A conversational interview (Leland and Josh Trent) exploring how emotions and personal narratives can influence physical illness. The speakers give anecdotal examples (a woman whose 'tearing' back pain related to feeling torn, a patient whose ulcerative colitis remitted after forgiving his father, sinus issues linked to situations one 'doesn't want to smell') and discuss psychoneuroimmunology — the idea that psychological states affect nervous and immune systems — while cautioning there is no simple one-to-one diagnostic rule. They emphasize self-awareness, self-love, and active patient work (e.g., EMDR, neurofeedback, narrative work) as part of healing, and note cultural/structural limits on applying those therapies.
Chapters
But one of the interesting things about illness is I think it's important for people to ask themselves what. What is my body trying to tell me? One of my mentors, Louis Mal, is a Native American by background, and he trained with many Native healers, and he really focuses on narrative and storytelling as medicine. I remember him telling me a story where he asked a woman who had back pain what was going on in her life. And if she felt torn in any way and she was having an affair, she felt torn between this man who she felt more emotional intimacy with and support from, and her husband, who she'd sworn to, you know, having to hold in sickness and in health, richer, for poorer, until death to us part. And, you know, this back pain, she described it as a tearing pain in her back. Right. Jim tells his story all the time on podcasts that his ulcerative colitis that almost killed him, it went into remission when he forgave his father for the way he treated him as a child. So we really have to be mindful of our bodies as these places where emotions get stored. And I see people getting so frustrated with their bodies. Why won't it do this? Why can't it do that? What else do I have to do to get it to do this thing that I wanted to do? Well, what. And. And. And who are you not treating right in your own life? Who are you hanging on to feelings of resentment and anger about? Jim mentioned to me the other day, he said, one of the reasons. I don't know if I should say this on tape, actually, so I'm gonna couch.
I think you should say it.
He said, one of the reasons why contact sports and violent sports don't embrace things like EMDR and neurofeedback is that once those guys get their demons under better control and some of the rage and anger that they have inside out in a positive way, and they really release some of that negative emotion.
Yeah.
They actually don't do their job of hitting people and damaging other people as well.
Wow. You are literally describing. I just had a full body chill three days ago. Three, four days ago, I saw a clip of Mike Tyson talking, and the interviewer had. They had all of his championship belts out on the table. And he said, wow, don't you. Aren't you proud of yourself? All these gold belts? And he's like, no, this is all bullshit. I don't care about any of this. I was a broken man chasing the wrong kind of dream. Wow. So literally, his anger, his vitriol, going to jail, drugs, Alcohol, everything. It was all driven by his lack of inner peace. So it's such a paradox, Leland. And if this is why I love podcasting, I had no idea we're going to go here. I thought, we're going to talk about biomarkers and all the things that are really downstream, but look upstream is this. If I'm fueled by a fuel source in my life, and I can attest to this myself, that is not sustainable, AKA anger, resentment, proving myself, lack of self love, lack of trusting myself, which then I project onto others as a lack of love, lack of trust, et cetera. There is absolutely no way I'm going to live a happy well and fulfilled life. There's going to be a reckoning at some point. So to circle back to your point, a lot of times when the fuel source of life itself is coming from a unsustainable well, the well has been dry for years. The body is going to start screaming and crying out, hey, I've got a message for you. You're not listening. The only way that you will listen is if I drop you to your knees, if I give you cancer, if I give you ibs. Even for myself, sinus issues. I was looking in a book that I just ordered here from Bjorn Ebel, and it's called the Psychic Roots of Disease. And I was looking at some of the things that cause sinus issues. And it's things in our lives that we don't want to smell. So it's situations that we've been avoiding, relationships that we been avoiding. What causes a lot of sinus issues.
From a psychosomatic or a psychic group perspective is things that I'm avoiding. And so I just got back, by the way, from a huge training, the Power of Language, NLP in Montana. And one of the things I realized there is that I'm 43 years old and I've had a lot of academic and really great interviews with people like yourself, 600 or more of them. But this concept of self love, it didn't really stick until recently. And I would probably be suffice to say that it's going to stick more in the future as I do the loving actions for myself that come from love. That self narrative piece, that's a big one. I wonder if you can talk about the self narrative of. Of why these illnesses happen. I believe in your field it's called psychoneuroimmunology, where thoughts become things. Break that down for us because this is a bit. It's a bit spiritual, but it's also very practical. And you and I both know that they dovetail very well.
They do. It's a very tough part of the literature because you can substantiate that things that will have a psychological impact have then a neuroimmunological impact. So both effects on the nervous system and the immune system. Right. But there's no simple treatment that comes out of that. You know, I, it's very, you know, you can't say, well, you have ulcerative colitis, therefore you have anger management issues against your family, or you have headaches, therefore you have a toxic boss. That's why I try to get. Because the true, the truth of that is that it's very easy for me to resort and fall back on data in the form of material and energetic information. Right. I mean, I've got ways to measure everything from how much light is hitting your eye to how much calcium is in your urine. I mean, I could do every test under the sun. And really, as a young man, I didn't like emotions. They were confusing. I didn't understand why other people felt the way they felt. I was just very logical. I wanted to find the problem and make it go away from a medical perspective. And part of why I got into all this was that it just failed so badly in some cases and I didn't understand why. And so I was chasing this. Why, why do some people not respond to what I do and other people do? The patients who don't respond are the ones who have something to teach me and they're the ones I think about because it's, I don't know, it's just how I am. I just want to solve the next problem. And so with emotions, the, the challenge becomes though, how do you, how do you turn that into a treatment plan? Right. And that's where I can't really do the push ups for you. Patients have to do the work of getting in touch with their emotions, understanding what they are and then understanding where they're coming from. And so, I mean, I had to do this myself.
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