in conversation lately between Oriana and myself just about this idea of how if we stop, like, we can just learn things, like ad nauseam, like keep going. There's always more to learn, especially when you're getting into a new modality, or when you discover mind body medicine for the first time, or just whatever it is you're doing, there's this potential for us to get stuck, maybe in that mode of acquiring information. And I know I'm certainly guilty of that. I kept going to school. I just kept taking classes and getting more degrees because I just wanted to keep learning. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:02:53]:
There's nothing wrong with kind of philosophizing or trying to understand things on this intellectual level, but it's ignoring the body component of the mind body connection. And I think of it as like walking the talk, right? It's one thing to really understand these concepts and to understand them, what it means and why it's important and how to incorporate it into your life. But if there's that lack of a bridge between the mind and the body where you are actually doing it, like doing the work, or not necessarily doing the work, but embodying the knowledge, then that's kind of a place people can get hung up. And so what's been coming up in conversation is how this constant intellectualizing, this constant thinking about it and feeling never really complete. Like feeling like, well, I don't quite know enough yet, is actually more so of a coping mechanism than it is than anything else. At some point, I think there's like this threshold you cross where you're learning new things. We have to learn something sort of initially before we can start to apply it. But then there's this line we can cross where we just keep learning, right? We just keep reading more books or going to more therapists or doing more stuff.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:04:08]:
And then that's where we're kind of in this purgatory, for lack of a better word, of being all in the mind and not ever really applying it to your life, and then that's where you can start to get frustrated of like, well, this isn't working, right? Like, nothing's changing. I know all this stuff. Why is nothing working? And this came up for me this past week, actually working with someone one on one. He is doing so much. He's working so hard on his own healing journey, working with PTSD and a lot of chronic illnesses that have sprung up, kind of like in his trauma journey, right? And so in my world, again, chronic illness is part of sort of a result of the things we're holding in our bodies as a result of trauma and chronic stress. So we're seeing his illnesses as a manifestation of his traumatic past. He is like a trauma expert at this point in his life. He has learned so much.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:04:58]:
He could teach classes, right? Like, he basically has a phd in trauma. He knows so much about trauma and the nervous system and the body and all of the responses. And he was sharing with me how he spends his whole day scheduling his stuff, like his therapies, that he does these exercises he does the supplements he's taking, the medications. His whole world is built around doing these things, like checking these boxes. And when I asked him, like, okay, are you taking this in? Are you absorbing this love and self care and these rituals you're doing around your healing process. He was like, well, no, I guess not, because I don't actually love myself. I don't actually care about myself. Right.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:05:40]:
He's got a lot of wounds around early childhood with mom and dad not receiving love, not receiving care. So for him, it's this very intellectual, like, it all makes sense what he's doing, although I would argue it's a bit much in terms of it's stressing him out. Like, it's so much stuff, it stresses him out, but in his mind, there's this very intellectual reason for doing all the things. And so we started to turn this corner together of like, how do we start to take what you're doing and actually let it absorb into your body? Actually let you take it in? Because otherwise, again, it's sort of this coping mechanism of constantly engaging in something and learning about it and doing something. It's like you're still kind of like moving away from the body. You're detaching from the body in some way. The body in some way is not a safe place for you to go. So you're staying up in your mind, and that is certainly true for his body, and there's things down there he doesn't want to feel or see.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:06:33]:
So that's kind of the introduction, I guess, to this idea of intellectualizing. And Oriana, I'm just curious because you said yourself you've been kind of seeing this in your own life and your own healing journey. And also, obviously, like we said, we've been talking about it and seeing in folks we work with. What's your relationship with intellectualizing or how does this show up in your own life?
Oriana Broderick [00:06:56]:
I can relate to your patient, of course, because that's how I started my healing journey, is doing how many things can I do, planning out my meals, exactly what to eat and being very stringent and strict about it, and actually started to make things worse because I was more stressed about what I couldn't couldn't eat and where I could go and all of the things that happen when we've had trauma. And I think as I started to move through the work, I started to realize how impacted I was as a child from not having support and not understanding my environment. And that was just like a top layer of trauma, right? Like not getting into the nitty gritty of all of the things that had actually happened to me as a child and throughout my life. But just that top layer of the reason I went to school for psychology, the reason I went to wellness school. All the things that I did was trying to understand people in my environment. And I didn't realize until even recently that part of understanding that is not only feeling safe in your body, therefore feeling safe in your environment, but a big part of understanding your environment is understanding yourself. And to understand yourself, you have to come out of your mind and into your body. I had been reading that book cured, that we had talked about.
Oriana Broderick [00:08:19]:
And so there's a lot of this coming up for me in different aspects of this terrain theory of the soil that we create within us. I think intellectualizing is about thinking about what plants we're going to put there and what seeds. We're thinking about all these things, but we never do anything with the soil to actually start planting, to actually start growing. That's how I feel this intellectual piece of this healing journey, because I think it is part of the healing. I think everybody goes through it, and it's the amount of time that we spend in it that creates the space of that linear time space that we live in, of how long it's going to take us to heal, basically, is being able to go beyond that, being able to come down into our bodies, come down into that soil of who we are, into our inner terrain, and start to actually change it, versus constantly grasping at information. But I think that is also part of our culture, too, is we're constantly inundated with information, no matter where you are. And so I think it's like almost a purging that has to be created within yourself to come to drop down out of that logic, to drop down out of your mind and into a space of. Okay, I am going to maybe take one thing like our work, mind body work.
Oriana Broderick [00:09:40]:
I'm going to take this one thing and I'm going to exhaust it all the way to the end. I'm not going to add anything else. I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to totally ground myself into this work and take it to the very nth degree, as we say in some of your journaling prompts and what we do of whatever it is that your fear is. Take your fear and take it all the way to the end. And what's the worst possible case scenario? It's like doing that, but in reverse. You're not taking it to the worst case scenario. You're taking it all the way to the end of, okay, I know that I've done everything that I can and this particular thing didn't work.
Oriana Broderick [00:10:15]:
So I can move on to the next, which I would even beg to argue that once you take it all the way to the nth degree, you're not going to need the next thing because you're going to have drop down out of that logic point and be like, okay, say, now I'm understanding. And then you can start living those changes and living your life differently.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:10:31]:
100%. Yeah. I love the relationship that you're drawing between this idea of intellectualizing and that soil theory. And so I'll link the book you mentioned in the notes below. It's cured by Jeffrey Reitiger or Ridiger, I don't know how to say his name, but it's a really brilliant book about so called spontaneous healing and remission. But it's kind of debunks that as like, it's not really, like spontaneous or like a miracle. It's a capacity we all have. But again, you have to do it right.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:11:01]:
You have to engage in this work and be willing to look at the soil, be willing to actually put the plants in and see how they grow. You have to try it in order to see what actually happens. And I think, yeah, that image of, like, when you were saying that I was imagining an empty garden bed with all the plants lined up and all the tools lined up with a stack of gardening books and just like, okay, what could I put here? Well, no, maybe that should go there. Well, maybe you can plan for forever. There's always more to learn. And so I think of this in terms of when we think about this as a coping response, to me, it feels sort of like flight. So if we think about fight or flight or maybe even a little bit of freeze, right? So when we get stressed out, when we get activated, when we get triggered, we move into a state of activation that's trying to get us away from the threat. And so I think there's this challenging threshold we stand on when we are starting to understand, like, the body keeps the score, right? To use that kind of phrase that we know now from that book, the body is what holds on to stuff until we're ready to see it and work with it and release it or integrate it or whatever needs to happen.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:12:11]:
So if the body's kind of holding on to things and we're starting to understand that, that can be a really scary. It can be scary. It is scary, right? We can start to understand, like, oh, yeah, I definitely faced a lot of adversity in my childhood, or I'm afraid to really understand the full depths of these experiences that I went through. We can get a sense that our body is containing some very uncomfortable things. And because of that, we want to move away from it, right. If we don't know how to feel safe with that, if we don't know how to feel safe in our bodies, if we don't have someone supporting us or guiding us, or if we just. Whatever it is, I don't know. There's so many variables that can keep someone from crossing that threshold and going into the body and actually being with what's there.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:12:57]:
But whatever that thing is that's preventing it. Our nervous system is going to detect, like, whatever is inside your body. We're keeping you unaware of it. We're keeping it in your subconscious for a reason, because it is unpleasant and it is not good, and we don't want you to see it. And so we have a fight or flight response in response to it, right? Like it feels like a threat. Whatever's being contained in our body feels like a threat. And so we either fight it, which I think in that case, it can come in the form of taking things to suppress it, just kind of trying to. Basically, you become like an enemy of your body, or your body becomes an enemy of you, and you're like, I hate my body.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:13:34]:
I want to shut off from it. I'm going to ignore it, whatever that looks like. That could be more of a fight response. To me, this intellectualizing is kind of a flight freeze response, because you're kind of engaging with it in a way that you're still moving away from it. Like you're reading books, but it's kind of still taking you out of your body. You're moving away from it. Fight is more direct, like you're more directly attacking it, so to speak. So I don't know if this analogy lands, but this is kind of how I'm thinking of it.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:14:01]:
You're intellectualizing it, you understand sort of what's happening, but you're still disconnecting. And freeze is like you're not taking action, essentially. And I think that's where we can get maybe caught up is like it feels like we're taking action. It feels like we're really doing something to heal, to move the needle. When we are reading books and we're seeing therapist and we're doing all the things, and I keep talking about therapists just to put this little caveat in there, because I'm talking about, like, talk therapy, right? Like, we can talk till we're blue in the face about our history, our trauma. But if we're not getting in the body, if we're not doing some sort of somatic integration with. Again, talking is intellectual.
Oriana Broderick [00:14:40]:
Right?
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:14:40]:
But if we're not somehow taking that and putting it in the body, we can do therapy. We can do talk therapy for 20 years and still feel like, but why am I not feeling better? Why is this not budging? And there's a time and a place for talk therapy. I'm not throwing it under the bus. But I think, again, there's a threshold where we need to learn how to take it deeper. So again, we can feel like we're really doing something. Like we're really engaging in healing work, and that's where it can start to feel frustrating of like. But then nothing is shifting. So how does that resonate with you? Or does that make sense to you, too?
Oriana Broderick [00:15:15]:
Yeah, it definitely makes sense to me. I think that bridge between being able to feel that I have this information, and then what? And then what is that space where we have to start speaking the truth to ourselves and feeling into that truth of the things that keep us from moving out of fight or flight, whatever those layers are. Those layers are only found through truth. We have to be honest with ourselves. If you started off with hux therapy, that's great because that's a good place to start for pretty much all of us. And then there's a place where we have to be truthful with ourselves. Is this continuing to help me move forward in my journey versus just keeping me in this one place, like freeze or keeping me even being dishonest with ourselves about our own healing? Right. Like talk therapy or any therapies, really, if you're not dropping into it, can be like you're saying that flight response where we have the information, we're doing it, and that's what we're telling ourselves.
Oriana Broderick [00:16:23]:
I'm going to therapy, I'm doing this supplement, I'm doing all of these things, and it's not working. But we stay stuck in that other place of I'm doing all of this stuff and we never get to the why of it not working. And so I think that bridge, that space, that movement to that next thing is the regulation. That's where we find that regulation as we start to drop into that place. And that doesn't mean that all of a sudden we're happy and joyful and everything's wonderful and everything's gone away because we've dropped into it now it's a different layer, right? And now we're working with something different, something deeper and oftentimes harder. And I think then we can go back. I think we talked about that too, where we get to this really deep place and things start to unfold and we're like, yikes, no way. I'm out of here.
Oriana Broderick [00:17:14]:
And then you go back to the suppression, or you go back to whatever it was that wasn't working before and just keep crossing your fingers and hoping that maybe this one thing will work.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:17:23]:
Totally. Yeah. And I have seen that in myself recently, that kind of like bouncing back thing. And we talk about this a lot in terms of getting to, even when you start to embody it and you start to get into these deeper layers, sometimes it can bring up things. It often brings up things, I would say almost always brings up things you're not expecting, layers you weren't aware of until you start to dig in there. So there's many choice points in this work of turning back. Right. So once you start to cross that intellectualizing threshold and do start to get into your body.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:17:54]:
Yeah. There's many times where turning around feels safer, like going back to that familiar space, going back to that familiar way of being. And as I was saying, I have seen that in myself recently as I have gotten into some deep layers of my own healing work and my life journey. Essentially, layers continue to come up. I don't think that ever stops. And I have found that when I'm in a particularly challenging layer or facing a particularly challenging core belief or wound or whatever you want to call it, I will kind of just stop doing the work for a while. I might stop journaling. I will stop doing my subconscious meditations and somatic practices that I do.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:18:36]:
I'll just find reasons to not. Or I'll zone out on my phone. Normally what I will do is I go to bed, and when I get into bed, I'll do some journaling and do some meditations, and I'll just lay there and scroll on my phone and then be like, oh crap, it's too late. I guess I'll go to bed. There's this really strong avoidance thing that comes up in my body. And so I think it's important to note that that happens. It can happen at any stage. And awareness is really the key to all of this.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:19:02]:
And I think that's kind of what you and I had been texting about prior to recording this episode, is that awareness is really the first step. Like becoming aware that intellectualizing is actually a thing, right? Like, it's actually a way in which you can stall your healing process. That is the first step to seeing it for what it is and engaging in it differently. Because I think a lot of this work is like, that we talk about often that this work is like a paradigm shift, right? Like we're trying to change the way we think about our bodies, our health, our illnesses. And again, if we think of intellectualizing or if we think of learning and acquiring information and even going to therapy or talking about stuff as we think of it as a good thing, because it is. I mean, really, it's not like a bad thing at all to want to learn and want to understand these things. But when you start to understand, there's again, that threshold of, are you going too far with that? And not ever applying what you're learning into your life? Then you can start to really, again, like you were saying, have this more honest reflection and kind of be more truthful with what's going on in your world and how you're moving through your illness or whatever. So it's all about perspective and understanding.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:20:15]:
Where did the learning stop being helpful, and where did it start being protective, I guess, is maybe that threshold that we're talking about. What is that line? And there's no right answer. Right? It's different for everyone. But I think it's like, when you get to a certain point where you're like, this makes a ton of sense. I totally can see how this applies to me. That's where it's like, okay, let's get started. Right? Let's just start doing it because you can keep learning. That's my balance.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:20:40]:
That's what I try to do, is I continue to try to learn more and more and more about this stuff. And I think some of us are drawn to just learn our whole lives. I don't think, again, that's not, like, a bad thing, but I think it becomes detrimental if it's getting in the way of us actually doing the work at the same time. So I think of this work as, like, there's many things that have to be in motion kind of at the same time where you're doing it, you're doing the work, which I think we should talk about what that actually means, because I'm thinking that people might be wondering, like, okay, so how do I cross that threshold into actually doing it? But, yeah, doing the work, maybe learning about the work, if that feels pertinent to you. I think, honestly, we say this all the time. Everything you need is already inside of you. You don't need to technically learn any of this in order to do the work. It's all in there.
Dr. Erin Hayford [00:21:30]:
A lot of this is actually like tuning into the body and trusting what you find there and following that intuition. And again, kind of changing paradigms around fear and symptoms and the kind of stuff that we talk about so that you kind of know your path, but you don't have to know what fight or flight means.
