Authored by Dr. David Alter

In the last blog I introduced the idea of adaptive flexibility as a core skill to restoring health.  Learning to be adaptive allows you to adjust to life’s challenges in ways that keep symptom patterns from getting to firmly established.  Where can you turn to learn about revving up your adaptive flexibility?

My patients and I have found it helpful to draw upon the “wisdom of the body.”  Look at how the wisdom of your cells can be tapped to improve your health by adopting the four questions that each cell in our body uses to maintain its health.  We are made up of several trillion cells that are interconnected with one another.  The patterns of interaction among and within these cells are unimaginably complex.  And yet, the vast majority of the time, this vast network of interconnected cells hums along in ways that allow you to smoothly carry out the activities of your daily life.  Cells actively regulate their boundary (i.e., the cellular membrane) with the world around them by asking four basic questions that you can learn to apply to yourself as you regulate your relationship to yourself and to the world around you.

The Four Basic Health Restoring Questions – Brought to you courtesy of your Cellular Mind!

1. Cell: What is in my external environment that is toxic to my health and well-being that I need to keep out?  You: Am I engaging in relationships or situations that hurt me, that drain my energy, that put me down, that make me sick?  What are they?
   
   
2. Cell: What is within my internal environment that is toxic to my health and well-being that I need to release and let go of?  You: Am I carrying around expectations, beliefs, attitudes, or memories of events from my past that are poisoning me?  What are they?
   
   
3. Cell: What is in my external environment that is essential to my health and well-being that I need to absorb to nourish me?  You: Are there resources, hopes, aspirations, opportunities, or activities that would be supportive of my health and well-being that are available but that I have not risked seeking out?  What are they?
   
   
4. Cell: What is in my internal environment that is essential to my health and well-being that I need to learn to keep in because it nourishes me in fundamental ways?  You: Are there resources, qualities, desires, preferences and practices that I know are self-nurturing that I overlook, defer, or minimize the importance of, to the detriment of my overall health?  What are they?

This coming month, take the time to ask yourself these four questions.  Set aside 20 minutes several times per week, morning or evening, at a time when you will be free from interruptions, to consider the four basic questions and record your responses.  The responses you obtain may be verbal, they may be feelings or they may be bodily sensations.  After you discover initial answers to these core questions, use them as a blue print sent to you courtesy of your body’s wisdom.  Recognizing that initial answers to the questions arose from within you can be a sign that you have the internal resources needed to begin to implement the changes suggested by your body’s wisdom.  The prize is a healthier and balanced YOU.  Let me know what you find!

Authored by Dr. David Alter

Chronic pain. Depression. Gut dysfunction. Anxiety.  Relationship discord. Sleep disturbance.  Post-traumatic difficulties.  Energetic imbalances.  When people begin to describe their difficulties, they often use these labels.  Each of these labels is a blend of sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions and behaviors that persist over time.  It is the fact that they repeat over time that makes them into symptom patterns.  I am going to offer four important questions that will help you learn to alter these symptom patterns.  By changing the symptom pattern, you can change your illness process – almost always for the better!

At first, the symptom pattern of chronic pain may seem unrelated to a pattern involving gut dysfunction, (Irritable Bowel Syndrome, for example), but all symptom patterns represent a loss of adaptive flexibility of the mind and body.  Adaptive flexibility involves the capacity to adjust to the ever-changing circumstances of your life while maintaining a steady sense of balance and control in your life.  The greater your ability to adjust and adapt to the circumstances of your life the greater the likelihood that you would describe yourself as healthy.  And the more you can learn to increase your adaptive flexibility, the more likely you are to regain or restore your health. 

The idea that we are designed to seek healthy balance is not new.  Ancient traditions described health in terms of the capacity to maintain balance among competing urges, functions, energies, or qualities (e.g., warm-cold; wet-dry; optimistic-guarded; active-sedentary; spicy-bland; thin-heavy; fast-slow; fiery-calm; stoic-vulnerable; thoughtful-emotional, etc.).  Sounds strange?  Think for a few moments about the kinds of suggestions we hear or give ourselves each day and you’ll recognize they are still suggestions about improving our ability to adjust and adapt in ways that are not all that different from what Hippocrates might have advised a patient in Greece 2500 years ago:  “I’ve got to stop burning the candle at both ends;” “I should eat less and exercise more;” “I’ve got to stop picking the same type of relationship partner over and over again;” “I have to take some risks if my situation is ever going to change;” “I have to get ‘in touch’ with my feelings;” “I have to give more and expect less;” “I have to over-extend less and take better care of myself.” “I have to live my life with integrity that is consistent with my basic values.”  Each statement reflects the recognition that you have gotten stuck in a repeating pattern of functioning that is negatively affecting your health.  Repeating unhealthy patterns of living is the primary sign of the loss of adaptive flexibility, and often predicts that a loss of physical, emotional or mental health will soon follow. 

Most of the time, our deeply wired ability to maintain balance in the face of constant change is something that occurs automatically (e.g., we don’t have to think about how heal a paper cut to a finger or how to walk, even though walking involves controlled falling!).  Sometimes, we have to make conscious decisions to maintain healthy balance (e.g., “Even though I want another helping of my dinner, I will listen to my body’s signals and push myself away from the table now.”).  And then there are times when we need to seek the help of a professional who is trained to identify what accounts for our imbalance and the symptom pattern the imbalance is generating. So, where to begin your efforts to alter the pattern of your symptoms?  In the next entry to this blog I will introduce you to what your own cells have to teach you about restoring your health.

           Authored by Dr. David Alter

Welcome! Thank you for taking the time to explore this site. I developed this blog to share with you practical, usable and effective suggestions for addressing specific health problems based upon what I have learned from my clinical work over the past quarter century.  In other words, what I share with you has successfully been put into practice with the patients I have worked with, and is solidly grounded in discoveries from fields of learning that span modern science, timeless spiritual traditions, western medicine, eastern healing practices, and developmental psychology.  My particular focus throughout my career has involved ways to apply mind and body resources to improve your health and enhance your life.  I will offer you condition-specific suggestions.  At other times, I will offer more basic strategies and techniques to improve your health that are useful no matter the particular condition(s) with which you wrestle.  I think of these basic strategies as a blue print for health that is not necessarily associated with any specific health problem.  They represent building blocks upon which a solid foundation for your future health can be built.  In the future, I intend to make down-loadable teleseminars or webinars available, which will provide you with opportunities to learn about various mind-body subjects in much greater depth.  At the same time, such programs will help you to develop essential health enhancing skills as you apply what you will learn to your own life.  

An ancient saying described a good teacher as someone who was forever learning from his students.  In that sense, I am a good teacher, since I have been learning from my “students” – the patients with whom I have had the privilege to work – since I first began my psychology practice in the mid-80s.  I am a clinical health psychologist and a clinical neuropsychologist in an integrative, holistic health center.  In 1999, after 15 years of working in a large health care organization, I left to form a smaller and more intimate center, which became Partners in Healing of Minneapolis (www.pih-mpls.com), the holistic health center where I have worked for the past 11 years.    

In my practice I have paid attention to how the mind, brain and body interact to generate symptoms.  Without exception, symptoms represent recurring patterns of interactions.  Sometimes those interactions are within the patient (e.g., dysregulation of muscle tone in blood vessels in the head that becomes the pattern we call “migraine”).  Sometimes the patterns involve anticipations of interactions with others (e.g., the sense of anxiety and dread that takes the form of stomach pain and nausea as a child waits and wonders whether her father will come home drunk tonight).  Sometimes the patterns represent the way in which biological, psychological, social, genetic, behavioral, and even spiritual factors interact with one another to form a condition such as irritable bowel syndrome.  And sometimes, the patterns represent the way in which past history has been encoded in a person’s mind and body to produce patterns we call post-traumatic stress disorder or dissociative identity disorder.  

By helping patients discover and modify their mind-brain-body interaction patterns, I’ve helped them to discover that once you change the recurring pattern in important ways, the symptoms can no longer show up in their usual way.  In effect, change the pattern and the illness process changes – almost always for the better! Now, I intend to bring what I have learned to a new “audience”: you, the readers of this blog.  It may be useful for you to read and apply what I offer.  It will be that much more useful if the communication flows in both directions.  Therefore, the blog will offer a comment board where your questions, ideas, and reactions to postings can be featured.  

I am looking forward to opportunities to interact with you as we go forward together.  Most of all, I am excited about continuing to learn from my “students,” which will now, hopefully, include you.