You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

You already know how to do this. Think about a time in your past when you made up your mind to change something about yourself or your life. If you recall, a moment came when you probably said to yourself, I don’t care how I feel [body]! It doesn’t matter what’s going on in
my life [environment]! And, I’m not concerned how long it will take [time]!
I’m going to do this!
Instantly, you got goosebumps. That’s because you moved into an altered state of being. The moment you felt that energy, you were sending your body new information. You felt inspired, and you came out of your familiar resting state. That’s because, by thought alone, your body moved from living in the same past to living in anew future. In reality,
your body was no longer the mind you were the mind. You were changing a belief.
The Effect of Perception
Like beliefs, our perceptions of past experiences—whether positive or negative—directly affect our subconscious state of being and our health.
In 1984, Gretchen van Boemel, MD, then associate director of clinical electrophysiology at Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, uncovered a striking example of this when she noticed a disturbing trend among
Cambodian women referred to Doheny. The women, all between the ages of 40 and 60 and living in nearby Long Beach, California (known as Little
Phnom Penh because of its roughly 50,000 Cambodian residents, were having severe vision problems, including blindness, in disproportionately high numbers.
Physically, the women’s eyes were perfectly healthy. Dr. van Boemel did brain scans on the women to evaluate how well their visual systems were functioning and compared them to how well their eyes were seeing.
She found that each of the women had perfectly normal visual acuity,
often 20/20 or 20/40, although when they tried to read an eye chart, their vision tested at legally blind. Some of the women had absolutely no light perception and couldn’t even detect any shadows even though there
wasn’t anything physically wrong with their eyes.
When Dr. van Boemel teamed up with Patricia Rozée, PhD, of
California State University, Long Beach, to do research on the women,
they found that those who had the worst vision had spent the most time living under the Khmer Rouge or in refugee camps when communist dictator Pol Pot was in power The genocide perpetrated by the Khmer
Rouge was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
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Of the women studied, 90 percent had lost family members (some as many as ten) during that time, and 70 percent were forced to watch their loved ones—sometimes even their entire families—being brutally murdered. These women saw things that their minds just could not accept Rozée told the Los Angeles Times.
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Their minds simply closed down, and they refused to see anymore—refused to see anymore death,
any more torture, anymore rape, anymore starvation.”
One woman was forced to watch her husband and four children be killed right in front of her, and she lost her sight immediately afterward.
Another woman had to watch a Khmer Rouge soldier beat her brother and his three children to death, which included seeing her three-month- old nephew being thrown against a tree until he died. She started losing her eyesight right after that.
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The women also suffered beatings,
starvation, untold humiliations, sexual abuse, torture, and hour days of enforced labor. Although now they were safe, many of these women told the researchers that they preferred to stay in their homes, where they had to relive their memories of the atrocities over and over through recurring nightmares and intrusive thoughts.
Documenting a total of 150 cases of psychosomatic blindness in
Cambodian women in Long Beach—the largest known group of such victims anywhere in the world—van Boemel and Rozée presented their research at the 1986 American Psychological Association annual meeting in Washington, DC. The audience was riveted.
The women in this study became blind or nearly blind not because of some eye disease or physical malfunction, but because the events they lived through had such an emotional impact that they literally cried until they could not see The heightened emotional amplitude from being forced to bear witness to the unbearable left them not wanting to see anymore. The event created physical changes in their biology—not in their eyes, but most likely in their brains—which altered their perception of reality for the rest of their lives. And because they kept replaying the traumatizing scenes over and over in their minds, their vision never improved.
While this is certainly an extreme example, our past traumatic experiences probably have similar effects onus. If you’re having vision challenges, what things might you have chosen not to see because of painful or frightening past experiences Similarly, if you’re having hearing challenges, what in your life might you be unwilling to hear?
Figure 7.2
charts how all of this happens. The line in the chart reflects a relative measurement of a person’s state of being, which starts out at a
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more or less normal or baseline level before the event occurs. When the line spikes, it indicates a strong emotional reaction to an event—such as when the women experienced the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge soldiers.
That horrific experience neurologically branded their brains and chemically changed their bodies, as well as altered their state of being—
their thoughts, their feelings, their attitudes, their beliefs, and ultimately their perceptions. Specifically, the women no longer wished to look at the world anymore, so through neurological rewiring and chemical resignaling, their biology complied.
A highly charged experience in our external reality will impress itself upon the circuitry of the brain and emotionally brand the body. As a result, the brain and body live in the past,
and the event alters our state of being, as well as our perception of reality. We are no longer the same personality.
Although the line in the graph eventually falls and levels o, the place where it ends up is a different place from where it began—indicating that the person remains chemically and neurologically altered by the experience. At that point for the Cambodian women, they were effectively living in the past, because they remained affected by the neurological and chemical branding that had come from the experience.
They were no longer the same women the event changed their state of being.
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