Expanding Your Thinking
My intention is not to tell you what to think. It’s to stimulate expanded thinking
When we are stuck in circular patterns, it’s often a natural result of stuck thinking. It’s why changing a system from within the system can be nearly impossible. The things that most need to change (the provider’s bias, the ineffective steps outlined in the process) have become implicit - assumed, unquestioned, and hidden from plain sight.
Before we change systems designed on outdated thinking and tethered to processes built on obsolete thinking, there needs to be a balancing of the dynamic. This path of change is for you, people using the systems, to be less dependent on them to know the answer for you.
To highlight another level of interconnections, this over-responsibility is often an internal double bind contributing to physician burnout. They are taught to be the ones with the answers and usually have other adaptations that drew them to the field and now contribute to unhealth. When people are rewarded for performance and meeting organizational goals, bringing in new ways of working may pose an incongruence.
This does not mean they are to be blamed or judged. It’s natural for it to be like this. I know my tone can still come across with judgment as I’m still emotionally processing the implications on my own wellbeing as well as that of my children and our relationships because of what was left hidden as I blindly followed the experts and authorities.
I do not want to communicate from my anger or stoke your fears. That would be more of the same that I passionately want to shift us out of! Simply expand thinking to open new conversations, new approaches, and new pathways of well-living.
As you expand your thinking about your context and your understanding of yourself, you can interact with the systems and services differently. You can understand the root causes that contribute to your pain, unwellness, and distress even if others do not take that approach. Interact with all the experts and specialists that you want. And collaborate as the expert with the most profound knowledge of you – the plethora of internal information, as well as your values that matter most in making decisions.
More than wanting you to agree with me, I want you to consider what expands your thinking and sparks new understanding. Be in the driver's seat of sorting what is useful for what you are trying to achieve. Shake up your autopilot ways of thinking.
It’s natural for us to get entrained in a way of thinking that we’ve been hearing repeatedly, particularly with fear-based messaging. Or comes from authority, if we developed in a family culture of compliance, or one where authority is always right. It becomes an adaptation for survival that sticks with us internally. AND, now, it’s lifegiving to you, the whole organism of you, to keep expanding on what you know and how you approach your health, wellbeing, and well-living.
Otherwise, we unintentionally create bigger problems. Like thinking stress is a thing to manage. First of all, it’s a dynamic process. Depending on which aspect of the dynamic needs attention, the solution will be different. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Yet the stress management industry is overloaded with one-size-fits-all answers.
What we have today is the tangle of crossed lines from a hundred-year-long game of telephone where pieces of information got used out of context, overgeneralized, and misrepresented. Mostly because someone saw, and continues to see, a way to use a hot topic to rationalize their product or service without fully understanding the actual problem. This is how the current economic system implicitly functions. It’s the status quo, unquestioned.
If you are interested in an expanded framework for understanding stress and how to navigate it, please leave a comment. I’m trying to decide if that's a section of the book or a whole other book. I’m curious about your level of curiosity.
The way of thinking that created the healthcare approach and operations for delivering it, as well as the workplace operations (organizational design), and the education process, predominantly applies the industrial production process to humans. But humans are not static machines with levers and parts. Humans are dynamic, living creatures of nature.
In whatever way you can, start seeing yourself as organically, naturally, dynamic with a biocomputer with algorithms for your survival, self-programmed by your innate adaptive intelligence. It’s more powerful and integrated than any supercomputer we’ve ever created.
Stress is a biological prompt for growth. But without the right support and energetic contribution from the environment, the organism (be it a person or a team or a whole company) gets overwhelmed and has to adapt for survival – constriction or amplification that becomes an autopilot until the right stimulus and environment develop it forward. There is no ‘going back’ in a dynamic system. Always continuing forward. Neuroplasticity is lifelong. Regeneration is in us.
We bypass the amazingness within ourselves for the sake of ‘fixing.’ Or the rules from others must be adhered to perfectly, ‘or else.’ These represent linear thinking. Cause-effect. We have an ideal of how a human body should work. If a part isn’t working, we assume that the solution is to fix the part so it meets the ideal. This overlooks a systemic fundamental that you cannot separate a part from the whole system. Why the part isn’t working is part of a larger systemic tangle deemed necessary by the person’s innate adaptive intelligence that has been working for your survival since one cell became two.
Let’s take ongoing pain and difficulty with a knee. To get rid of the pain, take this pill. Fix it by replacing it with an artificial one. Or, identify the external cause of the problem to be running; so stop running. Evidence has been mounting for decades that this is an incomplete understanding of how humans work.
The pain – signals through the nervous system alerting the person to pay attention – is only the communication. What are all the contributions to an abundance of pain signals in the concentrated area? Through a problem solving lens, pain is the measurement. Not the cause. The knee may or may not be the root cause. The context for discovering the root cause, or more accurately, the root contribution is understanding all the inseparable dynamics:
Trauma (physical + emotional) imprint from an old injury
Underdevelopment in the other joints that develop the knee to carry more of the burden
Held emotions of childhood suppression, particularly fear or shock
Electromagnetic block that holds the signals
This is how the whole human organism works. Why does it matter? Two ways:
If the root contribution is not addressed, the pain will persist. In the same area or to the next in command joint. It’ll be a never-ending game.
It opens new pathways to resolution that do not require introducing foreign substances and objects for the organism to assess and determine if it is actually helpful or poses a threat requiring another survival adaptation (a.k.a., creation of the next symptom like still having knee pain but it’s different, more depressed energy system from another experience with anesthesia, more anxiety symptoms because the pain killer lessens self connection so the organism adapts to loss of it’s communication system).
The first 1000 days of development holds critical clues as to the probable root contributions. Somatic, embodiment, and energetic techniques can address the root causes. Unfortunately, mental health therapy equally dismisses the whole person approach, over reliant on narrowly defined research, justifying dependence on coping skills.
You can expand your understanding and become an expert in how you want to approach it. I am not saying that you should use these latter options. I am saying that you can see the breadth of options that might be meaningful to you. I am saying that it’s possible to explore root contributions to support a healthier whole person rather than fix a symptom.
The all of you in the present is the minimum relevant context.
Understanding you through the dynamic of your lived experience is invaluable. You are uniquely positioned to lead the way.
A more accurate phrase would be 'Expand Your Understanding.' Look for additional angles of understanding. In addition to thinking cause and effect, think circles and indirect connections in the full context. Thinking is already glorified, yet we often think in the same way: stress causes heart disease, obesity causes heart disease, stress causes obesity...the reality is that they are all inseparable and none of them is directly controllable. We can to go a layer deeper in the internal systems than these pseudo-measurable outcomes.