Dr. Wilner: Can you give me an example of some of the exercises you’d do in a class?
Dr. Gordon: All of the exercises and our entire program that we teach at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine is in this new book of mine, “The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma.” It’s really the distillation of not just the past 25 or 30 years, but really 50 years of work.
Courtesy Center for Mind-Body Medicine
Dr. James S. Gordon works with a group of individuals affected by the opioid epidemic in Cumberland, Md.
The techniques are all pretty simple and, as we say, evidence based. There is evidence that shows how they work on us physiologically, as well as psychologically. And they’re all pretty easy to teach to anyone.
Myself and about 60 or 70 of our faculty at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine are currently leading online groups. Then several hundred of the other people we’ve trained are also leading these groups. We’re still counting it up, but we probably have between 700 and 1,000 groups going around the world, led by our faculty and by people we’ve trained.
We teach a different technique every week in these online groups. Last week, after getting people energized and focused, we did a written dialogue with an emotion. You put down the initial of your name – in my case, “J” for Jim – and create a dialogue with an emotion, such as sadness. I would write it as fast as I can.
I would say, “OK, Sadness. Why are you here? What are you doing? I don’t enjoy having you around.” And Sadness writes back to me, “But you need me.” And J says, “What do you mean I need you?” And Sadness says, “Well, your brother died 7 weeks ago, didn’t he?” And I say, “Yes, he did.” And Sadness says, “Aren’t you sad?” I say, “Yes. I’m terribly sad and grieving all the time. But I wasn’t thinking about him at this moment.” And Sadness says, “But he’s there with you all the time and that sadness is in you.” And I say, “You mean it’s in me even here, now, as I’m talking with Andrew in this interview?” And Sadness says, “Yes. You can talk about your work. But in between the words, as you take a breath, don’t you feel it in your chest?” That’s the way the dialogue goes.
Dr. Wilner: What about specifically with the coronavirus? Fear is certainly an emotion. Nobody wants to get sick and die. Nobody wants to bring this disease home to their family. People are reluctant to even go outside and you can’t shake someone’s hand. Are there precedents for this?
Dr. Gordon: There are precedents, but only relatively small groups were affected before by, for example, severe acute respiratory syndrome or H1N1, at least in the United States. But we haven’t seen a global pandemic like this since 1918. None of us was around then – or I certainly wasn’t around. So for most everyone, not only has it not happened before, but we’ve never been so globally aware of everything that’s going on and how different groups are reacting.
I’ve been reading Daniel Defoe’s book, “A Journal of the Plague Year.” It’s really very interesting. It’s about the bubonic plague in 1665 London, although he wrote it in the 1720s. Some of the same things were going on then: the enormous fear, the isolation; rich people being able to escape, poor people having nowhere to go; conspiracy theories of one kind or another, about where the plague came from or blaming a group of people for it; magical thinking that it’s just going to go away. All of those things that happened several hundred years ago are going on now.
And we’re all simultaneously aware of all those things. There’s not only the fear, which should be universal because it’s a reasonable response to this situation, but also the terrible confusion about what to do. The President is saying one thing, governors something else; Anthony Fauci is saying something else, and Deborah Birx is saying something a little bit different. There’s this tremendous confusion that overlays the fear, and I think everybody is more or less feeling these things.
So yes, a dialogue with fear is a good thing to do because it can be clarifying. What we need here is a sense of, what is it that makes sense for me to do? What precautions should I take? What precautions shouldn’t I take?
I have a 17-year-old son who lives with his mom in California. He and I were on the phone the other day. He’s a basketball player and very serious about it. He said, “I don’t want to put my life on hold.” And my response was, “If you go outside too soon, your life may be on hold for a hell of a lot longer than if you stay inside because, if you get sick, it’s serious. But you also need to start looking at the evidence and asking yourself the right questions because I can’t be there all the time and neither can your mom.”
Everybody really needs to use these kinds of tools to help themselves. The tools we teach are extremely good at bringing us back into a state of psychological and physiological balance — slow, deep breathing being a very basic one. Because it’s only in that state that we’re going to be able to make the most intelligent decisions about what to do. It’s only in that state that we’re going to be able to really look our fear in the face and find out what we should be afraid of and what we shouldn’t be afraid of.
It’s a process that’s very much integrated. We’re talking now about how to deal with the emotions. But the first part of what we do in our groups and our online trainings and webinars is teach people to just take a few deep breaths. Just take a few deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, with your belly soft and relaxed. You can keep breathing this way while talking. That’s the antidote to the fight-or-flight response. We all learn about fight-or-flight in first-year physiology. We need to deal with it. We need to bring ourselves into balance. That’s the way we’re going to make the wisest decisions for ourselves and be best able to help our patients.