The MEN1 Mosaic

#56 - No Boundaries, No Health – How Relationships Dictate Disease (Psychotherapist & Trauma Expert)

• Lizzie Dunn • Season 2 • Episode 6

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What if MEN1 weren't just a physical disease? - Season 2 Episode 6

In this conversation, I sit down with psychotherapist and trauma expert, Benjamin Fry, to explore how unresolved emotional patterns, co-dependent relationships, and a lack of boundaries might be the missing piece in your healing journey.

In this episode:
• Why boundaries are about you and never the other person
• Who's responsible for my health – the doctor or me?
• Why your inner child shows up in adult situations
• How trauma and triggers keep your nervous system stuck
• Why the history of medical practice should worry us

Healing starts when you stop waiting to be rescued and start to rescue yourself.

ABOUT OUR GUEST
Benjamin Fry is a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Khiron Clinics. He specialises in trauma recovery and relationships, combining personal experience, clinical training, and thought leadership. He is the author of The Invisible Lion and the founder of Televagal, a mental health tech platform for therapists. To be notified about the release of Benjamin's new book, Re-pair, click here and register for email updates.

Are you sure MEN1 can’t be influenced?
When I stopped just 'settling' for symptom management, I began carving a path to somewhere I believed impossible in MEN1: symptom-free, surgery-free, and medication-free. If you’re curious to see how I’m making this happen, join my community here.

Disclaimer
I share my personal experience as a MEN1 patient. Nothing in this episode, including the opinions of my guests, is intended as medical or holistic advice. Please consult a qualified professional before making changes to your care.

Just dump the word trauma for a moment because it's so overused, and ask yourself, what's good for my nervous system health?  One of the great misconceptions about boundaries is that they're about other people. They're not. They're about me.  We really want other people to take care of us a lot of the time. We don't really wanna take care of ourselves.  We think someone should know what we need, even if we haven't told them and they fail to meet our needs, we become upset.  Boundaries are to create that place.  I have to find out what works for me and figure out how to communicate that from me. All of that is about me. It's not about you. It's not a weapon.  You want the doctor to know what's best and to make it happen. A part of you has to do that for yourself.  If something doesn't feel good, are you gonna show up for yourself to rescue yourself or not?  That simple. 

If you've ever felt let down by your medical professionals, unseen, unheard or dismissed, your nervous system senses a threat, and your mind is doing what it can to keep you safe. My guest today is Benjamin Fry, psychotherapist, author and founder of Khiron Clinics, dedicated to the treatment of trauma. Benjamin explains what you can do in your personal, professional, and healthcare relationships to get your needs met and keep your inner peace. I hope you enjoy the episode.  

Benjamin, if you'd said to me even five years ago the word boundary, I wouldn't have had a clue what you are on about. I wouldn't have had the foggiest. I wanted to ask you how you define boundary and how boundaries show up not just in our relationships, but in everything that relationships can affect, and for this podcast audience, disease is gonna be at the forefront. 

If you were traveling in India, would you give any thought to the water you were drinking?

Absolutely. I'd be wanting to know that it's clean, it's healthy, that it's not gonna make me unwell.

So what you're interested in is the relationship with the thing that is coming towards you and how it affects the thing that you are already. Is that fair? 

Absolutely.

When people worry about what water they drink in India, all they're doing is creating a filter which is another word for a boundary between themselves and the water that is outside of themselves. They want water, they're thirsty. They don't wanna live in a world without water, but they are picky or they make decisions about what water they allow to come from the outside world into their inner world. And I think when you think about psychological boundaries, emotional boundaries, it's the same thing. We don't really want to live in a vacuum. Humans appear to have an appetite for other humans, which we can't cure. Some people can cure upper a, up a mountain, maybe in a monastery, but pretty much the typical experience is that humans would like other humans. So then you have to start to think about, what are you gonna do to create a filter between you and other humans? Of course we do that all the time. We are selective about who we wanna be friends with and who we spend time with. And we curate the human experiences we have by choosing the people, the places, and where you see them. And then you get into a more granular detail, which is, I given that I'm here with a person and this is what we're doing what aspects of doing this or being here or being with them, am I okay with, am I not okay with, or, take the water analogy. What's good for me? What's not good for me? Or what's in the middle? Now you might ask, well, by what criteria am I gonna evaluate that answer? My answer would be, what is helpful for my nervous system versus what isn't. And even that gets complicated because the honest truth is that a world in which nothing ever triggers or troubles, your nervous system will be a world, a bit like a world with very plain food. Or very uninteresting water supply where you just, nothing new or interesting or growth oriented would happen. But in a world where you are constantly triggered all the time and your nervous system's on fire, that's not a world of health either. So there's a kind of nice place for most people between being completely isolated and completely overwhelmed where human interactions happen and they happen in such a way that a little bit triggered some of the time, my nervous system is exercising. We put it like that. You know, when children play with each other and when they wrestle and when they get into mock conflict, what they're doing is exercising their nervous system. They're preparing for the case of being an adult where they might actually have to do this for real. So we need a little bit of grit in the oyster. We need a bit of grist to the mill. How do you know how much to let in? How do you know how to regulate that? How would you even manage it even if you knew? These are the complicated questions that the study of boundaries brings up. Now notice one thing that I've said, which is I haven't said anything about anyone but you. One of the great misconceptions about boundaries is that they're about other people. They're not. They're about me. I have to find out what works for me and then I have to figure out how to communicate that from me, I have to figure out what I'm gonna do in the various scenarios that could occur after doing that. All of that is about me. It's not about you. It's not a weapon. To say to someone, you failed because something including my boundaries in that sentence. I think when you look at it from the point of view of the nervous system, when that becomes your defining criteria of evaluation, it becomes very clear that it's about me. 'Cause everyone's nervous system is individual, everyone's baggage is individual, everyone's triggers are individual. There's no possible way that I can know what's okay for you, just by knowing what's okay for me. 

In the context then of a MEN1 patient or any disease patient who is advocating somehow for their needs to be met by someone else. Where does that line fall between this is my responsibility and this is their responsibility.

I would probably go hardcore and say it's not their responsibility at all. Why would taking care of myself be your problem? Why would the water that I choose to drink be the responsibility of the street vendor in Delhi? Just isn't, and it's up to me what water I drink, and it's up to me to choose how to manage that. It's up to me to prepare for that if I'm not gonna drink the water's right. Or even it's up to me to drink the water I choose to drink and deal with the consequences without complaining that it's someone else's problem. All of these are tough disciplines they have. Look in the real world of, let's say for example, I'm someone who finds, when people shout, I get totally overwhelmed. I can't deal with people shouting at me. So let's say I have a excited Italian friend who likes to shout during conversations and it seems normal to him. In order to maintain that friendship and be healthy, I might have to explain to him that find it really hard when people shout. It's not his fault. It's not that he's all Italians are bad and wrong, or that he's a terrible human. It's just that, my history is such that, for me, shouting is very overwhelming. I explain that to him and then you see what happens next. I mean, does he adapt his behavior around me or not? I don't know. Let's say he does, that's easy, right? Let's say he doesn't. Then, I'm in a bit of a quandary. It's like, do I tell him again and again and again? Maybe. It depends how much I value or need that relationship. But maybe what's gonna happen is I spend less time with him and maybe eventually I spend no time with him and all of those things are things I do. And it's like a flow chart. He does this or this is the outcome. But then I do this, I do this, I do this. I have choice all the way along. What is unhelpful is to sit there and say, I told you over and over again not to shout at me, and you're still shouting at me. And now I'm miserable and it's your fault. And yet still sit there and be shouted at. So this is the tricky thing with boundaries, is that we really want other people to take care of us a lot of the time. We don't really wanna take care of ourselves a lot of the time. And so when we either explicitly or even sometimes implicitly, we think someone should know what we need, even if we haven't told them and they fail to meet our needs, we become upset. And this of course comes from child parts. Most of us have wounded child parts who have not been nurtured and we're not on the point yet where we're fully able to nurture them ourselves. We're hoping like any child for some help, for some assistance, for some nurture from the outside. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to expect or hope for. But the practice of boundaries really is about turning up as an adult and taking care of my smaller parts. And it's really easy to think about if you go down to a playground. You see a 6-year-old girl being pushed around by some 10-year-old boys. How do you feel? 

Oh, distressed on her part.

What would you instinctively feel like doing? 

Intervening. Rescuing her.

That simple, you know, if something doesn't feel good, are you gonna show up for yourself to rescue yourself or not? 

Why is personal responsibility such a difficult idea for us to grapple with? Why is it easier for us to stay in what is inherently not a healthy situation? Fight and battle and try and make ourselves heard, right? Understood. Rather than take ourselves out.

Remember the beginning of the conversation. People actually need water. It'd be very easy to travel in India and never get Giardia if you just never drank or ate anything. But that would be also bad for your health. So here's the problem. You have to find a balance between the things that nourish you in a relationship and the things that are harming you in a relationship. And I think the problem is that it's bit like the stock markets. They fall very quickly and they come back very slowly. ''Cause humans, I guess like all mammals, maybe even all animals are very quick to respond to threat 'cause if they weren't, they'd all be dead. So the only species you see on planet Earth today are species that have become good at dealing with threat. They don't need to respond to safety particularly urgently. It's not an urgent problem, need to respond to danger very, very quickly. Very rapidly. So what you find is that in relationship, things that hurt us leave quite a mark and things that nurture us are a slow burn to create a sense safety, security, and happiness. So, you know, 50 50 doesn't cut it. That's part of the problem. Yet, if you're in any kind of relationship where 50% of it is everything you want, everything you think you need, everything that someone can give you, and 50% of it is difficult, damaging, hurtful, hard, it's very tempting to do what younger people do and younger parts of us do, is to tune out the damage so we can tune in to the nurture, because that's what kids do. And if we have relational trauma from anything below the age of about 18, which almost everybody does have to a greater or lesser degree, we will have become experts at adapting ourselves to reality. So we tell ourselves, it doesn't matter that Mummy shouted at me today. Tomorrow, she'll be in a good mood, and then I'll be safe and happy. And so as adults, you might be in a relationship with, say, a toxic boss at work who half the time is horrible to you, and half the time is telling you what a good job you're doing. And you're like, well, it doesn't matter she was mean to me today because tomorrow she'll be nice. And yet on the inside you're slowly dying. Now the problem is no adult is turning up for you in that story. There's no adult coming into the playground and rescuing you from the bullies. Because there was no adult there when you were a child doing that. So you haven't internalized or grown into the adult that will rescue yourself. So it's fine to hang out in abusive situations, because part of what you're getting is good. Also part of what you're getting may even be resonant or remind you of your earlier childhood experiences. Which some people might say, well that's familiar, so it's attractive. Others might say, well, that takes you to the place you need to go to stimulate the things that you need to heal, 'cause if you can feel it, you can heal it. All kinds of ideas about the actual, the wisdom of hanging out and things that hurt us as a path to finding our way out of them for good as a way of resolving earlier hurts. But the line is, it's not as simple as choosing a glass of water in the street in Delhi because we have so much vested in it. Let's say you are drinking water from your favorite street vendor. The person who's made you feel happiest as he told you all these funny jokes and took care of you and carried your bags, and now he wants to sell you a bottle of water from his mother's village. You might be tempted to go along with it and it might make you sick. And then you wonder why you did it. 

I'm smiling to myself because it's so relatable. You made a very important distinction between threat and danger. I don't think most of the time when I feel threat, that I know the difference between the fear of what could happen and what's actually happening in the moment right now. And I tend to live in this state of high alert. I wouldn't say I've suffered from anxiety in the sense that it's described now because I always had a knack of being able to somehow bring myself out of my body and be very controlled and logical and rational about my emotions. But I also have a very serious disease, and it does make me think, when in my life have I not allowed myself to process what was happening? And now the coin has been flipped. And when things aren't about to happen, there's an overreaction and I get freaked out and I get scared, and again, I'm in this state of high alert. How is it that you, yourself, or people that you've worked with have been able to calm their nervous system? If that's the right way of describing it. Are there any very tangible practices that you're aware of that can help people to essentially nurture their body and hopefully their mind as well at the same time.

That's a big question. And I think if you were to open that question up and think in the history of humanity, has anyone been interested in that? And has anyone addressed that as a problem? I think the answer is yes and yes. So, the very beginning, ideas about health were framed in spiritual terms. We didn't go and see a doctor, we went to see a priest. And then societies evolved and started to become, possibly more scientific, possibly beginning in China. Health began to become a thing apart from the kind of collective and individual spiritual life. And so it went on and now we live in a very kind of dualistic world where the body is a thing and it's a mechanism to be explored. And then Freud came along and he had a different idea about medicine of a thing called the mind, which is an idea, you know, a mind doesn't exist. You can't have a mental health 'cause there's nothing actually in you that's mental. A lot of these things become conceptual and you begin to wonder, does it come full circle or does it go back? What we have now is we have emerging some very specific trauma modalities, which, if you just dump the word trauma for a moment because it's so overused, and ask yourself as you've done, what do I wanna do for my nervous system? What's good for my nervous system health? There's at least two things going on. One is that there's an internal relationship with yourself, which is running your nervous system, then there's external relationships with others which are running your nervous system. And you might think of this as trauma and attachment. They're very closely related 'cause most people's trauma is in original attachment. All of us find ourselves in an individual relationship with ourselves and our nervous system and how much we're on high alert and how much we're not, related to the environment we find ourselves in. And that can change. That can change by doing nervous system recovery therapies and practices and techniques. Things like EMDR, psycho somatic experiencing, for example, sensory motor psychotherapy. They will target the individual release of pent up energy, unfinished responses to threat in your system, which will help long term to calm your system or keep your system more stable for longer, more often. And what I mean by stable is that the response will be appropriate to the danger in your environment. So often these days we're overreacting or underreacting to things. That's because we're adding in problems from the past. What you really want is you want the response to be just right for now. So if someone's maybe in danger of taking your lunch from the work fridge, the response is probably reasonably low level verbal, certainly have a word, don't throw anything and don't go catatonic. But if you're being chased by a bear in the woods, you gotta get a bit more mobilized than just having a word with the bear. So that's the goal. And then you ask yourself much more complicated question. Let's say you put two nervous systems together, or even more. Then what happens? And then you get into dynamics of interpersonal relationships and even romantic relationships where people seem to be, people who are otherwise reasonably well-regulated in other areas can become completely bonkers. And this is something we struggle with in modern life. A balancing of the self can assist in a balancing of a system with others, but it doesn't guarantee a balanced system with others. I think there's additional work that has to happen within that system where everyone who's trying to have a relationship with everyone else has to slightly get on board helping out each other's nervous systems as much as they can. To live in a world where you're indifferent to someone else's nervous system, indifferent to someone else's needs, or maybe even, malicious with it. That is obviously a world that we live in, but it's something that if you want to be regulated, feel safe or can't feel happy, it's a nice idea to tune those things out. 

I am thinking very much about the relationship between patient and practitioner. I believe when I sit on one side of the desk, I have an expectation that that other person, the professional, is gonna know everything, be able to sort all my problems, answer all my questions. Whether that's because of an unseen hierarchy between myself and the practitioner, maybe, but I also have those expectations of my very close friends, of my family. As you said at the beginning, it's very easy to believe that people should know what our needs are, perhaps before we actually know what they are themselves. How is it that patients can navigate expectations of the other, but at the same time be making sure that their needs are being met? If that question makes sense.

It's a tough situation because you're buying into a system that sells you on an relationship. And actually, you're buying in for good reason. You're saying, well, this person is the expert. I defer to them and submit, surrender almost to their power to heal me. And I will agree with everything they say and do everything they tell me to do which is relaxing. It's a nice thing to do. It's like imagining that you have a totally benign mother or father who's gonna look after you. This is what most people have been frustrated with in childhood is that they couldn't get that often enough. There's something very seductive often about the medical systems or educational systems that they kinda create or recreate this idea that perfect care might be available and that these people are actually better than the sort of lunatics we grew up with because they're doctors and they're trained and they have white coats and they have good manners, and they're often quite well behaved, and they turn up when they're supposed to turn up and stuff like that. That's all fine. The only problem with it is that if you go back, say 350 years to Harley Street in London, you'll find the same people sat behind the same desk in the same buildings. Their answers would be completely different and the treatments they'd be giving would be completely different. And if you did them today, you'd be arrested. So clearly there's a balance to be struck between reverence and surrender. And being an expert in myself, if I could put it like that, there's nobody who's an expert in you other than you. I might be an expert in trauma therapy, I might not be, but I'll never be as close to your trauma as you'll be. So anything that I suggest might be something that you also have something to say about or to think about. There's a balance to be struck between surrendering to the authority and the education of the medical community and preserving this idea that there's no greater expert on you than you. Because one of the things we know about the history of medicine is that if you look back a few hundred years, it looks very, very dodgy. And yet it was confidently asserted at the time to be exactly what the patient needed. So how do you know that's not happening today? 

You mentioned earlier childhood parts. One of the difficulties I find personally with, I guess, this era of self-awareness and personal responsibility is that I'm encouraged to step one, look at where my needs possibly weren't being met in childhood, and step two, learn how to meet those myself. My parents or parent in my case is still in the equation and I still have a relationship with this person and sometimes I enter into interaction with this person and I feel as though I'm a child again. Is there any hope that I could meet the need of that childhood part and she is never gonna show up again?

Let me ask you this, does it matter? What are you trying to do here? Are you trying to live in perfection? What would happen if we just say, okay, you know, that's me. That's my wound. Not all wounds heal perfectly. People have scars. Life goes on. I know that's gonna happen. I know it has a not a great effect on me. It's not the end of the world. I can survive it for this many minutes or hours or days a month. That's the given. You know, sometimes it's winter and we get cold and we go outside. Is that the end of the world? Maybe it is for some people, maybe not for others. But what are you really trying to do and are you not being slightly punishing of yourself if you are upset that you feel like a 13-year-old when you're around your parent. And almost everybody does start to behave like a teenager again in a not positive way when they're around their parents. I happen to have teenage children who behave even more like teenagers when they're around and it's okay. And I know that they're less like that when they're not around me, but it's partly being triggered. It's partly abandoning one's own adult position because you're hoping the other's gonna pick it up, which is what you've been doing probably since you were born. So it's a strong habit. The real question is, what's the cost to you? 

Oh, my peace.

So how can you create some islands of peace? Does this contact have to happen every day? Do you live together? These are the kind of questions you look at. And then, coming back to what we're talking about boundaries, peace is a very good description of what it's like to have a nervous system in the place you want to have it in. You find a place of peace, you wanna hang out there. You can't hang out there forever. That's just unrealistic. That's not real life. And in fact, it wouldn't be very good for you because then when you really needed your nervous system to respond to a problem, you wouldn't have much training. But peace is a nice thing to increase rather than decrease. So that tells you that you need to spread out the interactions a little more. Then you get a bit of time. You get time to recover, you get to spend some time in a peaceful place. You get to teach your nervous system what it wants to feel like, and then you can get back on the rollercoaster and see if you can recover a little quicker the next time. But if you're on the rollercoaster every day, you're not gonna make any progress. And that's boundaries. Right? This is exactly what we're talking about. How do you create a filter? And a filter is something that lets some through, but not everything. It's not a wall, it's not a plug, it's a permeable membrane. 

I remember that. That's how you described it in the talk when I first came to see you.

How often do you have to have contact with your parent?

As often or as little as I want, really.

How many days off do you need? To find peace and hold it for a moment. What's preventing you giving yourself three days?

Nothing.

There is something preventing you. You say nothing. That's not true. There is something preventing you and it's another part of you that isn't working in service of the peace of your nervous system, but is working to another agenda, and it sounds like, I'm just going to guess for the sake of simplicity and to keep moving. It sounds like it's a part of you that's worried about getting in trouble.

I think it's a part of me that's worried about being seen is imperfect.

Whatever it is, there's something about you that you'll get criticized for, or blamed for, or punished for, or you know something, that in itself will then be detrimental to your nervous system, so you have a conflict. On the one hand, you need the space to organically recover. On the other hand, if you take it, there might be consequences which will be detrimental to you. So You are in a conflict, you're in a paradox. It's irresolvable. That is the kid in the playground. On the one hand, she wants to be in the playground 'cause that's where kids play. On the other hand, she's getting bullied in the playground. You have to show up as an adult and do the adult thing. What does the adult do in that situation? What did you wanna do for the girl in the playground? 

Take her outta the situation.

It's not her problem. And you can't get in trouble because you're taking three days off, so nothing bad can happen. That's what boundaries are about. Showing up as if you are there to really take care of person who needs the boundaries, and both of those people are you. And it's not even just the two of you. There might be 27 of you all with competing needs, but somebody has to be the boss like you want the doctor to be. You want the doctor to know what's best and to make it happen. A part of you has to do that for yourself. Show up, be the wise, compassionate adult that says bullshit to everything, and just does the obvious thing to take the person away from harm so that they can recover. Keep 'em there for a while so they can feel relaxed. Eventually you take that kid outta the playground, you comfort her, look after her for a bit, and then you have to find her parents and figure out what the problem is and deal with it. Before you do that, she has to stop sobbing, calm down, and have an ice cream, and smile, and laugh, and feel safe and loved. And then you can go back in again. And that's what boundaries are for. Boundaries are to create that place. 

My issue is that I problematize that sobbing. For the first time ever I screamed into pillows two weeks ago and I was throwing stuff around this very living room, and I felt mortified, absolutely mortified. No one knew. No one cared. It was just me. Why am I feeling like that?

Presumably it conflicts with messages that you received as a child, that that behavior is unacceptable. And as a child, if we are exiled from our group, we'll die. So it's quite important to not go against the culture that we are given. A 2-year-old can't survive if it's not taken care of. A 1-year-old, a 3-year-old, a 4-year-old. All of those ages, children are like sponges for the culture that they're in, so they can fit in. And much of human activity is safer or more desirable in groups. And to be in a group, you have to figure out what is the prevailing norm of the group. And you have to cohere to that norm. And if you vary from the norm, you will get shamed. That's what the emotion of shame does for primates. It keeps us within the norms of the group. And if you do it too much, you'll get kicked outta the group. And in the old days, the fate worse than death was exile because it's miserable and dangerous and leads to death. So we're all looking for ways to conform to a group that will hold us. And in doing so, we lose ourselves and we've become adapted selves. And in becoming adapted selves, we lose all sorts of things, maybe even including our physical health. And as adults, the opportunity to choose a different group, to choose different norms and to choose to recover and to choose our authentic self, but we dunno what it is. So we dunno where to find the people that fit it. And so we're in this kind of symbiotic journey between groups and self and self and groups trying to find a place we fit and trying to be the person that we truly are. And you are on that journey and you are judging yourself as you emerge. And that's normal because you were judged when you were younger for behaving like a child. So you are just conforming to the laws of the group that you first knew. 

What your experience has been with physical disease patients, I'm not sure, but it is my belief that my genetic diagnosis with which I was told I was born, yes, there may well be a mutation on the gene, which causes symptoms, but I can't help but believe, in fact I know with every certainty that my experience with this disease is emotional as much as it is physical. And that the way to healing is probably via my emotions rather than taking a bunch of medications or letting a surgeon go in and chop off parts of my organs. In your experience, how does trauma, how does a dysfunctional nervous system take the body to the state of physical symptom?

Well, it seems like the nervous system has quite a strong relationship with inflammation and our ability to fight disease. So there are all kinds of things that are causing potential problems in our bodies, and they're being dealt with by our bodies, which are designed to do that. Now, if you decrease our ability to do that, then it will do it less well. So if you spend all of your time in your sympathetic nervous system, which is the flight or fight response to threat. You're not gonna do much rest and digest and that's the parasympathetic nervous system where a lot of healing happens. Whereas if you spend a lot of time in the parasympathetic, you might find that lots of the problems in your body that could flare up and that could be if you like dormant. I mean, you can have viruses that are dormant, for example. People's blisters on their face. The herpes one virus is a good example. It lives politely, does its own thing and occasionally you can see it on someone's face. Why? Nobody quite knows. But there are all sorts of ideas about stresses, whether they're physical or emotional, make it harder for the immune system to work or work effectively in the area, and therefore latent problems emerge. I'm not a medical doctor and I see you have The Myth of Normal behind you on the shelf, which I'm sure is no accident. Gabor's very eloquent on, on these thoughts and when you are a family doctor and you come from a world of trauma and he's very intuitive, so he saw, you could just see clearly that there was so much nonsense in the medical system that was not being correlated with the stories of difficulty in relationship and in childhood of the patients he had. He kind of called bullshit on that. And that's what his career is about. There are doctors who will tell you that this is nonsense and there are doctors like him. He's a doctor who will, passionately advocate for it. It makes perfect sense actually anatomically that there's a relationship between the nervous system and the immune system. The complexity of that relationship is probably beyond any human to describe or know perfectly. If you are in good shape in your nervous system, you're gonna give your body its best chance at dealing with whatever might be coming up.

I think so much of what this process requires or has required in the past for me is validation. I don't know that very often I trust myself, that I trust my own capabilities of healing, that I trust myself to know the answer and whatever area of health I'm in, whether it's functional medicine, whether it's conventional medicine, i'm constantly looking for someone else to make the answers or to validate the decisions that I'm making. And that's not just me, I know. It's very much a community where patients have been perhaps unconsciously separated from their own intuitive knowledge by way of a diagnosis. The label says this is what you have. We'll deal with it. Don't worry. Like, let us do our job type of thing. When you've worked with people in the past, how is it that you help people to understand that there's a difference between diagnosis, the name of the disease and the emotional side of things? The unease?

Well, if I have a thorn in my foot, I really do have a thorn in my foot. I dunno if you've seen, there's an hysterical YouTube video of a lady speaking to her boyfriend and saying about how something really hurts and he never really listens to her and he's always trying to make it about what it's not about. There are things that are real, like thorns in the foot, then there's all the stuff that's going on around my response to having a thorn in my foot. So typically what you get is black and white answers that don't incorporate both of those elements. You get a spiritualist who will say, well I don't wanna see a doctor ever because God will make his judgment if I pray enough. They're seen as a little fringe and to disregard the benefits of modern medicine could be seen as a way of actually saying, well, if you are religious here's a gift from God that you've chosen not to take. On the other hand, I think that to simply describe any individual problem as a kind of localized mechanical piece of a body and the absence of the many, many layers of human experience that go into how a human, its spirit, its soul, its body. There's supposed to be seven levels of physical ethereal bodies. I don't really know much about it, but if there are, all of them are having an influence on the outcome of this thing that's a thorn in the foot that's real. I wouldn't take away from medical science. All of its research and knowledge, but I wouldn't give it the primacy that it's the only knowledge that is relevant to the problem. I think that these kinda layered nuances, nuanced ideas that people like Gabor Maté or Stephen Porges might talk about, in relation to health and the nervous system and the emotional world and trauma and relationships are tremendously important. I've seen Gabor Maté give a talk about a lady who had lupus, had a kind of butterfly effect on her face, which apparently is a classic mark of lupus. And three years later, she's completely fine. And this isn't supposed to be medically possible. One of the key changes in her life was a change of relationship. She, I think, left a relationship that she was in and, not that there's any blame on the relationship with the other person, but there's something about the constellation of how she found herself or met herself within that system that didn't work for her on a deeper level but obviously had some attraction on some other level. It's a bit like you saying, well, you feel disinclined to shout into a pillow the one hand, but on the other hand, that might actually be the one thing that you, your body needed the most in that moment. And so navigating that complexity and those conflicts appears to have consequences for physical health. We just take that one example. It's obvious, right? You've cured something that shouldn't be curable without drugs by addressing something else. That tells you that there's other things that are relevant. It's a lot like anything really. You can go to a shop and take the things that you wanna take from the shop and then use 'em in the way you wanna use them. You don't have to buy everything or nothing in the shop. You don't have to do with it exactly what the person who sold it to you designed it to be done with. I think medicine's like that, there's, there's a staggering amount of brilliant science and painstaking research has gone into modern medicine and there's so many terrible problems we could have, which if we go to a doctor, they could fix very successfully, very reliably, very often. And for all of that, we should be enormously grateful. And then there's a huge amount of other stuff that it's not there yet and it doesn't work yet, and it's not good enough yet. Yet we want to take all those things, including mental health problems and give them medical system the status of those former problems. Like a broken leg, which they can deal with very well. Imagine being in a world before medicine with a broken leg. Terrible these days. Just take it for granted. You go to the doctor and they fix it, and we want to think like that about everything. But the science and the medicine just isn't there yet, and it may never be because the complexity of autonomic diseases might be totally different. The complexity of mental health problems and diagnoses might be totally different the complexity of a broken leg. 

Benjamin, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on and speak. As I say, I first listened to you speaking on stage in Exam Schools in Oxford and it was a way that you described boundaries that made me really rethink how I show up in my relationships and how those might be affecting my physical disease. I've massively enjoyed our conversation. I definitely didn't expect it to go where it went to and thank you for helping me on a personal level. I hope that my listeners, when they listen to this back, will be able to maybe take some of that and apply it to their own lives and their own health and their own healing. I actually just behind Gabor's book, I have both of your books, How I F**ked Up My Life and Made It Mean Something and The Invisible Lion.

The Invisible Lion is the book I wrote explaining the mechanism of trauma, how it affects our world, our relationships, our health. So that's available and out. There's a new addition out with a quote from Bessel Van Der Kolk on the cover. The talk on boundaries is part of a work that I'm putting together for a new book, which is called Repair, and it's about how to fix relationships. It's primarily aimed at talking about romantic relationships, but it strays into the area of every relationship and even the relationship with the self. But I think the fault line, where people really fall apart often, who think they're quite together, can be in romantic relationships. So it's a really good lens through which to see all the other problems in our life, it's not out yet. But if you sign up to mailing list on the website, you'll get something in due course about it. It'll be out end of the year, beginning of new year. 

Benjamin, thank you so much for your generosity of time and wisdom.  It's been such a pleasure to chat to you. 

 What I loved most about this episode was Benjamin's very relatable ways of describing where a lack of boundaries, safety and responsibility could be showing up in my physical and mental health, including MEN1. The analogy of choosing my relationships as carefully as I would do drinking water in India is one I won't be forgetting anytime soon. To find out more about Benjamin, drop into the description box below and find the link to his websites. If you're an MEN1 or disease patient after empowering conversations like this one, join my email community so you don't miss the next episode.