Mind Body Health
Today’s mind-body medicine has ancient roots, dating back almost 2000
years to traditional Indian healing practices of yoga and nutritional “ayurvedic” and “holistic” healing.
Due to the substantial research support for these practices, Western medicine
is beginning to advocate many of them.
All of my clinical work is mind-body based, and is an Integrative or Functional approach. It is grounded in the continuous neurological and chemical interactions between thoughts, emotions, and your body. I was trained in this approach at Cambridge Hospital as a fellow of the Harvard Medical School.
Thoughts and emotions are a part of life, and provide invaluable information about our interactions with the external world. The mind-body medicine approach believes we can often have unhelpful or “negative” responses to difficult thoughts and emotions.
Living a full life is stressful. In American culture, emotions are viewed as a “weakness.” When they emerge, as they must, we deal with them either by suppressing them, or expressing them in unproductive ways. Both of these responses do not acknowledge the validity of the emotions.
Emotions that have not been acknowledged or understood can express as a body based problem, or interfere with healing. On the other hand, mind based issues such as daily stress, anxiety and depression have a strong body component.
A particular specialization of mine is a woman’s stress response, called Tend And Befriend. When a woman is stressed, she feels relief from stress by “tending and befriending;” connecting and caretaking.
New research describes this as very different from a man’s stress response, called Fight or Flight. The fight and flight response describes managing stress by either “fighting” with the stressor, or withdrawing from it.
Women exhibit both kinds of stress responses. There are often situations in which a Tend and Befriend response would be inappropriate. Switching back and forth between these two markedly different responses can leave a woman feeling fragmented. This is one reason women end up feeling much more stressed than men.
But women’s stress is also because their special stress reduction response, based on caring and connection, is not understood widely, or respected. Addressing a woman’s stress must include tools incorporating Tend and Befriend.
I have listed some of my specializations below. If you would like to continue this conversation, I can be contacted at my Wellesley office at 781-237-4343 ext. 3, my Norfolk office at 508-553-9703 ext. 3, or you can email me at .
Areas of specialization:
• Stress and feeling overwhelmed
• Using Guided Imagery for Healing
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• Using guided imagery for surgery preparation
• Cancer
Approaches Used:
• Guided Imagery
• Meditation
• Relaxation Based Therapies
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
• Self-Hypnosis
• Integrative Relational talk therapy
• Breath work