In part one, we covered the mind-body connection through lots of angles with the help of Dr. Dan Ratner, a psychologist who specializes in the alleviation of physical symptoms deriving from, or exacerbated by, psychological causes. In part two, we expand on the variety emotional circumstances that can create physical illness - from childhood experiences through generational and collective trauma. We also spend some time talking about the signs you might be experiencing physical pain or illness due to anxiety or trauma, the importance of safety during healing, and finding the right fit for therapy.

We hope this episode gives you some practical information and ideas for what to do next if you’re experiencing this kind of pain. But bigger than that, we hope our experiences show that you can overcome hard things - or in the words of our guest feel “bravely hopeful in a world where cynicism is revered.”

Like our previous episode, trigger warnings abound in this episode about chronic pain, grief and trauma from violence. Be kind to yourself and listen with extreme care.

For the first episode of our “Not All in Your Head” series, we each shared the many ways our anxiety, trauma and physical health keeps crashing into the other. While our individual sources of emotional pain may be different, we’ve both experienced the same type of physical manifestation as a result. We heard from many of you that this episode hit a nerve and meant a lot to you. So in this episode we even dig deeper into the science behind the mind-body connection - what’s the biggest misconception about this subject, why don’t more people understand it, what do we know with certainty, and what does a positive therapeutic experience look like?

We’re joined by a very special guest, Dr. Dan Ratner, a psychologist who specializes in the alleviation of physical symptoms deriving from, or exacerbated by, psychological causes. He’s also the host of his own podcast, Crushing Doubt. We honestly could have talked to Dan for hours about this subject, which is exactly how we ended up turning this into a two-parter.

It’s no secret (or surprise) that a global pandemic would create anxiety - we’re only human after all. But the ways in which people have been experiencing that anxiety varies a great deal, including the unexpected anxiety setting in as people contemplate finding their way back to “normal.” This has been a somewhat new experience for many people, but for the both of us the pandemic is one incident among many when our anxiety over physical health has crashed into the other, and vice versa. This episode is the first in a series about how our emotional and physical health are interconnected. To start, we both open up and share how the pandemic has individually impacted our health, our own histories with this topic, and the shame and frustration that comes along with it. We hope in talking about our experiences, we can be a part of normalizing these struggles.