Healing illness with the subconscious mind | Danna Pycher | TEDxPineCrestSchool (1)

Translator: Queenie Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven

What if I told you, you might not be who you think you are?

What if I told you that your very perception or idea of who you are

has been weaved into your mind over time?

What if you don't agree with what your mind has to tell you?

I've always had an inquiring mind. I've always questioned everything.

I felt the need to get to the bottom of everything

and never took anything at face value.

This ever curious personality would one day save my life.

Let me tell you who I am. Hi, I'm Danna.

I'm a hypnotherapist, specializing in trauma and chronic illness.

I also do a lot of public speaking about the Holocaust

because I'm a third generation descendant,

about trauma,

and my favorite topic to speak about, the subconscious mind and how it works,

because, holy moly, it's fascinating.

I want to take you on a little journey, today,

that will expose the connection between your mind,

who you think you are, and the potential onset of disease.

So if you may, please follow along as we go through the human experience.

From conception until death.

OK, so it won't be that morbid.

We, all of us, are born as blank slates.

We, all of us, then, through our experiences,

are programmed to have certain beliefs

about who we are,

what we can achieve in life, and what type of person we should be.

From birth until six,

we are essentially living life in a hypnotic trance.

It's why we learn languages so quickly at this young age.

We are sponges just joyously absorbing everything around us.

At this precious age, we've set up the rest of our lives,

that's right.

What we learned from about the age of zero until six

is essentially the patterns or programming we begin to develop from then

and repeat again and again from adolescence into adulthood.

I want to tell you something that might offend you:

people, we are patterns.

I also want to relate something else to you:

sometimes our patterns do not serve us.

Those patterns are called disease, depression, obesity,

and the list, unfortunately, goes on and on.

OK, let's rewind for a minute.

I want to rewind to a really serious pattern that I had in the past.

I had what's called chronic fatigue syndrome,

which later turned into fibromyalgia.

Both are chronic illnesses that, to put them lightly, are no fun,

and to put them into context can be seriously debilitating.

I was 18 years old,

and I would suddenly go in and out of these intense spurts

of not being able to function.

I was dead tired

to a point where if I couldn't take a nap in the moment I needed to,

I felt as if my heart would give out.

The fact that I was so young, I knew something was wrong.

I went to many doctors,

many doctors, who all told me I was either stressed or depressed.

And I looked at them, and I said, "I'm a freshman in college.

Really, what do I have to be depressed about?"

So for years, I did research into why I felt the way I felt,

and I became my own advocate.

I began experimenting with diet, with lifestyle, many different things,

just to try to get a handle on my symptoms.

And I started to feel better,

and I was able to really get a handle on my life

and to manage life really well.

And when I finally had a big handle on my health,

I got severely knocked down again.

And when I say knocked down,

I mean almost killed in a near-fatal car accident.

T-boned, smashed,

left hanging upside down in my car until the firefighters came to cut me out,

not sure if I was paralyzed or dead.

Without going into the gory details,

I knew that I was in for a long ride ahead of me.

I was handicapped for six months,

and I developed what's called PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

And on top of that, I began to feel sick again.

In 30 seconds,

I wasn't the same Danna anymore.

I developed PTSD,

and because I knew that I was one person and I wasn't that person anymore,

I knew I had to see someone or do something about it.

So I began to see this therapist, and she was a very nice woman.

She would tell me things when you get to a stop sign, you need to breathe.

So I thought to myself,

am I really paying you this much money for that?

That I got.

So eventually after six months of minimal improvement,

I met a woman who survived cancer,

and she said she would not have survived cancer

were it not for this trauma therapist she went to.

So I said, "That's my woman."

So I went, and the first appointment with her, this trauma therapist,

she looked at me, and she said,

"I'm a bit alternative. I hope that's okay with you."

And I said, "I'm desperate, whatever you got."

She said, "I do this thing called hypnosis."

I said, "There is no way you're touching my brain with that stuff."

I was super skeptical,

I had no idea what it was,

and my only reference was show hypnosis,

and hypnotherapy is not show hypnosis.

So basically, after about six or seven sessions of meeting with her,

I decided that I liked her.

She was smart, forward-thinking, compassionate, so I thought to myself,

"What the heck! What can it hurt?"

So I walked into that session,

I walked in feeling one way, I walked out feeling another.

I wasn't exactly sure what she did.

I just felt better.

Within six weeks, my PTSD was gone.

The next month my depression, the next month my anxiety.

This woman saved my life.

OK, so that's all interesting,

and I want to tell you something even more interesting.

So I mentioned to you earlier that I started with chronic fatigue

and later developed what's called fibromyalgia.

I view these two ailments as sisters, very similar.

Yet fibromyalgia on top of the intense fatigue

is a serious muscular pain.

Yet what's the interesting part is,

I didn't develop this pain until after my accident.

So here's the interesting part.

When I was healing my trauma through hypnosis,

the pain in my legs began to dissipate.

Bit by bit, little by little,

the pain in my body was leaving.

I thought to myself, "Wow, what's happening here?"

So that brings us to where we're going today.

I want to walk you through the mechanics of the hypnotic process and how it works,

and how the mind and body and disease and thought

are all interconnected.

But first,

let's jump into the science of how minds and bodies interact.

So, how exactly are trauma and disease correlated?

I want to mention to you that trauma

doesn't have to be a near-fatal car accident;

it doesn't have to be coming back from war.

In my mind, the way I view trauma

is if you viewed the world one way and then some situation happened to you

and now you view the world in a different way,

that can be a traumatic circumstance.

So it doesn't have to be this overwhelming experience.

Have you ever heard the phrase "stress kills"?

OK.

So, I used to hear that phrase and I used to scoff.

Yet now, I see just how valid that statement is.

Physical and psychological stressors cause inflammation to occur in the body.

Inflammation is the keyword in many diseases.

Reducing inflammation is the key to healing many diseases.

Are you with me this far? OK, beautiful.

When events happen in life, they're recorded;

when stressful events happen, they are recorded as is.

And that creates a certain level of shock on the mind,

which therefore sends distress signals down the nervous system,

which in turn will tell the endocrine system

to increase adrenaline and cortisol,

and while those levels are increased, our immune levels are lowered.

The fact that we have these stress responses initially

is not a bad thing,

yet the fact that our minds compound all of these situations over time

without ever letting them go.

Every situation builds upon each other.

So the real reason we experience stress in reality

is for our own good, for our own safety.

If you think of an animal, for example, a mouse.

A mouse sees a cat, gets anxiety, has stress levels.

Why? Because it needs to make the decision to run away.

Yet once the mouse runs away, once the mouse finds cover,

that anxiety is gone.

The mouse doesn't over-analyze what the cat was thinking,

how to feel about it now, and what to do about it.

No, that's only something humans do.

Humans encounter a stressful situation,

we instantaneously attach meaning to it, and then it's recorded forever.

So the initial stress isn't bad,

the continual attachment to the stress is bad.

Follow me so far? Good, OK.

So just to reiterate,

when we experience stress

there's a recording in the subconscious mind.

And enough of those recordings, over time,

will cause havoc and an overstressed nervous system,

which in turn will cause an overproduction of stress hormones

and a suppression of immune function.

So, now the golden question: How do we reverse all of this?

So there's a new study dedicated to all of this

called psychoneuroimmunology.

Psychoneuroimmunology,

meaning the branch of medicine

that deals with the influence of emotional states

and nervous system activity on immune function,

especially in relation to disease.

So that's the textbook definition.

In reality, the best way that I have found

to take the study off of paper and into real life,

to intervene in the influence of stress on immunity,

I have found is hypnotherapy.

How? Let me tell you.

So I do this fascinating therapy, it's called regression therapy.

Essentially what this means is

I take my clients to the first time, the very first, first, first initial time,

that a stressful event or events caused the ailment at hand.

For example, let's say we're working with depression.

I'll guide a client through a visualization,

through their subconscious mind,

it's very cool,

and then through this visualization,

I'll say something like this: "We're going to go to the first time,

the very first time you had emotions around depression."

And so what happens in the subconscious mind

is the subconscious mind then links up with these specific memories

that are tied to that specific ailment.

So it goes something like this:

A client would describe

something that happened when they were two years old.

"I was two, my parents were fighting,

I felt very upset, confused, responsible for my parents, etc."

So then I start asking them questions like this:

"In that moment, how did you need to feel as a two-year-old?"

And then they would respond something to the effect of:

"I needed to feel like a baby, like a two-year-old, comforted, etc."

So at this point,

I would then direct them to feel as if in that memory,

they were filling their body as the two-year-old

with the resources that he or she needed in that moment.

In that moment, there is healing.

You cannot change what has happened to you in the past.

Instead, you're changing the mind's perception

and the weight of the heavy feelings that the past memory holds.

Then after resolving that memory,

we would then proceed through other memories in a similar fashion.

So what exactly is this doing?

It is completely allowing the subconscious mind

to cope with things it never got to cope with in the past.

This reduces the recorded stress that we've carried around our whole lives.