Heal with Grace
130. How to build Self Trust in Healing with Dr. Rita Gupta
Jun 23, 2026
Season 1
Episode 130
Grace Secker and Dr. Rita Gupta
You've been to the specialists. You've done the tests. And you still feel like nobody really knows what's wrong — or how to fix it. That's not you failing. That's a gap in medicine that mind-body medicine chronic pain practitioners are finally starting to close.
Dr. Rita Gupta spent almost 20 years as a primary care physician watching her patients get sicker despite everything she offered. The referrals, the labs, the medications. She had access to every record, sat with them through every specialist visit. And she was watching people not get better. That wore on her.
Then she ruptured a disc in her neck and was told surgery was her only option. She didn't take it. She turned inward -> toward integrated medicine, mind-body work, pain reprocessing therapy, mindfulness. And she eventually left conventional medicine entirely to practice the kind of care she couldn't offer inside the system.
In this episode, we get into something that doesn't get talked about enough: self-trust as medicine. Not as a mindset hack or a feel-good concept. As an actual biological process that shifts your nervous system, lowers your threat response, and creates real relief.
Here's what changes when you stop trying to force your body into submission and learn to be with what's there instead: your threshold expands. The loop breaks. Your values become a compass instead of a source of grief.
Dr. Rita says it plainly - every time you can sit with a sensation without collapsing, you're building something. Not ignoring it. Not giving up. Building.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Alan Gordon / Pain Reprocessing Therapy
- Ellen Alden's Long COVID community
- Dr. Rita Gupta's website
Resources from Grace:
Connect with Grace
130. How to build Self Trust in Healing with Dr. Rita Gupta
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