You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

how clean the hospital was, how helpful all the staff always were, what an easy place it was to go to just betaken care of. It was exactly the shift in focus she needed.
On the day of the appointment, as she drove to the hospital, Laurie gave thanks for the sunshine, for how well traffic was moving, for her car,
for her leg that was helping to operate the car, for her perfect eyesight, for the parking spot she easily found, and soon. As she later described to me,
“I went inside, gave them my name, shut my eyes, and meditated in the waiting room until it was my turn. I peed in a cup, handed the nurse the bag, and walked out, giving thanks for the simple act of walking. And I let goof the result—entirely. I was okay, deep down inside, with either outcome. It enabled me to forget about it entirely, because I wasn’t expecting anything. I felt happy, in fact, obsessively grateful. I stopped analyzing and just trusted.”
She remembered my saying that the moment she began to analyze how or when her healing would happen, it would mean she was just returning back to the old self, because the new self would never think in that unsure way. Laurie continued, And so, for no reason, I was simply grateful in the present moment ahead of the actual experience. I wasn’t waiting for the results to make me happy or thankful I was in a state of authentic gratitude and in love with life as if it had already happened. I
no longer needed something outside of me to make me happy. I was already whole and happy, because something inside of me was more whole and complete.”
She had almost nothing on any external grand scale by which to measure success, satisfaction, and security—not income, a house, a partner, a business, a child, not even any recent volunteer work she was particularly proud of. But Laurie had the love of her friends and those family members whom she could connect with. And she had a newfound love for herself. She’d realized that she’d never had self-love before—only self-interest. She told me later that it was a distinction that she never could have understood in her previous, narrow state of mind. She felt quite content with herself and her life. She said, And for the first time since I began this journey, I just didn’t care about the test. I was happy with myself.”
Two joyful weeks later, the test results came back. The doctor’s assistant told Laurie, Your results are perfectly normal. You scored a Your values are down from an abnormal, elevated level of 68, just five months ago.”
Laurie had crossed the river and was on the shores of anew life. There was no evidence of her past living in her body any longer. She was free—
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born anew.
Laurie told me later:
It occurred tome in an instant that my identity as patient and sick person with a disease had become stronger than any other role I’d played in life. I had pretended to be that person, but all along I knew I wasn’t. All of my attention and energy were consumed with being a patient instead of with being a woman, a girlfriend, a daughter, an employee, or even just a happy and whole person. I now know that I had no available energy to be anyone else until I took my attention off my old personality and old self, and reinvested my attention and energy into anew self. I’m so grateful that now I’m me instead of that!
Laurie now has no regrets and no significant resentments, and she feels no loss over the past. As she puts it, I wouldn’t want to judge or hold a grudge or feel forsaken from my past, because that choice would takeaway this feeling of wholeness. It’s as if my past condition was actually a blessing, because I overcame my own limitations and now I’m in love with who I am. I’m at peace. I am truly changed on the biological and cellular level. I am proof of the message that your mind can heal your body, and believe me, no one is more surprised than I am.”
Candace’s Story
Candace’s relationship, barely a year old, just wasn’t working. After their first few months together, she and her boyfriend became deeply embroiled in incessant fighting, volatile accusations, constant mistrust,
and ceaseless acts of blame. They both felt jealous and insecure, so their communications were frustrating, at best. They each were haunted by unfulfilled expectations that the other had no hope of satisfying. Ina rage she’d never known, Candace found herself in violent screaming matches,
throwing uncontrollable tantrums. These fits left her feeling more unworthy, more victimized, and more insecure. All of this behavior was new to her she hadn’t been an angry, frustrated, or upset person before,
and she’d never thrown a tantrum in all the 28 years of her life.
Although she knew on a gut level that staying in those circumstances wasn’t benefiting her, Candace couldn’t escape the emotional attachment to this unhealthy relationship. Yet as she became addicted to her stressful emotions, this became her new identity. Her personal reality was creating her new personality. Candace’s external environment was controlling how she was thinking, acting, and feeling. She’d become a victim trapped in
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her own life.
Flooded with the strong energy of survival emotions, Candace began to operate like an addict, needing that emotional rush of feelings and believing that it was something out there that was causing her to feel and think and react in certain ways. She couldn’t think or act greater than how she felt. Imprisoned in this emotional state, she was recreating the same thoughts, the same choices, the same behaviors, and the same experiences over and over again.
Candace was actually using her boyfriend and all of the conditions in her outer world to reaffirm who she thought she was. Her need to feel anger, frustration, insecurity, unworthiness, fear, and victimization was associated with that relationship. Even though it wasn’t serving her greatest ideal, she was too afraid of change to remedy the situation. In fact, she became so bonded to those emotions, because they reaffirmed her identity, that she would rather feel those familiar toxic feelings constantly than leave and embrace the unfamiliar—to step from the known into the unknown. Candace began to believe that she was her emotions, and as a result, she memorized a personality based on the past that she’d created.
About three months after things began to really go downhill, Candace’s body couldn’t sustain the stress of that heightened emotional state, and her hair started falling out in very large chunks within weeks, almost a third of it was gone. She began experiencing severe migraines, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, poor concentration, insomnia, weight gain, consistent pain, and myriad other debilitating symptoms—all of them quietly destroying her.
An intuitive young woman, Candace innately felt that this “dis-ease”
was a self-inflicted product of her own emotional issues. Just thinking
about her relationship would physiologically knock her out of balance in preparation for another conflict. Candace was turning on stress hormones and her autonomic nervous system by thought alone. And when she thought about her partner, or talked or complained about their relationship to her family and friends, she was conditioning her body to the mind of those emotions. It was the ultimate mind-body connection,
and because she couldn’t turnoff the stress response, eventually she began downregulating genes. Her thoughts were literally making her sick.
Six months into the relationship, Candace was still living in utter dysfunction, at the highest levels of stress. Even though she was sure by now that the symptoms in her body were a warning sign, she subconsciously continued to choose the same reality, which was now her normal state of being. Barraging her body with negative survival
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emotions, Candace was signaling the wrong genes in the wrong ways. She felt that she was slowly dying from the inside out, and she knew she needed to take control of her life but had no idea how to go about doing it. She couldn’t find the courage to leave the relationship, so she remained in it for over a year, living in a habitual mire of resentment and anger the entire time. Justified or not in feeling those emotions, Candace watched her body pay the price.

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