Ask Your Ovaries What? The Listening Cure with Dr. Chris Gilbert – #17

0:29 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome back to another episode of The Fertility Hour. Today, we have a very special guest and get to know about her in a minute. Dr. Chris Gilbert, MD, PhD – she’s a full-time author and public speaker. Her books include The Listening Cure, Dr. Chris’ A, B, C’s of Health, and The French Stethoscope (a memoir). She is also a regular writer and blogger for PsychologyToday.com. She was in private medical practice in Torrance, California in integrative medicine using a combination of homeopathy, acupuncture, Gestalt therapy, bioidentical hormones, supplements as well as conventional medicine. She did a surgical residency at Harbor-UCLA and a medical internship at UC – Irvine. Previously, she worked for Doctors Without Borders in Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Mauritania, and China taking care of refugees. And before that, she had a private medical practice in Paris, France. She has an MD-PhD from the Cochin Port-Royal in Paris where she was born.

Welcome, Dr. Chris. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Chris Gilbert: Thank you so much for having me, Charlene. Absolutely, it’s my pleasure.

1:54 CL: So the way that I came about you is I heard about your book The Listening Cure and there was a doctor kind of doing an unconventional approach to medicine, a mainstream conventional medical doctor which I don’t think that you’re mainstream or conventional at all, but the fact that you’re an MD and you’re doing kind of an unconventional approach. I read the book, I fell in love with you and the book and tears come to my eyes because I was like, “God bless this woman.” Can we clone you because I’m just thinking there’s so many people that want to be emotionally vulnerable with someone that they trust, a medical doctor, and time and time again, they don’t feel like they can be and they’re kind of getting shut down. It’s not to fault the doctors because they’re kind of all in the system where it’s like 5 to 15 minutes with a patient and things like that. A lot of things get missed and things don’t get communicated and heart-to-heart connections don’t get made in that short amount of time. So I was just really touched by your book.

So, let’s talk about it. Describe to us the unconventional way that you were treating your patients, that you talked about in your book The Listening Cure.

CG: I started as a conventional doctor doing what every other doctor does and prescribing medications. But I got into cases where patients had a lot of symptoms and were referred other physicians that could not cure their patients. So they had chronic fatigue or they had aches and pains, they had recurrent bronchitis. All the tests were normal. All the x-rays, all the blood tests, the examinations, everything was normal. And they couldn’t find out what the origin of the problem was. So I had a bunch of people like this and I got to know them and I started asking the question: Where does this come from? When did this start? Was there an event that started those physical symptoms? Was there an emotion that started those physical symptoms? And very often, there was an event and there was an emotion. And was that emotion repressed? And very often, it was repressed.

So, I allowed the person to talk about that emotion and the way to do this and my technique is to give the body a voice, give the symptom a voice. If a person has pain in her knee or his knee, give the knee a voice. If it’s a belly ache, give the belly a voice/the stomach a voice. And there quickly, I got to see that the body had a lot to say. That if I was asking the person to not talk about herself or himself, basically it’s not me that’s talking. It’s just my body part, it’s just my stomach that’s talking. It’s not me. The person had a lot to say. The body part had a lot to say. The pain had a lot to say. The fatigue had a lot to say.

And that fascinated me. So I did that more and more with more and more patients, and I realized that when I was giving the body a voice or the body part a voice and associating this to an emotion, and I was letting the person have their emotion out in front of me, then the pain would decrease and the fatigue would decrease so the person would feel more energetic and would feel better, and ultimately, it would little by little resolve the problem without any medication, without any side effect of medication again. I love conventional medication, just love it. But the problem is that there are like 1.3 million medical mistakes that are make every year in the United States because people or doctors do have the wrong diagnosis or the right diagnosis but the wrong medication, or the right medication at the wrong dose. And out of those, there’s 400,000 people that are going to die every year in the United States because of a medical mistake.

So I like to reflect and to see how can I help the patient the best. For me, the money wasn’t important because I know for a lot of doctors, they’re timed, they need to spend like 5 or 10 minutes, not more because otherwise they won’t be paid for an office visit. For me, it was not that. For me, it was my satisfaction as a doctor that was important to be able to treat the patients and receiving a letter or a card from a patient thanking me, telling me that I changed their life was so rewarding much more than any kind of money that’s fueled me. There are so many doctors that are suffering from stress also and take medications themselves, that I didn’t want to be one of those. I could have been one of those in doing my training. My training was really hard at Harbor-UCLA, for example, it was very hard. But I shied away from that.

8:26 CL: That’s beautiful. In your book The Listening Cure, you give many examples of different patients that come in and you addressed the issues of anger. There’s one that stands out for me. Maybe a woman who was very frustrated in her marriage and she was having a lot of signs. Was it the voice/the throat was very constricted, right? Of all the probably hundreds of people that you have treated and helped, can you give us a story?

CG: Yes. In each chapter of the book, there is like only nine chapters and in each chapter I give stories of patients and I talk about their struggles and I talk about their symptoms and I talk about how I did step-by-step the detective work of finding what was wrong with them, studying the tone of their voice, studying the way they were holding their hands, the way they were holding their back, the way their belly was when I was palpating their belly, the way they were holding their feet. So I described what’s happening in my head and how from just when a patient/a person enters my office to like half an hour later, I describe what’s going on in my brain literally and how I find the way to help that person. And at the end of each chapter, there’s a practical exercise that each person can do if they’re sick but also if they’re not sick that would prevent illness. Just expressing their feelings or there’s a chapter on drawing, there’s an X-rated chapter on sex. There’s a lot of different things that I think can be very helpful.

But I’ll give you an example of a patient, for example, who came to see me because she had throat pain. And again, I’ve seen so many people with throat pain that nobody, no other physicians could find an answer for. One of them, one of those throat pain patient, when I asked her what happened just before the throat pain started, and again, the blood test was normal when we were looking at her throat, everything was normal. The CT scan was normal. Everything was normal. So, when I asked her what happened just before the symptoms started, she said, “Well, I had a feeling that my husband was having an affair and I confronted him, and he admitted that he was having an affair. But he said, ‘No, no. Don’t worry. You have nothing to worry about. I love you. I’m going to break up with that person and it will be just like before because I really want to stay married to you. So nothing to worry about.’” But inside of her, there were two parts. There was a part of her that really was very, very angry and frustrated. She’s like, “’How could you do this to me? How could you have an affair on me? I don’t deserve that.’ And I’m so angry at him, I could beat him up.” And then there’s another side of her that was… again, she was working at the front desk of an office and she needed to be pleasant and smile in front of people and for family and friends. And she had to keep this anger, this bottled-in anger inside of her because she couldn’t express it. There was a tug of war inside of her throat. A part of her wanted to scream with anger and the other part of her needed to suppress that and smile and say nothing. And that was the origin of muscle spasms inside her throat and there was the origin of the pain.

So, my way of treating her was to have her express this anger. My way of doing things in the office is I put a lot of pillows on my examination table and I ask the patient to do as if those pillows were her husband, for example, and beat the pillows up and scream at those pillows and get the anger and frustration out this way. And by doing that, usually that tension goes away and the symptom gets better. The pain gets better.

But there are other ways of expressing anger and frustration. Sometimes people like to write in a diary. Sometimes people like to sing; to sing when I had a problem myself and I was stressed out. I went to my car every day and I created songs from scratch. I created lyrics, I created scores in my head and I would scream from the top of my lungs in my car and scream my emotions out. And that was very effective just by singing my anger, singing my frustration. Sometimes I sing my happiness, sometimes I sing my fear and I tell my patients, “try it because it’s spectacular what can happen. It’s a relief to do this.” But people can also dance their emotions out, dance the frustration, dance the anger, dance the fear. Whatever comes to the body, it’s the body that expresses it. Again, I tend to favor more what the body says rather than what the mind says. But the mind has a lot of shoulds and taboos, and whereas the body is just primal – and I like to give a voice to the body.

But it could also be drawing, draw your emotions out, draw whatever is in your emotion. Also, it could be physical exercise; go to the gym, get a punching ball and boxing gloves. If you’re very angry, punch that ball with boxing gloves and get the anger out this way. It could also be meditation. Some people like just being quiet and meditate. Some other people like reiki. So, whatever works for the person. Some people like yoga, some people like hypnosis. Whatever works for the person as long as the person feels that whatever is bottled in as an emotion gets out. Because whatever is bottled in, if it stays bottled in and cannot get out, it could harm the owner.

16:08 CL: Do you think that people though should originally start with asking the question? Because I kind of loved that. I did that for myself the other day. Remind me a little bit about when you take your nondominant hand and you journal, and quite a different conversation comes out, doesn’t it? Then say you’re right-handed, you use your left hand and you go, “Oh, these thoughts are really coming from a deeper place.” So I was asking questions of the different organs like, “Oh,” that’s kind of surprising, that’s very insightful. I guess I would feel like if people start with that, it’s a great starting off point.

CG: Yes.

16:51 CL: You had mentioned that doctors would refer patients to you where there was no known cause for whatever was going on with them, but I just want to clarify that if you have a disease where there is a known cause, then this would also be very beneficial as well. Right? If you get a blood test and it showed X, Y, and Z or whatever the case may be.

CG: As long as the disease is treated appropriately. Because if there is a disease, it very often needs to be treated with the conventional medications, conventional doctor. I want to be very careful because if people, for example, have chest pain and if there’s something abnormal in their heart, then they need to go see a cardiologist, they need to have a stent placed in. They’ve got to be careful to make sure that the right alarm is set. If there is really something wrong with them, they need to address that. Or if there is cancer, it’s pain from cancer, that needs surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. And in addition, yes, we can give the body a voice. If the person has chest pain and the person takes the right medications, has a stent placed in, has cardiac surgery, at the same time, yes, we can do give the heart a voice, so give the body part a voice. But I want to say that it doesn’t replace. Whenever there is a real disease that we find that something is really abnormal that giving the body a voice does not replace the primary treatment, it goes along with it though. You can give it together, yes.

18:42 CL: Our audience is primarily women – I hope some men are listening – that are challenged with fertility issues. When I was reading your book, I was thinking in many times it’s unexplained infertility, which is a frustrating diagnosis. Can you give us an example of how you would use The Listening Cure when someone doesn’t know what exactly is the issue of why they can’t get pregnant?

CG: A lot of studies show that many infertile women or couples have a lot of stress. Again, there are several studies that show that. So, are they stressed out because they cannot get pregnant or are they not being able to get pregnant because they’re stressed out? Or, is it a loop like they start being stressed out and there’s too much stress and then they cannot get pregnant and then they become stressed out because they cannot get pregnant, which increases the stress and then they become really, really stressed out even more. That’s a loop that is hard to get out of.

So, I like to address the stress. It’s always a good bet that somebody is going to be stressed out and if the person decreases their stress, they might be able to get pregnant. So the way to decrease the stress is to ask the body part, to ask their uterus, for example, what is happening, what is the feeling. You ask their ovaries what is the feeling. Give a voice to their uterus, their ovaries. Give a voice to their heart. Give a voice to their belly, to their stomach. And sometimes there is also two different parts of a person. There is a part of a woman that would love to get pregnant and there is another part of her that will be scared of getting pregnant. So I like to give also those different parts a voice and have what I present as an inner group therapy, except that instead of having different persons, we’ve got different organs or different parts of the person. To me, it’s just fascinating once we open that door to see how many different parts we can have. Again, it could be the part of us that really wants to get pregnant, the part of us that is scared what’s going to happen once we are pregnant.

But if could be also the heart part, that my heart needs a voice because I’m stressed out at my job or I’m stressed out in my relationship with my husband. Or the uterus will have a voice and say, “Well, how is it going to be if I get pregnant? Am I going to get dilated? How am I going to react if I’m dilated?” And get into how it’s going to be with that organ, the uterus to be dilated and how amazing it’s going to be to get pregnant and how people can destress and relax thinking about that. Some other people, they might do the opposite; it might stress them out. But there’s so many people that are so different. Each person is a different individual and that’s why I think it’s fascinating to see how each person reacts.

22:38 CL: Absolutely. You know, when I was reading your book, I don’t know if my mind just works this way but I think a lot of people, there’s sort of like a little bit of a judgement when you’re reading someone’s book and then you think to yourself, “Well, what hardship has this person really gone through?” where they’ve had to, I guess, really utilize these tools because it’s easy to write theoretically about it and you can see patients and kind of be a little bit separated from their pain. But when you go through your own experience and you use it, so have you ever had a life experience where you really had to put these tools to the test?

CG: Oh, many times. See, I don’t usually recommend anything to my patients unless I have experienced it myself, because then I can really talk about it. So there are many, many times. For example, well, I describe that my late husband, now I’m happily remarried with a person, Dr. Eric Haseltine who is a neuroscientist.

23:55 CL: Congratulations.

CG: Thank you. And he’s the co-author of my book so he’s actually explaining why my techniques work in the neuroscience point of view. So we’ve been remarried for 10 months and we’re doing speeches together and all over the world. It’s all the fun. But before, so I’m a widow, and my late husband died of brain cancer 8 years ago and when he was fighting against cancer and it was very hard for me to help him and to see how badly he was feeling, then it was very, very stressful for me. So as I described, I would go down to my car and just scream in my car. Just the fact of screaming in my car and being angry at the world and being angry at how can somebody, anybody do this to my husband. And just screaming with anger would really relieve my stress and would make me much more peaceful. Also, as I said, I would also dance. I danced my feelings, I danced my anger, I danced my frustration. It was very helpful. I also did drawings. I drew my anger. And afterwards, now what I do is I draw my happiness and I sing my happiness and I dance my happiness. So all those tools, I have used them. I’m still using them on an almost everyday basis. Not that much everyday but whenever I need it, I do use them. And they’re spectacular. I mean, that’s how I stayed off antidepressants at the time where it was very, very difficult for me. Or antianxiety medicines. But, just by doing that.

I have a little video on my website which is called Scream Off Stress, which I made, it’s a very amateur video. I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a video of I say when people visit their in-laws or when they visit people that stress them out a lot, in order to remain very calm, I recommend that they take a break of that. I demonstrate it. That they take a break, “Oh, I forgot something in my car. Let me just take a look. I’ll be back just in a few minutes.” So I go to my car and I show how I’m screaming like I roll up all the windows and “Aah!” and I scream my stress out, and then I feel much better and then I come back to see the family members so that I can be very pleasant and say, “Hi! How are you? It’s so nice to see you. What can I do to help?”

27:05 CL: I definitely have to watch that. So it’s you acting?

CG: It’s me acting, yeah. But it’s something that I recommend to my patients because sometimes they get into very stressful family reunions and instead of exploding in front of family members or being angry in front of people, it’s much more helpful to just go take a little break, go to their car, scream and then that’s it. So, a little tool.

27:39 CL: I think that’s helpful and definitely for the holidays pull up that video. Okay, a couple of questions. Suppressed negative feelings. What if someone’s listening? I mean, this is what happens more and more as we get a little bit disconnected with ourselves. Even you could ask someone, “Are you going through a lot of stress?” “No, not really. I’m feeling fine.” Which I want you to talk about that acronym – “I’m feeling fine.” Because we’re just told kind of to put on a game face soldier on and so you get disconnected, but how does one know that they’re suppressing negative feelings?

CG: A person does not really know because it’s common. Everybody does. That’s how we kind of raise kids. For women that are listening, after listening to this video and if they manage to get pregnant, thanks to my exercises, when they have their children I would recommend that they know how to allow their children to express their feelings. Because it comes from childhood. Our parents have always said “No, no, no. You cannot cry,” or, “You cannot express your anger,” or, “No, it’s not. You need to calm down.” So it comes from that that we’ve learned to repress our feelings and not say anything whereas I think if the feeling is very intense, it is healthy to let it out in a healthy environment, in a secure environment. So if a child has a lot of anger or a lot of sadness, to have the child put on either boxing gloves and punch a punching ball to get the anger out and not stay with that just like we were taught. Like I knew I was taught as a child to not be angry, to always be pleasant, to not show my so-called “negative feelings”. And that has been like this for most of my childhood and adolescent life and that was not healthy for me. I needed to express it but nobody showed me how to express it in a safe way. I learned it by myself and I realized that it’s so liberating and it changes the physical symptoms. I used to have cramps in my legs, I used to have pain in my knees when I was walking too fast. But those are all due to stress.

So for the listeners, the symptoms would be aches and pains, back pain, recurrent bronchitis, recurrent infections of some kind, depression, fatigue, headaches, there is a lot of different symptoms, you name it really. People don’t pay attention to those because it’s so common. Everybody has those, so what, what’s new. But it shouldn’t be and you need to pay attention to what the body is saying because if the body is feeling fatigued, the body is getting sick like recurrent bronchitis, that means there’s something wrong, the body is weak. What happens when there is stress is that we have stress hormones that are secreted. Those stress hormones are cortisol and that will decrease our immune system, so we’ll get sick more easily or we’ll heal less easily. Also, adrenaline is another stress hormone which will make our heart beat faster, our blood pressure gets higher. And all those stress hormones, there’s stress hormones that will prevent us from being pregnant also. So, I want to emphasize how important it is to decrease those stress hormones.

32:16 CL: So basically, to get back to the question, if someone is wondering “Am I suppressing emotions?” well, if you’re having signs and symptoms like the aches and pains, recurrent infection, then usually there is that emotional core that is involved. I know because you study acupuncture and I’m an acupuncturist, that thousands of years ago in traditional Chinese medicine they said emotional imbalances are the root of all diseases and now it’s taking western medicine quite a long time to sort of catch up to that. But the mind-body connection is becoming kind of talked about more and acknowledged, which is a very good thing.

CG: Yes. It’s hard to separate. I mean, usually when you go to your primary care physician, either the primary care physician is going to give you a medication and you say, “Oh, I have recurrent bronchitis,” or, “I have body pain,” he’s going to give you an anti-inflammatory or an antibiotic. But the physician is not going to ask you what triggered that, why are you sick, why did you get sick, why is your immune system not strong enough. And that’s what you need to ask yourself, is why. And usually there is an emotion and usually it’s either anger or frustration or sadness or fear, sometimes it’s fear. Rarely excitement and happiness because we tend to express those. But I like to tell my patient that they can express whatever emotion there is in there and they’re not used to that. And by expressing their emotion, they’re discovering what kind of emotions they have. I love seeing them discover their own emotions because very often they’re not aware of that.

34:24 CL: You talk about in the book “symptoms of unhappiness”. What are symptoms of unhappiness?

CG: Again, it could be everything. Again, the body is going to be stressed out because the body is unhappy and is going to try to be happy but will not manage to be happy, so it’s stressed. So symptoms of unhappiness, of course there is depression. But very often it’s fatigue or insomnia/they won’t be able to sleep well. They will not feel energetic. Again, it could be sexual problems also. They will not be able to enjoy sex. And again, I talk about recurrent bronchitis, I talk about belly ache. That could be a symptom of unhappiness, of belly cramps because again, the gut has neurons also, lots of neurons. So if you’re stressed out, the gut is going to be the first one to know it and it will give you cramps. Again, the gut is primal and since it’s got as many neurons as the brain of a monkey, it’s going to let you know right away what’s happening. So you probably have a stomach pain or a belly cramp, before you’re going to feel unhappy. Usually the body knows it before. People say “I have a gut feeling.” That means it goes to the gut first and then it goes to the brain. But usually it’s the gut that first you feel queasy in the gut and that’s usually a symptom of unhappiness and that’s the first one usually that is alerted.

36:28 CL: That’s really telling. You think about a medication like Prilosec or something, is that like the #3 or #4 prescribed medication in America, it’s treating gut disorders. So anyways, if we’re going to have a different conversation with the gut instead of perhaps medicating it first it would tell us a lot about how we’re kind of going through our lives. Now, you do go through an exercise at the end of the chapters. Is there a way that we could go through one?

CG: Yes, and actually, also if you are open, I can do that with you too.

37:14 CL: That’d be great.

CG: And we can do a little, well, I don’t know if you have aches and pains or if you have belly pain, but everybody can give a voice to their different organs. So we’ll do a little exercise but giving the body parts a voice. So I’m going to ask you and the listeners also to give me a couple of deep breaths.

37:46 CL: Okay, and right before I do that, I want to say if you enjoy our podcast, please support us and subscribe to the podcast. That would be wonderful and we’ll continue to bring on wonderful guests like Dr. Chris and also please tell us how to find out more about you and your work.

CG: Oh, yeah. So you can go to my website www.drchrisgilbert.com. You’ll find my books there, find my speeches. You’ll find my little videos. You’ll find an audiobook. I made an audiobook with my husband also with my voice about The Listening Cure. So again, you can listen to one chapter every night before going to sleep and at the end of each chapter you can do the little exercise and you’ll feel yourself in a different world, exploring a completely different world that you had no idea existed. It’s going to transform you; it’s transformative. Because there’s so many things that we don’t talk about that this is new, this is very, very new.

39:11 CL: So if you are listening and for myself I’m going to take some nice deep breaths.

CG: A couple of deep breaths. And I’ll do the same thing too. And another one. Now, focus your attention on your belly. Focus your attention on your stomach. If your stomach had a voice, what would it say? Would it say “I’m hungry”? Would it say “I ate too much”? Would it say “Oh, I ate just the right foods or ate the wrong foods”? Or, “I’m happy or distended”? What would it say? So I’ll ask the listeners to do this at the same time and you can do this too at the same time. I mean, you can do this live if you want and then the listeners will do this at the same time.

40:20 CL: It’s saying I’m a little distended.

CG: Okay. So it’s saying then “I’m distended”. And if it was going to mention a reason like I’m going to say it’s not Charlene that’s talking, it’s just Charlene’s stomach – not her, just her stomach. So Charlene’s stomach, if there was a reason why you’re distended, what is inside of you? Tell me what’s inside of you, Charlene’s stomach, for it to be distended.

40:50 CL: Charlene decided to put a kind of weird combination of food in me.

CG: Okay. So it’s that particular combination of food that’s making you distended. Right, stomach?

41:06 CL: And I’m feeling a little anxiousness in the background, yeah.

CG: Okay. So, a little anxious and a little strange combination of food that’s making you distended, stomach, right? Okay. So if you had a message, stomach, to give to Charlene to let her know what you, stomach, want her to do the next time, what would you tell her?

41:36 CL: I would tell Charlene she has been telling me that she’s going to give me a break like doing bone broths that she’s been talking about and I could really use that, I could just use a break from just the normal diet and just, yeah, I could use a break for a couple of days.

CG: Okay. So stomach, I hear you say you need a break, you want to be away from food, just the broth and you’ll feel so much better and you were asking Charlene to do that. Right?

42:09 CL: Mm-hmm. Yes.

CG: Okay, that’s perfect. So then we’ll see so each listener is going to have their own experience. And again, the question, I like to create a dialogue just like we just did between the stomach and the owner, and then the stomach will tell the owner what it likes or what it wants and then the owner, it’s great when the owner listens and then gives the stomach what the stomach wants. Then the relationship will make the owner feeling so much better. So that’s an example.

Now, we can go through any organ like this. We can talk to the back like Charlene’s back. And so another deep breath and we’ll ask the listeners to do the same thing and then deep breath, and focus on your back, the lower back or the upper back, whatever part of the back wants to talk. If that part of the back had a voice, what would it say?

43:25 CL: I feel great.

CG: Okay. So now, I’m going to ask the lower back. So your lower back feels great. The lower back says “Oh, I feel great.” So now once you have the lower back tell Charlene why it feels great, where did Charlene do that was right for it so that it feels great, and what does it have to be thankful for?

43:58 CL: It has to be thankful for being strong and supportive of Charlene, and Charlene’s been taking care of me and in doing just her breathing exercise and just being a little easy on herself, so my muscles are relaxed.

CG: Exactly. Perfect. So again, see, this is a positive feedback. It doesn’t have to be a negative feedback; it can be positive. And by experiencing each body part and some of them have a negative feedback and have things to say that want change. And some other ones are very happy and by listening to those happy parts of the body, it’s going to make you feel more empowered as a whole person to be in tune. But my main thing is to be in tune with those body parts. So the women that are listening to us, if they want to, again, take a deep breath and now give their uterus a voice. And if their uterus had a voice, what would it say and what does it want and what is it afraid of. I don’t know if you want to do that exercise. I mean it’s also different but that’s where we could go to and that’s what we could do in everybody. Or give the ovaries a voice. Or give the lungs a voice. If your lungs had a voice, what would they say? Would they say “Oh, I’m inhaling some very healthy air”? Or, “I’m in my car a lot and I’m breathing a lot of exhaust gases because I’m driving so much.” What would they say and what would they ask also? That’s the kind of thing that is very interesting to do. Because all those different organs have their own nerve system or neural system and they’re dependent on the other ones but they have some kind of independence from the other one.

46:26 CL: Dr. Chris, I’m just going to say because maybe someone is thinking it, they could be going, “This sounds just kind of silly.” But I challenge you, if you’re feeling that way, sometimes the resistance to it is you’re trying to protect yourself from feeling a vulnerability and in touch with your emotion. So if you’re feeling that because I love touchy-feely type stuff but I can sometimes feel embarrassed of certain exercises. But then I implore you to really do it because your resistance to it is part of the exercise. You need to explore that resistance, what’s behind there. You might be very surprised and really like, of course, doing this on air but I’ve asked myself some questions. I sometimes have energy issues where it goes up and down and I really talked to myself the other day and some interesting things came up for me and my energy levels shifted. I had never really approached it that way. Of course, someone struggling with their energy, you can really get stuck on it’s my adrenals, it’s my thyroid, it’s this. But what’s the drain on that? Is it some repressed anger that you’re having? Some fear?

CG: It could be.

47:52 CL: Yes, and I don’t think that there’s any type of endocrine issue or adrenal issue that doesn’t have an emotional factor I just don’t believe that.

CG: Well, there is a hereditary factor, so there is something that’s genetic. Some people have a weakness that is genetic. But when there is stress on top of that, the weakness gets even more. So yes, they do need to decrease the stress. But there is so many different factors. The genes, the environment, what are they exposed to. I don’t like them to, for example, drink water from plastic bottles that stayed in the sun in their car that has been heated. I want to be very, very careful with plastics and liquids that have stayed a long time in plastics. I want to be very careful with people that cook a lot and their cooks that stay in front of smelling or breathing in oils when they’re cooking a lot. So I want to make sure that the people stay away. They don’t cook all the time or very often with their nose that breathes the oils. I want to make sure that they’re not in a very polluted environment where they stayed in their car, they breathe the exhaust in their car. I want them to turn the vents off so that they don’t inhale all the outside air if people are bumper to bumper. Some people are exposed to secondhand smoke, well not as much now anymore. So I wouldn’t want people to drink alcohol and againt smoke. So there are environmental issues, there are genetic issues and there’s stress issues. It’s a combination of all of those. That’s why things that are not that simple and that’s why it takes skill to determine what’s wrong or what can be improved for each person. You need a checklist really.

50:17 CL: Absolutely. And all those things you mentioned, we do a very good job at educating our audience on all of that. So this is just another piece, another tool in the tool box that you can implement.

CG: Yes.

50:34 CL: I have enjoyed our conversation so much and I feel like you’re really going to help people that are listening. I appreciate it. Her book is The Listening Cure. It’s a beautiful read and you’ll get a lot out of it, I promise you. It’s Drchrisgilbert.com. Please find out more about her and her books. Thank you, Dr. Chris. Thank you so much for being on. I really appreciate it.

CG: Thank you, Charlene.

51:09 CL: Thank you. All right, have a wonderful rest of your day.

CG: Thank you. You too. Bye.