What happened there? What was going on with her?

Yeah.

What a delightful person Mary is, by the way.

So she's telling a story of when she was raised in Croatia as an eight-year-old girl.

The teacher completely unjustly slapped her in front of the class, right? And she has obviously a response, and, uh, she's upset, she's embarrassed, she's hurt, and she's been thinking about it to this day.

And so as I meet with her 10 or 15 minutes into our first session, she seems to want to tell some story, and so this is the story that pops out.

And as I'm listening to it, I'm hearing two things.

Can you tell me why name-calling and violence and using physical movements that act like you're hurting somebody is actually really helpful for the brain?

How do you approach these conversations with these individuals?

Tentatively, with the cautious person, I think is the best answer.

I'm cautious about a lot of things, I think.

And so when I see tentativeness, when I see skepticism, I usually applaud it and say, well done.

I'm glad that you're a skeptical person.

And then I invite people to explore or experiment.

And some of the approaches that I would use would be a little bit of education and a few case examples.

do.

So how would quieting an internal conflict help someone with chronic neuroplastic symptoms? And some of the people watching this are very familiar with neuroplastic symptoms, but some of them may be newer to the idea.

And I have to be honest with you, there's some mystery to the mechanism.

We don't really know.

We have models that we suggest.

So there's pretty good evidence that the brain seems to be the primary generator of our experience, whether our experience is vision or hearing or bodily sensations we have.

And then the question is, what sets off the brain to do that? Most of the symptoms we have have some evolutionary value.

Pain does.

I ask people to do this all

Yeah.

But the patients who went through it all got some nice results.

So, you know, one of my thoughts was the great battle over h- could this problem beYou know, organic, could it be structural disease-based? You know, there is this world of psychophysiological disorders where there is both symptom presentations driven by psychosocial factors and physiological changes.

So the asthmas and the, you know, the issues, and a whole bunch of other things.

Sure, there's things going on in the body, but they can be triggered by, by psychosocial processes.

But, you know, the notion that migraines have been recognized as a, quote, "psychosomatic," or let's say a neuroplastic illness for a long time.

Yeah.

And I was struck by these patients who seemed to recover a lot from their migraines by doing this work, and I think the active ingredient was the shift from, "Oh, crap, here comes a migraine.