I'd like to hear from personal experience mostly, what has worked for you or what has not worked for you that has tried any type of mind-body approach.
There are many different views and approaches to this, I guess Dr. Sarno was the pioneer, and his views was mainly that the brain perceives negative emotions as a threat, and therefore create physical symptoms to distract.
This is not so much the mainstream view now it seems, not it's more viewed as the body going into a fight, flight and/or freeze state, adrenal fatigue and or simiar viewpoints. Nevertheless, the exact wording of what is going on is perhaps not that important, the important thing for me is what do we actually do and how do we best approach a mind-body approach.
There are some approaches like LP that mostly want you to go into toxic positivity, ignore symptoms and think/suppress yourself healthy again, this is a mind dominated approach where you are primarily using your mind to change your beliefs in order to get healthy, trying to convince yourself you are healthy and not ill anymore on demand, it also has many stories of patients getting blamed if they don't get better and has some toxic and cultish elements too it while also a very greedy financial setup.
Then you have other approaches like more regular brain-retraining types of modalities. Where its believed that the brain creates the symptoms because of perceived danger, or something similarly.
These modalities often focusing on positive self talk, creating safety for the body, but oftentimes also have a certain type of; don't stop doing activity philosophy. And I would say some of these approaches can have a "pushy" mentality when it comes to activity. I would say there is a big range, some recommend you to listen to your body, some are more pushy in the sense of you should not constrain activity because of fear of getting worse, and then you have modalities like LP where you're just kind of told to forget about PEM because you are already healthy.
Ideas around some mind body approaches can be "fatigue is your brains way of protecting you and keeping you safe"
"the more we think about symptoms the more we fuel them"
- Now I also see another separation in mind-body approaches, it seems like some believe strictly creating safety, changing thought patters and such is enough to recover. But then you have also the people that encourage to work more emotionally, do meditations, work with trauma and so forth.
These modalities might have more of a "The symptoms are telling you something" and might also be more centered on confronting patterns in your life and uncovering what your illness is trying to convey to you and have more of a spiritual undertone.
The reason I'm writing all of this is because I'm trying to get a grasp of what is logical, but also what is working for people. I find some of these methods to be strictly scams, some of them are also potentially dangerous in terms of getting worse, but I also think some of it makes sense and I want to try to do more of an mind-body approach, I just have to decipher what that truly mean for me.
When some approaches is all about that it is fear that is creating the symptoms they kind of lose me, I have many times done things and had a great time and had debilitating fatigue come over me for example.
on the other hand I have had periods of getting better focusing on positive self talk especially around feeling safe, meditation, and I think generally believing that there is nothing wrong with my body and that it can get back to homeostasis again.
Another thing is with the whole mind body approach, I feel it can be so mind dominated, but what should we actually do, what practical steps are routines should we value, that is something I find very lacking in most of these modalites. Many come across very wishy washy with a lot of talk but not much actual practices.
So my question is to you what mind-body approach have you tried? Did you truly give it your all? Did you have positive or negative results? What practically did you do that you found beneficial?