The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing

"I write a lot about stuckness - it's not just how bad the thing is but whether it's changeable and flexible - whether the patient is at least occasionally able to get out of that perspective and see things differently. For patients who are really stuck, sometimes I would give them medicine and continue psychotherapy. After six or seven months of having a different perspective, if the medicine wor...

"We used [open-label placebo] in kids with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and the interesting thing about these patients is that they were only allowed to enroll in our study at Boston Children's if all other treatments had failed. Basically. we had a population that had undergone numerous treatments with all of them not helping much. These are patients that didn't have a positive classical conditioning...

"[Springsteen's book] is about rock and roll; it's about the joy of music; and it's about clinical depression. He weaves these together and Springsteen is not only a great example of how someone can live a creative life while enduring this kind of suffering, but he also shows how invisible depression can be to others. Who would have ever equated that the man who is just briming with life and vital...

"The first pillar is relaxed awareness - we talk about it as the fundamental state of mind and body that is the basis of attunement. Listening is the taking in of cues and information from the other person. Understanding is cognitively processing and understanding that information that you've taken in. The final pillar is mutual responsiveness. It is in essence the active component of attunement -...

"In infancy and childhood the autonomic nervous system is going through developmental stages just as with any other aspect of development. The quality of the engagement and the closeness with the caretaker has a big effect on how the autonomic system develops. When we have conditions where we feel safe, then we tend to have dominance of the activity of the parasympathetic system."      Episode Des...

I play [piano] regularly with a violinist every Wednesday night - my violinist comes with her student to my house and we play two violin and piano duets first. Right now, we are working on the Franck Sonata and it is so much fun! It is so great and I am so happy I can do that! When I am playing and I am passionate, the pain stays in the background enough for me to feel that I am in another world....

"If you discard an item that a compulsive hoarder is attached to - it could be an empty box, a tin, or something like that. If you throw that particular item that they are attached to away, the grief that a compulsive hoarder will experience is the same amount of grief that one would experience with the loss of a loved one. The same intensity of grieve and mourning will be displayed as if you have...

"It's not a good meditation when you are having fewer thoughts, it is not a bad meditation when you are having more thoughts or wilder thoughts. Really what Zen talks about is the limitation of just focusing on thoughts.  Most of the time we are lost in our thoughts - we focus exclusively on our thoughts with much less attention to sensations, to perceptions of the world."     Episode Description:...

"Any separation, no matter how short the separation, requires a moment of reunion and repair. If you disregard the importance of that reunion and repair, collectively that starts to do great injury to that baby. Every time we have those missteps it is really important to repair them."       Episode Description:  We begin by discussing the centrality of the newborn's experience of attachment and ho...

"She first came to me for the amenorrhea  -  she was sent to me by a  gynecologist  colleague .   T he menstrual problem was solved  in  the first five months and then everything was fine from that point of view .   B ut from the eating disorder, stress, situational anxiety,  and  sexual difficulties in accepting herself as a young attractive  woman, this  was a long work which went on for several...

"Buried inside of us are  all  these layers and layers of selves ,  like a Russian  nesting  doll ,  and the baby self fits inside all the different ages of you .   I n my experience of being in this kind of therapy I was starting to get to know all the unresolved  thoughts and  conflict s  and ideas that were still sort of buried in me but hadn't had an opportunity or the need at the time   to ha...

"I'm not saying this is going to cure your depression, but I am saying that it stands a good chance of fixing up your gut, and if your depression is gut-related this could have a big impact on you .   T his could be a big explanation for the worldwide epidemic of depression that is going on because it is very strongly correlated, not caused, but correlated to the extraction of fiber from our foods...

"When you look in the background of th e Mona Lisa  you see how much attention the artist paid to the landscape  -  it's  at  a certain horizon, the left horizon is higher than the right horizon, it's interesting .   T he parents and the family are the landscape into which the infant is born . If  every infant is though t of  as if it is the Mona Lisa in the center, potentially beautiful, the land...

"When we talk about psychodynamic therapy that's what we are talking about - therapy   that aims to enable you to truly know yourself in a way that is transformative, in a way that opens the door to living life differently than you are able to live now, in a way that provides some escape from having to relive the same kinds of painful, self-defeating and limiting  patterns. "     Episode Descripti...

"What we do is meaningful, it's real, our effects are real. I can say that now. We still have people that read our studies and say: 'This is random...It does not do anything … It is not possible…', but it is, it really is. You only have to see it 10 times, but now I have seen it hundreds of times since we have been following people now for 5, 6 and 7 years in the clinic, we started in 2013"   Epis...

"If we spoke about his illness it made it more real. Of course he did know, he must have known what the prognosis was for his illness - ultimately for 100% of the kind of lung cancer that he had, it was fatal. I also think he feared that if he was spoken about in terms of being someone with this horrible potentially terminal illness, that he would be viewed differently. How? I would guess weaker,...

" The autobiographical stage [in a psilocybin experience] is where a great deal of important work happens. One of the most important things that happens during this phase is the emergence of what is truly valued by the individual. Consider when there is a cancer diagnosis - it seems that at that point everything about them falls away except their body, their cancer, their chemo, their vomiting and...

"Why I am so interested in the microbiome across development is because it really shows a very interesting developmental gradient that closely maps on to other parts of the body and the brain in terms of sensitive periods of emotional development and language. There is also a really taut connection between the mother and child in terms of what the microbiome looks like across the lifespan."   Area...