Turn Pain Into Purpose with Dr. Phil Parker

Welcome to True Grit and Grace, a podcast designed to empower you to claim your resilience and thrive through life's challenges. I am Amberly Lago, a mindset coach, fitness expert and bestselling author. Each week, I'll dive deep with the world's brightest thought leaders and elite performers to share tangible tools and practical advice to inspire you to keep your eyes on the prize and forge ahead. So get ready to conquer your fears, heal any trauma, lead with your heart, and elevate your life with grit and grace. Hey there, this is Amberly Lago. And thank you for tuning in to True Grit and Grace because I have a real treat for you today. My good friend, Dr. Phil Parker, is here with us on the show. Y'all, he is the creator of The Lightning Process, a certified master practitioner of NLP, clinical hypnotherapist. He's a mind-body connection expert with a PhD in physical health or psychological health. I think you're superhuman. I think you do it all. You have, gosh, Dr. Phil's got 35 years of experience working with individuals to help them make extraordinary changes in their lives and health. He's got 4 books now, 4 books. I don't even know how many podcasts. When I say superhuman, I truly mean that because— You do so much, but you really have changed and are still changing the lives of so many. So I've been looking forward to this. You just moved and you made it work. We made all the technical difficulties, like, we got through it. So Dr. Phil Parker, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.

Hey, Amberly, great to see you again. It's always lovely to hang out. We've done this many times on stage and on Clubhouse and audio, so it's great to see you.

Yeah, I'm so happy to see your face. And you just moved. I mean, you're literally Literally in boxes, and you're like, okay, I gotta find my mic, gotta do all this. And I just appreciate with all that you have going on, and I know you're you know busy with your clients and patients, and you have your own clubs on Clubhouse and all that you do. So I really appreciate you being here. We spoke together on stage for gosh, I think almost two years ago in North Carolina for the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Annual Convention, and out of all the other speakers that were there, you are the one that I really remembered because you're such an incredible storyteller. And I would love for you to share just a little bit about how you became this expert in transformation because you really show people that change is possible and hope is available. So can you tell people how you got, you know, so passionate and you turned your pain into purpose?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, your story and my story are quite similar. I think you've been through a lot more than I did. But at the age of 21, I was a budding rock guitarist, which is what my real passion was, to be a rock guitarist. I've always loved music. But to keep my mum and dad happy, I had a proper job. So I was training to be an osteopath. And one summer's day when I was 21 in August, I got up in the morning and within about half an hour, I'd severed my left hand. Oh my God. Um, we were pushing this kind of trailer, uh, we call it a caravan, but I think it's called trailer homes in the States. And I was pushing on the window. Back in the day, the glass wasn't proper safety glass. My hands went through the window and the people pushing it on the other side didn't know, so they're rocking it backwards and forwards.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah. So without going into too much of the trauma, I severed, uh, the major muscles and particularly the nerve, the ulnar nerve of my left hand. And there was rush to hospital. Luckily, I hadn't severed the artery; otherwise, I'd be dead within a few, literally a few minutes. But they said to me, "Bad is bad news. You've severed this nerve, and this is the nerve that controls the fine movement of your fingers. It's called the musician's nerve." So it's not just about moving your arm around; it's about the tiny little you know delicate movements we make. And I was like, "Okay, great. So how long until you can sew me up? I can get back." to being a guitarist because my career was going pretty well. And they said, oh, you, you won't recover. You'll be left with no movement in your fingers. And I was like, well, that's not the right answer because, uh, you know, I need, I need a hand. I need 2 hands to be both an osteopath and particularly a guitar player.

Yeah, well, you know what, when you said our stories are very similar, it's so true because that's basically what was told to me about my leg. that, oh well, you won't forget your training career, you won't even walk. You, you know, your life has changed. And here you are, you're not— your love of guitar playing and music and your passion and the job that you had to, you know, you know, make sure your parents were happy, all of those could just be vanished right then and there. So—

That's the thing, isn't it? It's one of those moments where you Your life disappears, your future just goes. And so because I was kind of contrary, and I still am, when I was 21, I said, right, I demand a second opinion. You know, I thought, well, if lizards can regrow legs and tails, surely there must be something I can do. So I got a second expert consultant came along and said, it's good news. I was like, great, what's the good news? And he said, uh, the good news is the first expert was absolutely correct. You will never move your fingers. You'll be left with a useless claw. And he showed me what that would look like, you know, just like hand that was just unable to move.

Wow.

And I was like, it just can't be right. So I asked everybody I knew, because obviously I knew people in the business, both in orthodox and complementary medicine. They all said, look, I'm really sorry, but this is a really severe injury. You're considered to be old neurologically at 21. You won't recover. You may get the odd kind of bit of movement, but you won't be able to play the guitar or be an osteopath. You just won't be able to do it.

So wait, what does that mean if you were like neurologically old? Yes, thank you.

So basically the idea was that at that age, your nervous system's kind of run out of steam when it comes to regrowth. It's just not very good. They were wrong. I mean, now even the research has caught up with these ideas in that neurogenesis, which is the idea that the brain can regrow When I was at osteopathic school, they said, no, it can't. Now we know that it can, small amounts can, but the peripheral nervous system, which is like these nerves, they grow about a millimeter a day. And they said, you're 21, probably won't even do that. So you won't recover. So I kept on asking, I kept on asking, and everybody said the same thing. All the textbooks said the same thing. But then eventually I found someone who said, I think you will recover. And I decided to believe them and ignore all the other medical opinions and advice, although that was all correct. And that, you know, that's— they were, they were accurate in their prognosis.

Well, how many doctors did you go to, or how many specialists did you go to before?

At least, at least 20 or 30. Wow.

Until you heard the one that was like, yeah, okay, thanks. Sometimes that's all we need is one person to believe in us.

Well, I think that's so important. I mean, that's been a you know, the end of the story is happy, which is I did recover the movement in my hand. I did continue my guitar career. I taught myself to play the piano. I became an osteopath, and I even played guitar with Eric Clapton at one point. So I did all the things that I wanted to do. But probably most importantly was just what you said. It kind of made me really think about what are the consequences of these kind of conversations that experts have with us and tell us stuff. And sometimes we mishear it and misunderstand it, you know. So we're not medical bashing at all. It's like just sometimes it's not communicated or we hear it in a funny way. And sometimes what they say is, it's not quite right. They say, there is nothing that can be done. And what they mean is, we have used all our tools and we, we can't do any more. And that's not quite the same. We have to get clear about that. So I was very interested in that. I was also very interested in that maybe the doctor says that once, The consultant says that once, but then we walk away and keep on telling ourselves that. How important are those conversations?

Isn't that the truth? I mean, the story that we play in our head or that soundtrack we play over and over and over, and we tend to hang on to the negative more than the positive. I think it's like you have to hear 7 positives to take away 1 negative or something like that. But people ask me all the time, Why did you choose the 1% that I had to save my leg versus the 99%? And I was like, well, that's all I needed was that little ounce of hope for me to go, okay, well then it's possible. Let's, let's try something. Let's figure this out.

Yeah. And it's so important. That little, that little statement there is so important. And this is one of the things we do when we help people to make change in their health using the mind-body connection. So that's the kind of way that mind and the brain interface, um, is that we know how important— this is where the research is really interesting, and I'll come on to talk about some of the published research on it— that our beliefs, what we expect, has a massive impact on how drugs work on us, how surgery works on us, and of course how much we can switch on our internal healing mechanisms. And one of the questions you just kind of asked yourself, we ask, which is Healing, changing is either completely impossible or it's not completely impossible. It can only be one or the other. Yeah. So ask yourself, whatever thing you're dealing with— I'm sure a lot of people in your audience will be dealing with stuff— ask yourself, is it completely impossible that I can change? And if the answer is, well, it's not completely impossible, therefore it must be possible. And that's a really important shift to make. It doesn't mean to say definitely you're going to, you're going to make the change, but it does open the door to, well, okay, well, if it's possible, then, you know, let's see what I can do.

Yeah. And I think that's important to touch on, just having that hope and that belief that there are possibilities. And for me, I went to several doctors and we do have a lot of listeners that are dealing with You know, they're dealing with chronic pain. And I know you don't even like to say the P word, the pain word.

Right.

But that have been diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome or lupus, arthritis. I've got people that have just recently had their, you know, leg amputated. And for me, I know when I was diagnosed with CRPS, I kept going to doctors that would tell me, no, you don't have it. every doctor I went to was like, oh yeah, you got it. And I didn't want to believe I had it. In fact, I was in denial about it for about 2 years. And because I was denying it, I really drove my health into the ground because I was trying to ignore it. And I think there's, what I've had to learn, and I'm hoping you can help me and the audience with, is yes, you want to acknowledge when there's something wrong or maybe there's, you know, you have chronic pain or CRPS, but not to get hyperfocused on it. And all you think about is what can I do to get better? How's my healing today? How's my healing? What am I doing to get better? And you just really find joy on the journey and find ways to enjoy life. What would you say to people that, to get that balance between, okay, embrace where you are, what's going on, But also don't be hyper-focused on it. So that's all you think about, that that's now your identity, that you are even on social media, you know, CRPS Warrior Girl or CRPS Jenny, or I'm just making these names up, or Chronic Pain Annie or, or whatever it is. Because then I feel like your whole identity becomes wrapped around pain and you become identified with your disease instead of— who you are and your big dreams and goals?

Yeah, it's, it's such an interesting, important, and tricky question that, you know, it's really, it's such a sensitive issue because people, particularly with things like CRPS, where people have fought for a long time to get their illness recognized as a real thing, you know, because with CRPS they're like, well, you stubbed your toe, or, you know, in your case you've had something a lot more serious, but sometimes it can occur from a very, very minor, you know, twisting the ankle, and they can't find anything. And with medicine, one of the big problems with medicine is if you can't find something, there's a tendency to go, well, there isn't anything there. There's nothing wrong. So there's another condition which I don't know if you've heard much about called functional neurological disorder, FND. So functional neurological disorder is the second most common reason for people consulting neurology clinics. The first is headaches. The second is FND. And what you present with is symptoms of epilepsy and other quite severe MS, other quite severe neurological illnesses, but on examination you can't find anything.

Really? I've never heard of that. What is it called again?

It's called FND, functional neurological disorder. It used to be called conversion disorder, and that's because a kind of Freudian perspective was it was the, the ego and the id fighting each other in the internal conflict eventually showed up in somatic physical symptoms. But they've moved away from that. And one of the interesting models they've moved to is my computer over there. I've got a lovely Mac, and you look at it and it's great, it's a beautiful thing. But if the software is corrupted, it still looks the same, but it doesn't work anymore. And you can't see the software is corrupted, you know, you can't see that. If you look at it, it looks the same as any other Mac until you try and get it to do anything. And the same with the brain. They're starting to move away from this idea that we've got to find the thing, because sometimes what's missing is there's something wrong with the processing of information. And that's really where CRPS comes in. So to kind of go circle back to your question, which is about how do we, how do we do this balance? Because on one level, we need to acknowledge, we need, we need to get acknowledgement that something's going on, you know, particularly when people can't see it.

Mm-hmm.

Like pain, people can't see pain. You can't really find it. It doesn't show up in that way. We need to believe our patients when they tell us they have it. That's the first kind of rule. When they say, I've got a symptom, we go, okay, what do we do with that? And so we need to acknowledge where we are and what we've got. We've got to be quite careful of labels because labels can become very limiting. It's like that becomes who you are, so your identity. But also you start to read, you Google it and you go, oh, that's the first thing I do. Oh, that's the first thing I do.

was I went home and, you know, Googled it. And I was— the first thing I read, it said the suicide disease. And I was like, what? And no hope. And the pictures that I saw online. So I do not suggest Googling that, whatever you've been diagnosed with.

But of course you do. That's where people go. That's where you go. You pointed earlier to this, that we have a bias, a tendency naturally within our neurology to focus on negatives. So, and we think this is evolutionary, that it's important when we're out in the, in the savanna and there are wild beasts to know where the dangerous beasts are. That's more important to our survival than knowing where honey is, the nice stuff.

Yeah.

And so we have this tendency to focus up on negative and difficult things. And that's useful. But it also means that we can suddenly get— we see the stories, as you say, 95% of people have this, 5% don't. We're likely to fixate on the 95%, particularly if it's negative, and, and vice versa. If the 5% is a negative outcome, we're probably going to go, I bet that's me, you know. So we've got to be really careful when we hear, uh, when we have labels given to us, to kind of use them to go, okay, well, how can I— how could this be useful for me as a starting point so I can find my way out of it? rather than kind of associating and immersing. And I think, as you say, on social media, there's a danger, I think quite a strong danger of people over-identifying with the illness as being defining of themselves, because that's not true. That's— it's an aspect of their life for sure, but they are so much more than that.

Yeah. And I remember when, you know, we were on Clubhouse and you— so you came into the True Grit and Grace Club and I had I had never been able to find you know kind of a support group for people who've been diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, and so or the ones that I found were very negative victim mindset. Those are the ones I found. So I thought, well, I'll just have a place on Clubhouse where people can come and connect. And you came in and you were so you know gave your time to talk on talk on the panel, and it really changed a lot for me. There was one thing in particular that you said about. how powerful words are. Because I think down in my bio, I had written CRPS warrior somewhere in there. And I've never liked the word survivor. You know, like I don't want to be a survivor. That's in fight or flight. I want to be a thriver. And so we talked about like identifying with these words. Well, a warrior, like that means you're just fighting it all the time. You're fighting. I'm like, yeah, I'm ready for some flow and ease and comfort and serenity and peace. And so I'm like, okay. I actually even took CRPS off of my bio. So it's not even on there anymore. And I had it on there for a while just so people that maybe if they've seen my TED Talk or they, you know, read my book, they'd be like, oh yeah, that's her. I see the CRPS. But I've really found it a little harder lately. I feel like it just pulls me down.

Yeah.

energy-wise to, to see that. So I'm doing kind of a little test right now to see if I take a little break from that, if I just don't associate myself with CRPS like at all. Like, I, it's hard. I don't like talking about it sometimes because when I start to talk about it and I explain what it is and what it feels like, I start to feel it more.

You will. I mean, the research is really clear on this, that if you— and this is why I generally don't use the P word, the pain word— is that when— some interesting research from Germany— when you say the word pain or the P word, you actually wake up the neurology that processes those signals, that experience, those feelings. So you increase your pain. So coming back to my Mac computer, you know, The problem is not with the Mac, it's with the processing, the way it's processing information. And the same with our brain. The problem is not with the tissues. For most people, tissues heal. What the problem is, if it's lasting more than a few months, is the way the brain is still thinking and processing that information, that shock, that trauma, whatever it is. And that's the bit that needs to change. And each time we talk about it, so I often talk about neuroplasticity, which is worth mentioning. So neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to change its shape and architecture based on use. So the more you use a pathway, the stronger it gets, a bit like a muscle. So the more you use a particular part of your brain— if you learn to play the piano, you practice, you practice, you get better at it. Same applies if you get angry a lot. The more you do that, the better you get at being angry. The more stressed you get, the better you are at stressed. And unfortunately, the more you experience or talk about or have conversations or think about the P word, the better you get at that. And when I say the better you get at it, it's just a neurological thing. It's not like you're doing on purpose. That's just the way neurology works. It learns through experience. And that's a real, real problem because of course, if you've got symptoms, you're bound to be thinking about it a lot of the time. A lot of your conversations are going to be about it. And one of the things we do when we help people to move out of CRPS and other chronic pain issues is kindly and compassionately teach them how to start to steer their neurology in the other direction. And one of the things we say is like, you know, you've tried that way, you tried talking about it a lot and thinking about it a lot. Did that work? If it didn't, maybe it's time to kindly and compassionately steer your brain in a different direction, because that is where the secret is of recovery from this stuff, because you can recover from it. We've helped Literally hundreds and hundreds of people across the world recover from it. And the secret is, how do you change the track, you know, the train track, as they were, jump the tracks from where it's going to where you want it to be going? And the other thing that's worth pointing out, of course, is that for most people's lives, there was a chunk of time where that neurology was just never used. You know, it's a relatively new thing in your brain, most of your life, even. I don't know how long ago it was now, but let's say it's 10 years ago. You're older than 25, so, you know, not much, maybe 30.

Not much, just a couple.

Thank you for that. No problem. Most of the time, your neurology has been heading into happy space, you know. So it's actually recognizing this is a learned behavior, it can be unlearned, and it's just about finding the way. And one of the ways which is really simple but slightly strange to even think about, is the power of our words. Our words are incredibly powerful. I'll tell you a really interesting thing I read about recently is somebody did a study about why do people talk about criticism when somebody has a go at you in very body terms? Like, I felt like stabbed in the back. My heart, I felt like my guts were punctured or my heart was ripped in 2. I felt gutted.

Well, when something like that happens, I actually have had that experience where you feel it in your gut. Like it feels like a gut punch.

Yeah. So the research looked into this. Is there a reason why we're using these words? Is it that when we trigger Real pain, you know, by treading on a pin or something, attack. The pathways those are used are the same pathways used when we experience emotional pain, like criticism. So they studied it and they found, yeah, it's exactly the same pathways. That's why we express it in this way. And they even found there's a bunch of people who have a very rare genetic abnormality where they actually experience more pain than most people. They're very, very sensitive to pain.

And I can tell you that there are probably people listening right there now that are like, oh, well then that must be me.

Yeah. So there's a specific gene, I think it's called the GLL. So people listening to it who have that will know about it. And it turns out those people are also, because it's neurological, are also much, much more sensitive to criticism because the same pathways are processing the same information. So One of the interesting things about pain is that it opens up this, again, this whole mind-body connection, that pain is about processing and not just physical stuff. It's just about signal processing, whether it's coming from our body or coming from emotions. And that gives us some clues as to where we need to point our attention to shift things, to move things forward.

Well, I think that, um, I know my dad has a really like intense back surgery where they cut him in the front and the back and fused his spine. And of course, that was a really difficult surgery, and he's having a lot of— experiencing a lot of issues since then. And when I talked to him, I noticed he's focused only on the things that he can't do and all the things that he used to be able to do.

Yeah.

And I get him to focus on, but Dad, look at all that you can do. And so by the end of the conversation, he's like, oh yeah, well, I can go to my favorite little pub. I can go meet my friend. I can walk now. I was bedridden. Like, I can see the difference in him and hear the difference in his voice just from focusing on things that he can do instead of what he can't do. And I've really I do this myself, which really shifts my day. It shifts my perspective, is I, I focus on gratitude, um, because I really feel like gratitude really starts to train your mind to see the good and count the blessings.

Yeah.

What is one thing that, that you could share with us that you do to get people who come to you? Because people come to you and they have tried everything else. Nothing has worked. You're like their last resort a lot of times. Hopefully people will hear this and it'll be their first time they, they want to go see you. But a lot of times I can imagine you get people who've tried every sort of medical procedure, surgery, treatment, and they can't get any result. They come to you and they're probably depressed, maybe they're anxious because they're— the P, the pain has really skyrocketed. What's one thing that you start with to try to calm down and shift their mindset a little bit just to calm the pain?

Yeah. Well, like you say, when people have experienced symptoms for a long time, there often are secondary issues like anxiety or depression or feeling flat or hopeless. But that is not what's causing it. It's important to recognize that probably doesn't help. But it's not like you have pain because you're you're moody. It's not that simple at all. It's basically a kind of glitch in our neurological processing. But anything else like anxiety, depression doesn't help. So the very first thing I do to them or do with them is really have those conversations about, okay, so, you know, where are you with this? What are you thinking? Because there's some really interesting research about this from the work of Professor Irvin Kirsch, and others called response expectancy, which is you give someone a pill and they don't think it's going to work, it will really knock its effectiveness. If you give someone a pill and they think it will work, it increases its effectiveness. And the same for everything, right? And so I was talking to Professor Andrea Avers, who's a really well-respected researcher, and I said to her, what's the most important bit of information you would ever share with somebody from your experience of looking at the mind-body connection. And she said, if you're going to have an operation and you don't think it's going to work, don't have it.

I could not agree more. I couldn't agree more.

Get your head around it, you know, go online, find people who've had success, buy in this, or don't do it. Because your— how you're thinking about it, your expectancy, your beliefs, your anticipation is so powerful. You don't want that going against the treatment or interventional therapy or surgery because it will have an effect. It's so—

I think, I think that's what happened when I had the spinal stimulator because I was so freaked out about getting the stimulator. I was like, I really don't want to have like a box implanted in, you know, my glute and have a machine to turn on. I was so freaked out and ended up— it did not work at all. I ended up in the ER. They could not understand what was going on. Dr. Prager said, in all my experience, I've never seen this kind of reaction. But I really think it's because in my mind, I was so freaked out. I was like, this thing is a weird— I had not wrapped my mind around it. And I think it's powerful. So to hear you say that makes me think, okay, yeah, it was probably my thinking, my stinking thinking.

Well, it certainly wouldn't help. It's not saying your thinking is responsible for everything, because it's not. Drugs have an effect, surgery has an effect, but it's looking at it from a bigger perspective. What you want is the best surgery by the best surgeon, but especially for you to be in the best place to benefit and receive that. And so when I first work with people who have usually, as you say, done most things, The first question is really about, okay, so what do you think? Where are you? And they go, well, you know, I don't think anything will work. Like, well, that has to change before you do anything else, because if you bring that conversation, which is a completely reasonable conversation to have based on your experience, but if you bring that into the party, then that is going to have such a destructive effect on whatever you do that that's where we need to start. So having those conversations, like asking, you know, do you think it's possible? And other interesting conversations like, you know, do you think, um, you have the capacity to change this yourself? Or are you waiting for somebody else to fix it? Do you think you deserve to get well? That's a very interesting question. Sometimes people kind of go, wow, that's an interesting question. Well, wow.

I don't— you're figuring out like if they believe in themselves, you know, if they think they're worthy.

Sometimes, sometimes people have conversations like, well, my mum had it, she was a good person. So I'm not, I'm not better than her. So I don't know if I deserve, you know, she couldn't get— she was a God-fearing, you know, lovely woman who, you know, cared for other people. She, you know, I don't know if I deserve it. So it can be stuff like that. And another really important question is, do you believe you are the same as other people? Enough the same? as other people who've made this change? That question I asked is a really important question, which is, do you believe you are similar enough to other people who've made this journey from this illness out of it? Because in pretty much every illness, there are people who've done that. There are people who've found a way through it. If you class yourself, you categorize yourself as, I am not the same as them, I'm different, then that's really not a very good place to start. What you want to do is the opposite. You want to kind of go, I am different from people who never got through this. And that's probably something you've been telling yourself, like, you know what, I'm, I'm going to be that person who shows other people that there is a path out of this. That's kind of where that warrior thing comes from. And it's kind of, you know, it's probably better to have it as an adventurer, an explorer, you know.

Yes. Yeah. And you know what, there are— I've, I've got people that come to me and they're like, oh my goodness, Finally, to see someone who is like, you can still find joy, you can still work out, you can still work, you can still do all these things even though you've gotten this diagnosis dubbed the suicide disease. And because a lot of times people hear that and they kind of give up. And so I've had a lot of people that have come to me and they're like, finally to see you doing all that you do and you've got CRPS. then it makes me think that I can do things too. And so that's what I really want to do is give people hope. But I do have some people that, like when I was on the doctor's TV and I was talking about mindfulness and mindset and the PACER method and using these tools basically of your mind to get through pain, not to cure pain, but to get through it. And hey, maybe some of it will disappear. I got a lot of resistance from people, like a lot of people. I was even called a disgrace in the CRPS community in a self— one of the self-help or support groups. Um, I left the group after that. I was like, I don't think this is very supportive for me. I think I'm out of here. See ya. So yes, I have told myself that I'm different. I'm not going to let this take me down. I'm not going to let this stop me from going after my dreams. I might have to do it a little bit different. I might, you know, this morning, I text my accountability partner every morning. We text 3 things that we're grateful for, a little, we'll take a picture of something that we've read out of a spiritual book. And what, just a little note. And I had written to her this morning. I said, Well, I'm moving slow, but I'm still moving. You know? And she texted me back and she said, it's okay to move slow. The important thing is you're still moving. You're still moving forward. And so I think along the journey, I wondered if you've had any people that are like, you can't begin to change things just with your mind. And have you had some resistance?

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah, really?

Hell yeah. Yeah, I mean, uh, in certain parts of the internet, you know, my name is an, uh, the equivalent of somebody who has no idea what they're talking about and is just causing trouble. And I was going to ask you— yeah, no, I mean, death threats, the usual things, you know.

No, well, I haven't had that yet.

Yeah, but I was going to throw the question back at you. I mean, I'll talk a bit about my experience if you want, but What do you think's behind it? You know, there you are, you are somebody with the condition saying, you know, I'm, I'm just trying these things, they seem to be helping me. What do you make of people pushing back on that and going that you're a disgrace? What do you make of that?

Well, when, when that happened, I had just done— I was all excited, you know, it was pretty cool to get to be on the doctor's TV. And they kind of edit it however they want. So they cut out the part where I say I've tried the spinal stimulator, ketamine infusions, Eastern, Western medicine. You know, at one point, I was on 73 homeopathic pills and 11 different prescription medications a day. And none of that worked for me. And what I had to do was really start to change the way I thought about my situation and change the way that I did certain things. And these are the things that really helps. This is what helps me. I'm not saying it's going to help everybody. But if you can take something away from it and it helps you, then that's why I do what I do. But at first, I have to say, being excited about the interview and then getting constant dings, messages, messages, messages. Because in the support group, there were people like fighting it out over me. People saying, oh my gosh, Amberly's awesome. She's changed my life. And other people saying, she's a disgrace. There's no way she has CRPS, blah, blah, blah. There's no way she could possibly look the way she does if she has CRPS. She couldn't work out if she has CRPS. Or she doesn't have it as bad as me. And it's like, whoa. When you start getting into the comparison of who has it worse instead of collaboration of how we, how can we share what works for us so we all get better? We're shoulder to shoulder. Let's all rise.

Yeah.

I was about to get on stage at a women's empowerment group. And I was, remember seeing these messages. I was getting my hair blown out. And I was really upset. Like I was starting to cry. And I was like, this is an opportunity for me to either let this make me cry and crumble or ask myself a question. do these things really work? Is this working for me? And it was like, hell yeah, it is. So I used that moment to make myself believe in myself even more that yeah, it works. And the best thing for me to do is to get out of the negative environment. I don't need to hear or see that anymore. I mean it was bizarre, you know, seeing people talk about you like, well, I messaged the author.

Well said.

see if she gets back. And I'm like, the author? Dude, I'm just like you. I was diagnosed 10 years ago. Like what are you talking about? I'm trying everything too. And so I think it's so important. The people that you surround yourself with can really affect how you think unfortunately. You know, you hang out with a lot of negative people that are complaining or gossiping or just saying mean things, that brings your energy down. And it also— you might, you might just join in and start talking negative and doing those things. And so, yeah, I was like, I got to get out of that. I want to be around positive, passionate. That's why I'm hanging out with you.

And also, the science, the science and research is absolutely spot on with this. It's, again, it says if you talk about pain, If you talk about trouble, if you talk about problems, and you swim in that neurology— and we even have these neurons called mirror neurons, which are designed specifically to mirror, to copy other people's behaviors. That's how we get to be a social animal. That if you hang around that, you will start to adopt those neurological pathways. You will start to think in that way. And yeah, we've had exactly this. You know, it still amazes me because I've worked in this field for a number of decades, helped over 25,000 people around the world transform their lives from situations where people said you will never recover, impossible things. Instead of— particularly when it's the charities who support people with these illnesses, they were just not interested. They were like, come back when you've cured cancer. They didn't believe it. They still don't believe it. We've done research because that's one of the ways to gain credibility, and they still kind of try and undermine the research. They don't want to hear that these illnesses can be recovered from. I don't know why that is, but that's the conversation. Yeah.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think they still say that there is no cure for CRPS?

Uh, they can say that because the research has not yet been done on, or not enough of the research has been done on approaches like mine and other approaches that are getting good results. So it's still reasonable to say that from a science point of view, because with science, you need to have a number of published papers that find the same outcomes. And until that's happened, you can't say this— there is a cure or there isn't. All you can say is we don't have the research to be sure.

Because have you had people that you have cured?

Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. But what's interesting, the way science approaches something is it says, let's say I work with you and you go, and there's pictures of you, you know, in crutches, you know, not being able to do anything on your meds. And then a few weeks later, you're, you know, climbing mountains and not take— not needing to take any medication because you've been to your doctor and resolved that, you know, he's recognized you don't need to take it anymore. And you go, look, here's me before and after, I'm well. Here's me, you know, kicking a football or whatever it is, you know, all the things that would clearly demonstrate that you are now well. And I have 100 or 200 or 400 cases like that, and particularly with CRPS where you get the changes in skin coloration you quite often get with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, the changes in hair loss and all the rest of it. And we have loads of photos of that. It's still completely reasonable for science to go, that's just stories. We want to see the data. We need to do a randomized trial where we compare the lightning process with drug treatment or with nothing. And we do it in a standardized way. And we need to do that with 100 people. And then we need to get that data processed. And then we need to do that study. We need to get the study published and then we need to replicate it 4 or 5 times. And then at the end of that—

So have you started that process?

Yes, we have. Yeah, we have. But that is about— we did, so we did one, for instance, with chronic fatigue syndrome, ME. I don't know what you call it in the States, but that, you know, chronic fatigue. And that took 10 years to get from—

Oh my goodness. I was going to say, that sounds like it would take years.

Yeah. So that's one.

And then all the other people in the research, do they all have to like come out of it?

Yes. Oh, they don't need to all come out of it good. What you're looking in science is a statistical improvement. So better than chance is what you're looking forward to. This— that's how, that's how science measures effect. It says, is this just a random effect, or is this— can we see that this group has done better than that group? So we've done the first one of those. There's a few others in the pipeline. But interestingly, those negative people that you talked about Try and prevent the research. They spend a lot of time saying these people are charlatans. It's no research to back it up. You're wasting our research dollars by following this. This is a hopeless dream. That money should go usually towards medicine. That's what they're pointing out.

Yeah, what is that?

It should go to pharmacy.

I don't get that.

I think partly it's because there's this belief that they still haven't caught up with the whole mind-body research, which says. You're not a test tube. You're a living human. Your physiology is affected by your diet, your sleep, your exercise, the way you think, your genes. All those things are important. And we need to take care of all those things rather than seeing it as it's all about the drugs. It's all about the chemicals. It's just, it's a really kind of old school view that most doctors, most researchers don't subscribe to anymore. But I think it again comes from this Not being believed as having a real illness, and so like we want to show everybody we've got a real illness. We need real medicine to make sure to prove, and and so the accusations leveled at you are like well you couldn't have had it because if you had the real one, you couldn't got better unless you had proper medicine. So therefore you didn't have the real one. So we get this. We've had people who I remember young girl. who had it, uh, was part of a community, you know, an online community, was, you know, bedbound, carried into the room, got up 3 days later, was able to run on the beach, told all her friends who'd known her for 10 years, you know, in this young people's support group. And their response, Mitch, a bit like yours, was, I can't believe you've lied to us for 10 years pretending you were ill when clearly you weren't ill. Because this is an illness nobody can recover from. So if you recovered from it, you must have been lying. It's like, that is such a weird way to look at the world. Surely, like you say, shoulder to shoulder, we should go, wow, I'm so pleased for you. I'm not sure if that will work for me or if that's my thing, but great. That would be a reasonable, logical, rational response to that. Anything else is a bit— what is going on there?

Well, I think it's a mirror sometimes. to other people of, you know, well, if they can do that, they obviously don't have it like I have it. Because it maybe makes, I don't know, maybe it makes them feel like they're not doing enough or they're not working hard enough or they're not putting in the effort to get better themselves. I'm not sure. But I really do wish we could, you know, change that. But I had to ask, I'd love to ask you. So—

Yeah.

I noticed as positive as the, you know, the support group that I've had online on Clubhouse has been— I love these women. There's some men too. A lot of physical therapists join us every single week. But I noticed as much as I set the room up for positivity and we share our goal, our win, and maybe what's one challenge we would like support with, That it's still people that come in a lot that are just down. They're down. And I mean, look, they've got real struggles. They have a lot of stuff going on. But I found it's hard to hold space for a room full of people that are just— they're desperate a lot. Not everybody in the group. I'm not saying that about everybody. But it's hard to hold space. I wondered, how do you keep your energy up and stay positive when you are surrounded and you're working with people who tend to be, you know, maybe they, they might be negative, maybe they are hopeless, maybe they're sad? How do you keep your spirits up?

That's a question people often ask me. Because the client group that I work with are people who have been lost overboard, usually to medical and complementary approaches. Nothing's worked for them. So people say, God, it must be really tough keeping them afloat, keeping their hopes up. And actually it isn't, because the work that I do is all about helping people to recognize They have this incredible resource within themselves of the ability to make change to their physiology by changing the way they think. And when people— so to do the Lightning Process, there's 3 basic phases. The second phase is a seminar where they come along and they learn the fundamental skills of how you can switch on your brain-body axis. You can improve your parasympathetic nervous system function, reduce your sympathetic nervous system flight and fight response, boost your healing and all that kind of stuff. But in order to get there, you have to listen to about a 4-hour audio program which talks you through a lot of the things we're talking about here, you know, about the research into the mind-body connection, the importance of language, using our neurology in interesting ways, checking in with our beliefs about what do I think is possible. And then having listened to that, then they have a conversation with their coach who talks them through any points they're a bit confused about. until they get to a point where they go, all right, I get it, I've got my head around this. Yeah, okay, so I've got to take, take the responsibility for influencing my neurology. I need to learn some tools. I'm going to have to put them into practice. Uh, it's not a fix, it's a training. But, uh, yeah, okay, I feel up for it. And when they've kind of gone through that part of the journey, then they're ready to take the seminar. If they just— if we just grab people off the streets and said, get in that seminar and do the work, it wouldn't make— it wouldn't work because We need people a bit like, let's say, a weight loss club. No point in going to a weight loss club, uh, you know, if you want to lose weight, you know, where, you know, where they get you to do diets and exercise and weigh you.

Oh yeah, well, it kind of reminds me of sobriety too. Like, yeah, you, you want to stop drinking, but do you really? Are you willing to stop? Are you gonna do— put in the, the work that you need to Get better.

So I think there's no point in just going to a meeting every day if you spend the rest of the day drinking. It's not going to work. Or if you don't believe that you can make that change. So it's all about getting people to the point where they recognize, okay, no, yeah, I think I can do this. And that has to happen because, again, all the research suggests if people think, I'll give it a go, I don't think it'll really work for me, but yeah, let me. And quite often, that people are negative towards the work we do say, if it works, which I don't think it does, then do it on me and then let's see if it works, shall we? I was like, that's not how it— that's not the deal. It's not like an injection. And of course, even the research says injections won't work if you don't think they will work. They'll have a detrimental effect on the medicines you're being given. So it's even more more not going to work if it's all about changing the way you use your brain. It's not about me making you well, it's about me teaching you tools and you're going to have to put them into practice. If you don't think there's any point to that or you're going to put any effort into it, then of course you're not going to get any results. It's not really a fair test, is it? But again, it just shows how people don't— haven't really quite grasped this idea that There are interventions out there that are not based on the physician fixing it. And that's where a lot of these problems arise, is that people are still coming from the model of, I've got this pain, fix my pain for me. It's not how it works. It's— the pain is running in your nervous system. The only person who can really shift that is you. The doctor can give you drugs that will kind of sedate your nervous system. That's not really fixing it. That's, that's just kind of putting a Band-Aid on it. The only way you can change your neurological processing is by you changing your neurological processing, which is a lot to ask of somebody who's got a lot of stuff going on in their lives. But it's, in my experience, the only way that really, really works.

Well, so my dad has lost some use of his legs. He's like, used to be this big. He's still a very handsome man, strong, quite the ladies' man. But he used to be, I think, you know, I learned all about weight training from my dad. And now he's like, I'm, I just got a walker. I think I'm gonna have to use a walker now. And he's like, I can't feel parts of my leg. Do you think the Lightning Process would work for him?

It depends, depends a bit on what's going on neurologically. So, you know, if he has bruised, severed some nerves, then they do take a while to recover. And it depends how badly bruised they are. But the Lightning Process, one of the things to remember about the Lightning Process is the Lightning Process itself is not what does the work. What it does is it teaches people tools to switch on their mind, brain-body connection, which we all have. And it helps you to learn how to use that to make change. So the changes that you've made already are the result of you accessing this inner ability to kind of right ourselves, to get our body and our nervous system working. And it's about hacking into that, finding ways to do that. Does that mean everybody can get rid of everything and live forever? No. Who doesn't? There are limits to what we can achieve. But it does open the question of, well, let's see what we can achieve. Let's see what's possible rather than, hmm, I guess this is just something I have to live with. I think those kind of conversations are things that are always worth challenging. Doesn't mean to say, you know, there will be some things you will have to live with. That's just the way that it is. But I would say always be curious. Always be intrigued as to how extraordinary we are. Again, you know, I always think about lizards. If they can regrow tails and legs, I wonder what we can do.

I couldn't agree more. Well, what is your definition of resilience?

I think for me, one of the things I always kind of come back to is the Serenity Prayer, which you probably know, actually, if you've been hanging around.

show you. I have it on my desk. That's how much I love the Serenity Prayer. Of course, you know, I think, I think we think a lot alike, um, you know, just in how the mind-body— because I'm all about the mind-body connection. But I do want to learn more about, dive deep into the Lightning Process, and I'm wondering if it will help my dad as well. But what were you going to say about the Serenity Prayer?

So yeah, I think it's Serenity Prayer, for me, out of all the things I've ever come across, really summarizes so much of what I've found to be true. So as you know, it's like, have the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, courage to change the things you can, and really interestingly, the wisdom to know the difference between the two. And I think your question about resilience is, is that, it's that when stuff happens, as it does in everybody's lives, We need to check in and go, right, is this something I can do something about or not? If I can't, then I just need to deal with it. I need to find a way to be okay with the fact it's not how I want it. And that happens for many of us in our lives. If there is something I should do, I can do about it to do something. And one of the interesting things, the third part, the wisdom, is with healthcare, people have got fooled into thinking there's nothing you can do about that. So they kind of filed it in, this is something you can't change. So you've got, oh, you've got CRPS, you can't do anything about that. Or you've got chronic fatigue, there's nothing to be done about this. And that's not accurate. There are literally tens of thousands of people around the world that I know personally who've had those diagnoses who don't have them anymore, who've now run marathons, climbed mountains, done, you know, had babies when they— nobody— people told them they'd never be able to do it. So we know people can do that. And it's like opening up that conversation about Oh, I thought that wasn't something I can deal with, but it turns out I could. So resilience, I think, is central to that. It's like when stuff happens, kind of recognizing, oh, that's happened, okay, and what am I— how am I going to deal with this? How do I— how do I be around this in a way that works for me?

I love that. And yeah, I'm not back to marathons yet, but I'm hoping. I love to run, and I I miss it so much. And, you know, I was getting kind of down about just the fact that I can run, but then it really flares me up for a while. So I've tried Kangaboots to run in, different shoes, sand. I can run in the sand a little bit. But I was kind of down about it. And my husband helped me. He's like, well, so you can't run beside Ruby. Go get on your bike. And so I always think of, okay, well, what can I do? Focusing on all the possibilities, you know, it really helps get through the day some days when it's a tough day. But you have changed my way of— excuse me, sorry— you've really changed the way that I talk about it. And I don't say CRPS warrior anymore. And I'm a thriver. And you are changing so many lives all over the world with your program. And I know you have all kinds of stuff going on right now. I am amazed you have so many books and podcasts. Please tell people where they can find out more about your— not just your books and podcasts, but really where they can get involved to start getting some relief and change in their lives for the better through your Lightning Process.

So to find me, if you go to philparker.org, that's the easiest place. If you go to Lightning Process, there's no E in Lightning, so it's L-I-G-H-T-N-I-N-G, lightningprocess.com or .co.uk or .usa.com, any of those, just search it, um, and that will take you to the website which kind of answers loads of questions. But you were bound to have more questions because with anything new, people are like, how does that work? And what's it all about? A lot of the questions are answered with that first audio thing that you can also get hold of online. You can just listen to it on your iPhone or your Samsung and talk to us. We know most of our practitioners had chronic fatigue, CRPS, or at least someone in the family had it. So they've been through it. firsthand or secondhand. So they know what it's like to be there going, is this going to work? Is this another thing that's not going to work? Is this something I should put my time and energy into? And one of the things we're very keen to do with the Lightning Process is to say to people, look, we think it works really well for pretty much everybody, but maybe not now. There's a time and a place for these things.

Mm-hmm.

So we'll help you decide. And we don't want to help people to choose the Lightning Process if they're not ready for it. That wouldn't be of any value to anybody. We want people to be ready. And so probably when I interview people, probably about 20% of people, I say, look, I don't think you're quite ready for this. You need to go away and do some more research, getting your head around it, because you want to come to this when you're ripe, when you're ready. Then it's easy and the change is easy. And so, yeah, I'll be interested with you, Amberly, to have a conversation because we've been having a number of chats around this over the last few years, find out when the right time is for you to do this.

I was just thinking that as you were saying it. I was just like, you know what, when is the right time? Because when we first met, I was traveling, living out of a suitcase, you know, speaking at different conferences because it was— my book was pretty new. And then I knew we were destined to like meet again because I had one of my friends tell me about you. Then we connected on Clubhouse and Instagram. And I'm like, okay, this is crazy. We need to— I have to have you on the podcast. We need to talk. I need to learn more about this Lightning Process because it's really, I think that that's how I've been able to get through a lot is just with the mind. I mean, I still take Lyrica, and I'm not saying that so everybody runs out and gets Lyrica. I'm not advertising it. Check with your doctor. I didn't want to have to take any medication at all. I was the opposite. I don't want medication, but it seems to help a little bit. My goal is to get off everything. And so I'm really curious to, to talk with you. And also, um, I love all you share and on Clubhouse too. Are you still doing your rooms on Clubhouse?

Yeah, yeah. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I do the Mind Body Doctors where there's 3 PhDs talking about the mind-body connection and answering questions and finding out what people know about it in the room. Always some amazing, amazing people. Yeah, I think it's 11 AM Central Time, I'm guessing. Uh, it's 6 PM UK time, so whatever time we started this today. What time zone are you on? You're California, aren't you?

Oh, it's 10. So, oh well, right now it's 11. We started at 10. Um, because I'd love to come back to your room. You, you always have like some great doctors on the panel, um, and learn more there. And so yeah, you can go. And you know what, I subscribe to your newsletter. And y'all, when you subscribe to his newsletter, you get an email back and you you offer right away so many downloadable resources. So thank you for that. And I love your passion and your heart for, you know, genuinely wanting to show, hey, this is possible. You can do this. If I can move my hand again after my nerve was severed and they said it would never move again, then what else is the human spirit and the mind capable of?

Yeah.

You know, so absolutely, thank you for sharing with us today. It's been— it's always a joy to talk to you, and I'm going to be in touch. I hope to see you in person someday soon. I don't know if they're doing, um, any conferences, um, that we will be sharing the stage again soon, but I sure hope so.

That would be lovely. And I would like to say to you, you know, that the work you do, the stand that you take I think is really, really important. I think, you know, things that we talked about today from your own personal journey, standing up for, well, you know, this is my story, this is my journey, and people don't have to like it, but this is what I'm doing. You know, I think that's an important conversation because unfortunately, you know, remember we talked about this whole negative bias that we have in our neurology. People hear the difficult stories and how people don't change, and it's easy to focus on that. And there needs to be a different narrative because that is not representative of what's going on. There are thousands of people who have stepped away from CRPS, ME, chronic fatigue, and all sorts of other illnesses— MS, Parkinson's— and research suggests that as well. There's some really interesting research into that, some of which I've done, some which other people have done. So we know that there are ways through it. And one of the things that's really important to do is to fly that flag of, yeah, you know, it doesn't mean to say it's going to work for everyone, but there are routes out. And I think you should be acknowledged for what you're doing with that. So thank you, Amberly.

Oh, thank you. That means so much, especially coming from you. So I really appreciate that. Thank you. And thank you for being on the show with your move in the middle of your move. You're like, wait, I can find a mic here in a box somewhere and you joined us. So y'all, please, if you go check out Dr. Phil Parker, check out the Clubhouse. I love your rooms on Clubhouse too. But The Lightning Process, all the information will be in the show notes. So if you're listening and you want to go back and find out more information, all the information is in the show notes. And if there was one thing that really stood out to you today, please take a screenshot of any platform you're listening to this on and tag us @AmberlyLagoMotivation on Instagram and Dr. Phil Parker. So thank you for joining in. Oh, I see your whole face now.

Let me see if I can take a photo. I'll do that thing. Where are we?

Okay.

Am I still there? Hold on. Thank you.

Thanks so much for Thank you for joining us this week on True Grit and Grace Podcast. If you like it, please rate it or share it with your friends. That would help too. If you're not yet on the newsletter list, come over to amberlylago.com and jump on it. While you're there, you can grab a free downloadable gratitude journal, and you might just want to check out my book or even check out my monthly motivational membership. Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next week.