The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing

"We trained pregnant and never pregnant women and we tested them on their memory for these items immediately after they learned them and then we tested them two weeks later, looking at their long term autobiographical memory. What we found was that for the immediate test, the pregnant women did better than the never pregnant women on the baby relevant items, but they had equal performance on the a...

"The universality of guilt - I think that my life as a child therapist has a lot of advantages; we carry the idea that 'we are all the ages we've ever been' and those magic years never disappear. There are some great things about that - there are some problems with it too. That kind of irrational self-centered construction to explain what is intolerable and difficult to grasp comes from that. Earl...

"Because I couldn't help my son, I couldn't do anything for him, I thought maybe I could start this group and help other people and other parents deal with this problem. What I wasn't prepared to face was just how lonely, how alone, how sad, and feeling hopeless I was.  In a way, when the group began, I needed the group as much as the group needed me. I've continued the group although I need it fo...

"If you randomly assign people in two groups and you give them different insignia or you have them go through different practices, as we saw in this study, they come to like each other more. It's very easy to create this basic sense of belonging and identity. Ritual is particularly good at eliciting that kind of sense also because it triggers our intuitions about what we call phenotypic matching,...

"One of the things that is very exciting is that this is a very robust finding . I n other words, sometimes in science people see something and then it's not replicated - Rapamycin 's impact on lifespan has been replicated . W hen I started researching this area 50 years ago , I never felt that we would find a pill that would have an impact on aging and lifespan. Aging is very complex - to find on...

"One way a child of Jody's age deals with loss is that you don't miss the person, in a sense you can become them. So, I have her step into the mother role, immediately trying to look after the younger ones and then wearing her mother sunglasses - it's like she becomes her and then you don't miss her so much. The neighbor is like an analyst figure, and she goes over and talks to this woman, Juliett...

"The best way to think about insulin resistance is that it's pre-diabetes. In the course of developing type 2 diabetes, which we see in much higher rates in people with bipolar disorder compared to the general population, one starts off with normal blood sugar levels but elevated insulin. It is the elevated insulin that pushes the blood sugar down into the normal range. This is typically something...

"When paternity leave comes into the picture you have a situation where parents are home together. Those processes are able to develop for both the mother and the father - there's time for fathers to bond with their children, there's time for parents to figure out how to be  parents together. It's not so lopsided where mothers become the experts because they are there all the time. Mothers and fat...

"There is a company called NightWare, that developed a feature for PTSD that uses components from Apple Watch. One of the primary symptoms in PTSD is intense nightmares which are very distressing, they disrupt their sleep and really drive a lot of symptomatology. This company created an app that detects when people with PTSD are having nightmares.  It uses the existing sleep function [on the watch...

"I would say to any parent who has a child now or any adult who has a disability now - disabilities are looked at quite differently. They are accepted much more than they were when I was growing up. So, you can't take things out of context, but I was just living a secret life and that wasn't good, it really wasn't. That was why I was remote, so what I would do is dissociate when I felt the pain of...

"Someone comes in and they are having these fainting attacks and neurological symptoms, they do develop different anxiety channels and the first of their goal is to help them be able to identify and feel their emotions and not have any anxiety, but before getting there we help them learn to reflect on their body response and intellectual wise and it tends to make anxiety get into the muscles and s...

"We have those two groups with the probiotics and the placebo. The patients were allocated to the two groups and it was double-blind so we didn't know if they took the probiotics or the placebo. They took it for four weeks and we did the assessments before the intervention and after the intervention and then we just compared. We compared how the trajectory of the depressive symptoms was in the two...

"How does religion matter here? The reason that kids who are religious 'abiders' end up having an academic advantage, especially in the working class and the middle class, is because their grades are so much better in the middle and high school years that their chances of getting into college are much higher. They also are constantly being told: "Oh you have good grades, you are college material,"...

"I don't think anybody can truly describe the [psilocybin] experience. One can use phrases and words that are common - ineffable, mystical, powerful. All I can say is it was the most powerful experience of my life that I have gone through ever."      "We had another CAT scan in September of last year, in 2021, and it showed another small nodule. My oncologist said, 'Don't worry, we don't know what...

"That was actually Darwin's hypothesis in observing his own son and he writes about this in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals." He writes about this incipient laughter – he was the first one to recognize this as a built-in response that the baby has that really pulls the baby into the adult world or pulls adults into the infant world. It is such an important emotional connection."...

"All Jenny knew was that she wanted to lose weight. One of the things I say to people when I teach about eating disorders is 'treating eating disorders is all about food and not at all about food'. It is not at all about food, there is always an issue, it is not just about wanting to be thin. Even though in the late 70s' Twiggy came on the scene and everybody thought Twiggy was the big inspiration...

"If somebody was to say a prayer to Jesus versus say a prayer to Allah versus say a prayer to Vishnu - in some sense that is going to be a similar kind of process in the brain. They are repeating certain words directed towards some higher power in their view. In some sense there is similarity across those different domains and those different traditions. On the other hand, when different beliefs t...

"There is a very close relation between being known and knowing others and allowing others to know us. When somebody goes to therapy, it usually impacts everyone around them in many ways. We can say it challenges relationships. It does many things. But one thing is that when you feel known and you are not hiding anymore, you realize that who you are is not so terrible, somebody actually likes it....

"When someone is disordered in their eating often what you find is that they've been a kid who has learned to have radar for the feelings of other people. Whether it's a family where the kid can't express their emotions and parents' emotions rule, that kid has learned to look to the outside to figure out who she should be. So of course, in our culture that means that they looked to the scale, they...

"Polyvagal theory at the simplest level emphasizes that we have a physiological system, and the autonomic nervous system mediates how we react and respond to the world. When our autonomic nervous system is calm it supports our bodily functions. It also provides permission at a neural level for us to trigger other parts of our brain that results in engagement with others. The secret underlining pol...

"[during the MDMA experience] at around 45 minutes they may notice a shift where the anxiety dissipates and there is a sense of opening, a sense of feeling ok, maybe more than ok, maybe feeling a little bit blissful or positive. One study measured a sense of authenticity - meaning the feeling of being ok to be oneself. They may choose to continue to be inward and notice what is coming up for them...

"To be able to contain, withstand and hold the aggression of your adolescents who push you away, you have to feel very secure - meaning that you have to feel pretty good about yourself as a parent, that you have given them everything, that you have been present enough. It comes from a security and I find today that many, many parents are not secure in their feelings that they have given their chil...

"There's this kind of dance between biology and this little molecule that gave us the capacity to take care of our infants by feeding them directly. That gave us tremendous freedom - we didn't need a nest so we were able to wander the planet. We could interact with all kinds of others as long as mom was there for the first couple of years, or let's say, at least six months, to feed the baby. The r...

"Coaching is asking. It's even better when you don't know how to do that person's job because they work in a different industry to you. All you can do is ask and that is pure coaching. It's an 80-20 ratio of speaking to listening - 80 percent of the time your job is to listen and to ask but not know the answer. Often the client thinks you do know the answer but actually you really don't and that m...

"As cognitive psychologists we are very much interested in these unconscious processes. Most of the processes that are involved to create your reality you are not consciously aware of. There are more computations that happen in our unconscious minds to allow us to solve a lot of these problems. As within psychoanalysis we are often unaware of a lot of these processes, and as magicians this is very...