In Your Pants with Dr. Susie G - Pain is a Gift

Episode Date: December 7, 2017

Suffering and loss doesn't have to be a drag. Today's guest, Lorraine Faehndrich, says that "pelvic pain IS the motivating factor!" It's the wake up call your life needs to initiate change. A change that you're body's been whispering to you for years before it started screaming out you.

You're listening to In Your Pants with Dr. Suzy G, the physiotherapist for your privates, helping you get in the know down below. On the show today, Suzy talks with Lorraine Fendrick, a women's pelvic pain relief coach and mind-body mentor. Join us as they discuss the physical and mental connections of pelvic pain and how you can begin to manage it. Hey guys, it's Dr. Suzy G bringing you yet another In Your Pants episode. this time we're going to talk about how your brain affects what's going on down in your pants

and to help me i've got the wonderful lorraine fendrick she is awesome guys she's going to help us share and increase our knowledge with why sometimes issues are not always in our tissues so lorraine is a woman's mind body mentor pelvic pain relief coach and the founder of radiant life design. And I actually heard about Lorraine from many of my female clients who just raved about her work and compassion. And I just knew I had to connect with Lorraine and get her on the show. So Lorraine, welcome to the show. Thank you, Dr. Susie. I'm so glad to be here. How's your day going so far? Pretty good. It's actually really beautiful here. So happy to get to do this interview with you. And where are you calling us from?

Ithaca, New York. So upstate New York. Cool. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, Lorraine, I really love your approach to healing pelvic pain as it's totally in line with my message for men who suffer with pelvic pain as well. And I'd like to start off by just asking you, you know, tell us your story and what inspired you to create the Healing Female Pain Program? Okay, sure. So the short answer is I created the program because I was working with a lot of women who had pelvic pain and I wanted to create a way that they could be empowered to learn and have effective tools to work with the mind-body component of pain you know how their mind and their emotions were impacting their pain whether

that was actually causing the pain or making it hard for them to relieve it so but my path to like doing mind-body work and working with pelvic pain specifically took a little longer. My first career was as an accountant. So I was a CPA at a big firm in Boston and I was having all kinds of health issues that I wasn't finding answers for. And it wasn't pelvic pain at the time, but things with my heart and difficulty breathing. And I made the decision to leave my career and explore what I loved and all my symptoms that I had been trying to solve for months and months went away. So that kind of really got me interested in all kinds of natural healing. I became a massage therapist. I went to naturopathic college. I became a life coach.

and you know i kept attracting and working with women on health issues to help them heal their bodies really by learning how to work with their thoughts and emotions and address other things that were going on in their life and use their body as a guide for that and then i started suffering with vulvar pain myself and that was like early 2010 and at the time i didn't know anything about it and I just knew that like I wasn't able to enjoy sex anymore and then pretty soon the pain progressed to like taking over my life I couldn't exercise I couldn't wear the clothes I wanted to wear I was like searching for answers and getting really really frustrated and not getting answers from the doctors I was seeing and actually having like ridiculous things

suggested. Like I had been struggling with chronic yeast infections and I had one doctor tell me to take antibiotics for a year, even though there was no bacteria showing in any of my tests and things that I knew because of my background in natural healing were going to just make things worse. So I decided to do what I was doing in my work already and really tune into my body. and instead of struggling with my symptoms drop my resistance to the struggle and start asking you know like even though I wasn't like fully on board at first but I was like all right well this struggling is not working like I can tell it's creating more tension it's creating more pain it's freaking me out giving me anxiety on top of my symptoms so what happens if I

like drop that struggle and start assuming that my body might be trying to help me And so I just followed that path. And within a few months, my pain was completely gone. And I still didn't know that I had something called pelvic pain. That didn't happen until later when I started attracting women to work with who had pelvic pain, and I was helping them. And through them, I was hearing a diagnosis, but I never got one myself. so yeah and then I just loved working with those women so I decided to focus exclusively on that so that's my long answer that's a great answer and I love how you said drop your resistance to the struggle because I had one of my dharma practitioner buddhist teachers once tell me if you ever imagine holding on to a tug of war rope right or like a tight rope right and you're holding on and everyone is pulling on the other end, right? You just keep holding on and it hurts like hell and it's like blistering and you're bleeding and you know, and you have to ask

yourself is sometimes letting go of that rope easier than hanging on. Yeah. Right. That's a great, great story. Like good analogy for what happens. Yeah. I mean, it's totally, it makes sense. You can either struggle you mentally and cause more mental pain and suffering in addition to the physical pain, or you can flip the script and change your perspective on what's happening in your life and maybe allow it to teach you something versus resisting it, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. And what we don't learn, what we don't learn in the medical model, our medical approach, which, you know, other medical approaches do incorporate the mind and emotions into healing, but we don't. And those things have a real physiological impact on our

body. So when we're struggling and resisting and holding onto that rope, there's actual things happening physically in our body that are contributing to pain and making it impossible to relieve it. Right. Right. And you're in that's that it's great segue to the next question. Cause I love your blog posts. You wrote one about pelvic pain in your brain. It's a great article by the way. So that leads me to the next question with how does psychological health, mental health, and mindset impact pelvic pain and the body and what strategies would you recommend to help with that? So, yeah. So I know that that post in particular was influenced a lot by the work of Lorimer Mosley, who's a neuros pain researcher. So he talks about how anything, you know, that

pain may or may not be caused by what's actually happening in your body and that it's a danger response. And so the connection with mindset really is that if we're thinking things that are creating additional stress and tension, not only is that triggering the sympathetic nervous system or the fight or flight response in our body and actually releasing stress hormones that impact the level of tension and blood flow and oxygen and nutrients that the tissues are getting. But it's also causing your brain to register that there's danger. And so that in itself is contributing to the pain as well. Like a lot of the women I work with have had patterns of putting a lot of pressure on themselves or being really self-critical or trying to do things

right or like being really kind of perfectionistic or worry like pattern like mindset patterns like that before they got the pain but even then once you're having symptoms that you're not getting solutions for and that aren't getting better they are scaring you it's so easy for your mind to just really get obsessed and worry more and then that just triggers this negative downward spiral that creates more stress and physical tension. And ultimately, in my work, I'm really focused on helping people reconnect to their body and learn how to be present with their emotions. Because all of those things I just mentioned, self-criticism, worry, catastrophizing, putting a lot of pressure on yourself, trying to do things perfectly, they all kind of stem from

this way that the brain protects us from being present in our body and with emotions it's like a survival strategy that's usually developed when we're very young or maybe from experiences that we've had that may have been traumatic and that cause our brain to protect us by dissociating from our body and one way that the brain does that is by staying obsessed with all these thoughts And then symptoms, of course, are one obsessing and focusing and worrying about symptoms that it's understandable to worry about, but it just really feeds that negative spiral and leads to more tension and pain in the body. So one thing that I recommend at first is to just becoming aware of what's happening and how what you're focusing on and what you're thinking are impacting your body. And I think writing is a great tool to start identifying what particular thoughts are creating stress and tension for you

and learning how to choose thoughts that feel less scary, you know, like continuing to think I'm never going to get out of pain, noticing how that affects you, recognizing that it's just a thought and that thoughts can actually be changed and that we have the power to look at them and choose different ways of thinking, not just random out of the blue, but things we can actually find evidence for like, other people have relieved their pain. You know, I found this great physical therapist or this other way to work with my thoughts and emotions that will help me relieve my pain and starting to focus more on solutions and where you're going rather than staying stuck in the worry spirals. Another really big thing is to stop going into scary online groups where

people are really focused on oh yeah they can be so damaging literally damaging with this negativity and catastrophizing and anxieties and fears but at the same time it's people are very frustrated and scared and angry that they're dealing with these issues and oftentimes I feel like they're looking for that one magic cure, you know, like that one guru, that one thing, that pill, that, you know, whatever it is, X, Y, and Z fill in the blank. But, and I know in your experience and oftentimes in mine, it's not the case. It's not just one thing. It's taking a step back and looking at your life and saying, okay, what's the prescription that I need to write for myself in order to get out of this absolutely yeah and starting to turn your

attention inward you know rather than yes it's so important to have a team you know and people who specialize in pelvic pain and know how to help your body physically and it's also really important to start bringing your awareness inside um and addressing what's going on in there which a lot of it is unconscious right do you do you believe or i mean what are your thoughts on hypnosis or hypnotism when it comes to subconscious patterns and thought formations are you a fan not a fan i guess i don't have a lot of um experience with it so the so yeah i mean i think it i think i think different things help different people so it certainly might be one way to address it but the way that I work with it is actually to help people make things more

conscious that are happening unconsciously and actually that's not that hard to do when you pay attention to what's happening in your body like I don't want to go too far off topic but a lot of people think when they think emotions you know what they think oh like do I have to go back and like talk about all the things that happened in my life or find like the traumatic thing that got suppressed that's causing this pain and it's really not about that at all it's about that when when we have experiences it could be trauma it could just be growing up in a culture that doesn't honor emotions which is pretty much the case for the culture we live in and learning and then our our brain and body learning ways to suppress our awareness of our emotions because

it just learns they're not helpful and so um the so the effects of the trauma or the experiences is that our mind and our body are dissociated and so working to reassociate your mind with your body and starting to make all these things that are happening unconsciously more conscious gives you really empowers you to like understand this amazing mind body emotion soul system that is much wiser and more understandable than we ever learn that it is like our body and our emotions are giving us guidance not just about our symptoms but you know in my experience our lives and the path we're meant to be on and what resonates with our soul. And our culture has taught us that we can ignore all that and push ourselves and focus on, you know, what's going to bring success and

what we have to do and working hard and all this stuff. And not that those things don't have a place, but we've really disowned the wisdom that comes from our body and our soul. So I think hypnosis can maybe help someone to maybe find answers or look at the things that might be scary for them in reconnecting to their body. Um, but it, it's not necessary. Like you can also, there's other ways to do it. Oh, that's awesome. How, how would you motivate someone? Or I guess, what was that one pivot point in your life that you're like, I have to evaluate this a little bit differently, like almost a realization of some sorts. Do you feel that when, when women reach out to you, are they already at that point where they're like, no, I, I completely understand where

Lorraine is coming from. This is me. I need to make, I need to address this big elephant in the room. And sometimes that's really scary for us, for, for people in general, you know, uncertainty is very scary, not knowing and not being in control. We, we try so hard to be in control of our environment and when things are not going the right way we freak out because we're like what the hell is going on with me and you know you're yeah and the body's been whispering to for years before this catastrophic event that has happened to you and now it's screaming at you so you have to pay attention exactly right so so that's what's your to tell me what you think about that and you know how do you work with yeah so that's the answer right like i feel like

for myself and for most of the women that I work with, it turns out that pelvic pain has been a huge gift and men and the men I work with too, because it teaches you like that it is the motivating factor, but it's so bad and you're not finding answers and that you can't have sex anymore. You can't exercise. You get to the point where you feel like you're like stuck in your room and can't do anything and you're like i want my life back and that's the motivation and you know pain of any kind really can be a great teacher because the patterns that we have learned in this culture to survive thrive succeed actually um aren't that effective and when you get to the point where your body's screaming at you you've got no choice but to listen i mean if you want

to relieve the pain. So sometimes it takes people really exhausting every other possible thing that they can think of and realizing that that's not going to work. I think a lot of the people that come to work with me, it just resonates with them when they hear it might be emotional, because a lot of times these things will happen in conjunction with other emotional events. So we go through our whole life, we have these patterns of suppressing emotions unconsciously, being really using our intellect and our mind a lot not paying attention to our body and it can be successful and actually help us succeed in our lives up to a certain point and then maybe something emotional happens or sometimes several things like a divorce or being in a

relationship with someone that you're not happy about and you don't know how to change or a career that you're not happy about and don't know how to change or a parent dies or a pet dies or all those things happen at the same time. And then all of a sudden there's so much emotion that would be coming up that all of the suppression mechanisms, just your body just gets overwhelmed and then the pain starts. So it's not always super obvious, but I think a lot of the people who I work with are kind of like, I kind of can see how this could have been emotional, but I don't know what to do about it. You know, and I've tried meditating and I've tried yoga and I've tried thinking positively and none of that's working. And that's because all those tools are meant to help

the process. But the real issue is really learning how to reclaim your emotions as the guidance that they are meant to be and come into your body and learn how to feel them. It sounds like it's almost the form of accept like you have to just accept the moment instead of like you said resist that resistance to holding on and and pushing away from something that we just don't want to deal with whatever that is physical and mental all of it really when something happens and part of it's just being okay with how you are in the moment knowing that things are not going to be permanent nothing is ever permanent everything is impermanent really changing all the time so absolutely 100 and also mindfulness and being present in the moment is a great start but if

you're someone who's had any kind of trauma or grew up in a household where you had a lot of pressure put on you for one reason or another not to show emotion the patterns that suppress emotion are unconscious so we don't know they're happening and we also don't know the emotions are there and even coming present like it's almost not even possible to come present because your brain is so um invested in protecting you by keeping you in your mind um that it really takes some specific awareness of what's happening and tools to learn how to come back into your body and start feeling sensation again which is the core of it and what kind of tool like so you mentioned writing and reflecting but is there like a specific example that you can share with us of how you

would you know someone who just comes to just started with you and the first thing is recognizing and bringing awareness you know what would be something one of the first things i do is actually start assigning reading so some of the teachers that i really like are um john sarno he wrote a book he's a medical doctor who's actually um an orthopedic surgeon he worked with people who had back pain um and he at some point like in the 60s came to the conclusion that the pain was emotional and not physical and so um he took his patients off all physical treatments and taught them how their brain was creating the pain and his work is very much in alignment with laura mermosley's work um adding in that like the thing people think the thing the brain has learned is dangerous

is emotions so that's so something like that uh peter levine is another great uh resource and um gab or mate who wrote a book called when the body says no he's also a doctor so i have them start reading stuff for evidence to show their mind like this can be caused by other things than you know an injury or something being out of alignment and one of the really amazing things that sarno found was that he was x-raying people who had no pain and he was finding all the same things in them that the people, you know, that he was operating on with people with pain. And he was like, but wait, they don't have pain. Exactly. And people get so freaked out about their scans or lack of something showing up, right? They're like looking, they're looking. And you know,

if you look really hard, you'll find anything, right? You'll find anything, but people live and go asymptomatic forever like prostate cancer for example is is overly diagnosed in my opinion and a lot of new research is coming out that it is and these biopsies are unnecessary and it's very invasive you know and and most most men will die of other natural causes and they'll do by you know they'll do a biopsy on the cadaver and the body and they'll see that they had prostate cancer right right they didn't die from the cancer that's really cool and it's like exactly the same thing so yeah Dr. Gabor Mate's work was a lot around um he did a lot of research around cancer patients and um yeah so same thing and also looking at the factors that created in the first place that

have a lot to do with um emotional and mental things and personality types more than physical things like diet and not that those things don't play a role but we completely discount this other thing that's playing a huge role and then of course once someone has a diagnosis and they're focusing on it you know you get what you get what you focus on like on a very simple level right but then physiologically that's having all kinds of impact on your body and your nervous system and the muscles and tissues and organs in your body so absolutely hands down like you asked me like what would i do so the first thing would be some education and that's actually what dr sarno did with his patients he taught them so any there's so many amazing mind body doctors out

there there's lots of information on my blog you know like any kind of reading um that's going to help you understand the mind body stuff uh and then start so being in the mind is a way of dissociating from the body and the way that you teach your brain that it's safe to be in your body is to start to take time to do that so it's body scans but body scans not with the idea of i need to change this or relax this but body scans with just awareness and presence and i can be present with the sensations that are in my body whether they're contraction and tension or pain or burning or heaviness in my heart or you know fluttery panicky kinds of feelings and just starting to be present with those because that actually teaches your brain that sensations in

your body are safe and over time that allows you to be more present in your body and not have to like engage all these survival mechanisms nice tips thank you that's awesome as I'm like, this is great. This is juicy stuff. So you work with, I know you work with mostly women in group, in a group setting, but have you had experience working one-on-one or in a group setting with men? And if you have, what differences, if any, do you notice when helping women versus men? Okay. Awesome question. So I do, I work with men privately. So like, yeah, My groups are women, mostly, and this probably goes to the answer to this question a little bit, mostly because women have a lot of similar issues that they feel safer talking about

that can be contributing to pain. And they feel safer talking about those when there's not men around usually. And some of those things are like sexual abuse or even just starting to talk about their sexuality. So some of the differences I notice, really like there's far more similarities than differences you know the the mechanisms of dissociating from our body learning how to be in our mind um suppressing emotion or anything that our brain thinks is dangerous unconsciously that's all the same and the tools in the process to work with it are exactly the same

that said i think culturally in general and this is definitely a generalization it's not true for all men or women But, you know, women are usually more shamed around anger, for instance. And so they have, they're doing more suppressing of anger and have a harder time learning how to welcome and allow their anger. Men, in general, it might be like, they're just sort of shamed out of being emotional. And but that particularly applies like, like to sadness or fear, they're supposed to be strong, they're supposed to be brave, they're not, you know, like anger is okay in that picture. but not so much sadness and fear, or sometimes differences in the life events that will be contributing factors to the pain itself. Like for men, the men I've worked with often, like I've worked with several men who have had pelvic pain start after retiring or when they see retirement coming because their career and their work has been such an important part of their life. Um, and that creates emotion that then contributes to symptoms. I've totally noticed

that myself or career change or something, something related. Oh yeah. I've had a handful of times where you see the pattern when you're like putting their timeline together and you're like, wait a second, all of this kind of happened when, when you retired and they almost have this sense of this loss, their grieving purpose. I, I almost feel like it's a purpose. Like I, okay. I went to work. I had to do something. I had to be accountable for something. And I, my whole life was around work and now it's no longer there. What am I supposed to do now? Exactly. So really it's like maybe differences in the things that trigger bigger emotion between men and women but it's still underlying caused by emotion also with women and this can also absolutely happen with men

but women have had more sexual trauma and or even if they have a trauma just experience more shame around their sexuality like in our culture women's sexuality is not as accepted as men's so that's something that is more of a focus of working with women sometimes sometimes it's also uh comes up with men so yeah so same exact how to like come back into your body because like it's not true that women are the ones who are supposed to be having all the emotion right or that men are always supposed to be the ones who are brave and know what to do and there's so many cultural stereotypes that prevent us from being who we actually are and really it's learning how to be who you actually are despite what your culture is telling you that relieves pelvic pain and

other symptoms this is not just pelvic pain that's caused by mind body issues and so learning how to come into your body reclaim your emotions whether you're a man or a woman understand the different mental survival patterns that are keeping that in place and protect trying to protect you and discovering that you can actually trust yourself uh and your body and live a really awesome life when you do that is what what relieves the pain and that's why i say and people think i'm crazy that like pelvic pain or really any other physical chronic illness that can be an amazing teacher and lead you to reclaiming parts of yourself and living a more joyful, fulfilling life. And all that can be done in conjunction working with amazing practitioners who can specialize in the

physical part. It's not like an either or thing, you know, like you can have amazing physical therapy and do the emotional work at the same time and they support each other and help you get better faster. Absolutely. And that's the best combination. Oftentimes I'll hear like, well, are you trying to tell me that? And maybe you've heard this too. It's all in my head. you know, like this all or nothing, like, is it, is it just all in my head then? Or are you saying that, you know, I, I'm a crazy or emotionally disconnected or, you know, it's like the extreme and we tell them, right? No, it's not. But your head, your brain is part of you. It's a physical part of you and your brain's not only in your head, it's also in your body. Like there's neural

tissue all over your body yeah so like this whole like saying there's a mind separate from a body or body so it's like it's not even true like we're mind body emotion soul beings there's not like separate parts really so supporting all any of those parts supports the rest great for support i love it and you probably get this question asked maybe you don't i always get this question. Well, how long will it take? When am I going to start feeling better? You know, and what would be your answer? My answer is, it's different for everyone. And there's so many factors. And there's different factors, like how entrenched are the protective patterns in your brain? Like what level of trauma have you experienced in your life? And that doesn't

mean it's a harder process, it just might take a little longer. But I'm really not actually that good at predicting it because sometimes people that i think you know like oh they've been in pain longer um and they're older and they had some significant trauma they can turn around their symptoms really quickly and so you know like so i can't really predict it it's different from everyone for everyone i definitely think that some of it has to do with how willing you are to start to come inside and be able to practice being with your body, feeling your emotions. But I also always say you can experience a lot of relief before the symptoms are actually gone. I also say that most of the women that I work with and the men, at the point where they relieve

their symptoms, it sometimes takes them a while to notice that their symptoms are gone because they're not paying attention to them anymore they've gotten engaged with other things they're focused on feeling their emotions working with their mind learning how to follow their passion and you know and that process is engaging and i say like you can reclaim your life long before your symptoms are gone and that process of doing that is what relieves the symptoms at least in the work I'm doing. So it's not possible to predict, but get on the path and start heading in the right direction and you'll get there. Right. And it's not always a straight shot without any detours, right, Lorraine? Oftentimes we have these expectations of

perfection, right? Like, oh yeah, I'm going to do this and it's going to be great. And I'm going to feel great. Zip-dee-doo-dah, right? They're like, well, no, sometimes there's a fork in the road and a detour you have to take. And it's just going, going with the ride. And like you're saying that patient acceptance and listening to what your body's trying to tell you, what your emotions are trying to tell you and not resisting the present moment so that you can be free. Yes, yes, yes. definitely i love it lorraine this is great i had such a blast thank you so much how can others connect with you how can they connect you can always go to my website and blog which is radiantlifedesign.com and also you can find me on facebook radiant life design and i have a great

new ebook on my website called seven reasons you're still in pain and it uh it's a free download and just gives like seven of the key components that are often not addressed when trying to heal pelvic pain. So thank you so much for having me, Susie. I had a great time talking to you too. And I love your work. And yeah, I think you're doing amazing work. You're so welcome. And thank you so much. I've learned so much. This is the main reason why I love doing these podcasts is I just learn so much and share it with others who really need to hear these messages to get themselves out of the rut that they're in and and that life can be awesome and beautiful and you heard it right from lorraine guys it is possible so get on the wagon and start

doing what you need to do all right thanks lorraine i appreciate it you enjoy your weekend thanks for listening to today's episode be sure to head on over to drsuzyg.com where you can get more information, show notes, and related articles on today's topic. Also, if you like what you're hearing, head on over to iTunes, subscribe to the podcast, and leave us a rating and review. We'd love to hear feedback. Thanks again.