Can Unexplained Chronic Pain Be Linked to Grief, Trauma, and Stress?
What if your persistent unexplained chronic pain or illness isn’t just physical? Neuroplastic symptoms describe chronic pain or illness that defies conventional medical explanations, and Dr. David D. Clarke, a pioneering expert in neuroplastic symptoms and mind-body healing, has dedicated his career to uncovering the profound links between stress, grief, trauma, and physical symptoms. As President of the Association for Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology Emeritus at Oregon Health and Science University,
Dr. Clarke shares invaluable insights on common neuroplastic conditions, personal traits linked to these symptoms, and how they can be effectively diagnosed and treated, offering hope and highlighting the possibility of healing for those struggling with chronic pain or illness who have been told “they can’t find anything wrong.”
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- How unresolved emotional distress can manifest as chronic pain or illness.
- Common neuroplastic conditions and personal traits linked to these symptoms.
- The five common types of stress that are emotionally painful experiences.
- How neuroplastic symptoms can be effectively diagnosed and treated.
- The concept of stress illness and its evolution into a widespread epidemic.
- The difference between visible and invisible illnesses and the importance of listening without judgment.
- The “neuroplastic self-quiz” and its purpose.
- The importance of finding joy in life and aligning skills with what the world needs.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS DR. CLARKE:
- How did an encounter with a five-year-old girl reveal that truly listening without judgment can be a crucial key to later helping patients heal?
- What questions to ask patients, how to respond to the answers, and how to listen from both theological and physiological perspective?
- Why aren’t the profound hidden forces disrupting our ability to cope commonly taught in medical school?
- What are the five common types of stress that are emotionally painful experiences?
- Are there common neuroplastic conditions and personal traits linked to those symptoms that lead to the diagnosis and treatment?
- Are some people with certain personalities more prone to these symptoms than others?
- Tell us about your book and your neuroplastic self-quiz.
- What is Dr. Dave’s message about the importance of healing?
- What is the famous Dr. Dave’s tip on finding joy in life?
Grab Dr. Clarke’s They Can’t Find Anything Wrong: 7 Keys to Understanding, Treating, and Healing Stress Illness
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Can Unexplained Chronic Pain Be Linked to Grief, Trauma, and Stress?
Unlocking Neuroplastic Symptoms: A Deep Dive
I hope this message finds you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. David D. Clarke, who is a pioneering expert in neuroplastic symptoms and mind-body healing. Neuroplastic symptoms describe chronic pain or illness that defies conventional medical explanations, conditions where no clear disease or injury is present, and where traditional treatments have often failed to provide relief.
Consider this. What if the persistent pain or illness you or a loved one has battled for years isn’t physical? What if it’s deeply rooted in unresolved emotions, grief, trauma, and stress that the body has been holding onto in ways medicine has yet to fully understand? Dr. Clarke has devoted his career to uncovering the profound links between stress, grief, trauma, and physical symptoms, helping thousands of patients find relief where conventional medicine has fallen short.
As President of the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, he brings decades of expertise as a board-certified gastroenterologist and internal medicine physician. In addition to his leadership in this field, he serves as Assistant Director at the Centre for Ethics and holds the title of Clinical Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology Emeritus at Oregon Health and Science University.
Dr. Clarke’s impact extends beyond the clinic. He is the acclaimed author of They Can’t Find Anything Wrong! and the lead editor of two professional textbooks on psychophysiological disorders. Through hundreds of interviews, lectures, and his role as executive producer of three documentary films, he has become a leading voice in the field of neuroplastic symptoms and mind-body healing, reaching audiences across North America and Europe. His podcast, The Story Behind the Symptoms, along with the comprehensive online resource hub, Symptomatic.me, offer invaluable guidance for both patients and healthcare professionals.
I’m looking forward to talking with Dave, who joins us from Portland, Oregon, about how unresolved emotional distress can manifest as chronic pain or illness. We’ll also explore common neuroplastic conditions, personal traits linked to those symptoms, and how they can be effectively diagnosed and treated for an enlightening conversation that will surely inspire hope and highlight the possibility of healing perhaps for you or for someone you know who is struggling with chronic pain or illness and has been complaining that they can’t find anything wrong.
Dave, a warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
It’s great to be with you. We already have a spiritual connection because my mother was born in West Orange, New Jersey.
Early Seeds of Empathy: Dr. Clarke’s Childhood Gift
That’s a beautiful connection. That’s lovely. Who would’ve known? That’s wonderful. There you go. Speaking of your mom, there was a time when you were a little tyke. Your abilities for listening and seeking seemed to have started when you were a very young kid, because kids trusted you from a very early age. How did this gift shape your experiences in preschool and kindergarten in Venezuela, which is where you started? I guess your mom found her way from West Orange to Venezuela. How did an encounter with a five-year-old girl reveal that truly listening without judgment can be a crucial key to later helping patients heal? Tell us about your early beginnings.
It’s a funny story. I have no idea where this came from. I don’t even remember this happening, but both of my parents tell the story in exactly the same way. The story was that when I was in kindergarten, a young lady named Priscilla locked herself in a closet. Why you have a lock on the inside of a closet in a kindergarten, I will never know, but they did.
The brain can cause severe, long-lasting pain or illness. Share on X
The teacher could not get this young lady to unlock the door and come out. She talked to her through the door for quite a period of time, and the little girl refused to come out. The teacher finally gave up and went looking for a custodian to unlock it. Who does this as a five-year-old? I went over to the door, and I started talking to Priscilla on the other side.
The story is that she unlocked the door and came out in response to that conversation. I have no idea what I said. I have no idea why I took it upon myself to do that, but clearly, there was something about me as a five-year-old that felt connected to people who were in distress. Here I am, quite a number of decades later, still doing the same kind of work.
Helping people, talking them through their distress, and working with them. That’s marvelous. As a soul, those seeds were planted in you already. That was the beginning of your path.
It certainly seems that way. Yes.
Chronic pain and illness often are generated not in the body but the brain. Share on X
Bridging the Gap: Visible vs. Invisible Illnesses in Medicine
I could point to some things in my life, too. Who knew? They led me to where I am. You worked with a psychiatrist many years later who opened your eyes about the difference between visible and invisible illnesses, what questions to ask patients, how to respond to the answers, and how to listen from both a psychological and physiological perspective. If you look at the path already, this is developing your childhood. You then meet a psychiatrist who’s working along those lines of talking to people and working with them. Tell us about that experience because it was so pivotal.
It was, but I didn’t see it coming. I was the most traditionally trained Western-style physician. I had the usual education for a physician in the United States, which was 4 years of medical school and then 3 years of residency. It was all about structures and organs. It was the usual assumption that most people have that if you’ve got pain or illness, you must have a diseased organ or a damaged structure to explain it.
The last thing I expected in the eighth year of my training was to encounter a patient whom I didn’t know the first thing about diagnosing or treating. This was a 37-year-old who, for 2 years, had been averaging 1 bowel movement per month despite taking four different laxatives at double the recommended doses. She was sent to us from another university because they could find no explanation for this.
We did some specialized testing at UCLA, where I was at the time. That test was normal also, which was a big surprise to my department chair and me. It was left to me to do her exit interview and tell her she was going to have to live with this. Something about my brain, going all the way back to age five, kicked in. I wanted to have a little bit more of a conversation with her than just telling her she was going to have to live with it.
Many unexplained symptoms stem from pathways in the brain and nervous system. Share on X
Eventually, she trusted me enough to tell me that she had been severely abused as a girl, between the ages of 4 and 12. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I had no training in what to do with information like that. I had no training that I should even be asking somebody about that. I certainly had no idea that abuse like that could play a role in serious physical symptoms in somebody’s body 25 years later.
I was in gastroenterology at the time, and still was throughout my career. I had heard about this psychiatrist who had an interest in these brain-to-body conditions. I thought, “I’ll get the patient an appointment.” I was glad to have something positive to do for her, thinking maybe it’ll help her live with this terrible condition a little better.
I forgot all about her. Three months went by, and then I ran into Harriet Kaplan, who was the psychiatrist, in an elevator, which was the elevator ride that changed my career. Between the ground floor and the fifth floor, Harriet told me she had cured this patient with less than ten weeks of counseling sessions. That, too, blew my mind. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but the idea that you could alleviate a serious physical symptom by talking to somebody, I had no idea. Nobody had even hinted that that was possible. I was intrigued, to say the least.
The idea that serious physical symptoms could be alleviated just by talking to someone was unheard of. Nobody had even hinted that it was possible. Share on X
I wanted to be a complete doctor. I wanted to be able to handle whatever came through my door. Harriet became something of a mentor for me. She taught me her framework for how she thinks about these things over the last year and a half of my training. When I got into private practice in Portland, Oregon, it turned out there weren’t any Harriets here, so I had to start doing this myself.
It also turned out that this condition was not rare. Although most of my patients weren’t as severely afflicted as the first one, I was seeing 5 or 6 a week, or 250 or 300 a year. Sitting here, I have treated over 7,000 people with this condition. It was a very rewarding part of my practice. It was about 1 in 3 of my patients. I could help them get better, and I love doing it.
What an amazing thing, though, because most of the patients who come to you have probably seen so many other people. They probably don’t have a lot of hope, but then they’re like, “Here’s another guy that got recommended to me.” All of a sudden, you talk to them and you’re able to help them that way. You find a link that no one else could. That’s fantastic.
It was very rewarding. You’re right. The rest of the healthcare profession had been taught it’s about organs, structures, damage, and disease. When they don’t find those things to explain a patient’s symptoms, then unfortunately, the patients get thrown into this category of, “It’s all in your head. These symptoms are not real. You’re neurotic. You’re crazy. You’re imagining this. You’re mentally weak. You can’t handle your own stress. We can’t diagnose you. You’re going to have to live with this.” Every single one of those assumptions is false. In most cases, the exact opposite is true. These are people who are at least as mentally strong as everybody else. They’re coping with levels of stress that would bring anybody to their knees.
The Epidemic of Stress Illness: Why Aren’t We Taught This?
My whole premise with this show about people going for healing is about what you are doing. These things are happening to you, and they go into your body. Where’s it going to go if you’re repressing it or if you don’t heal it? Get it out. I doubt there is a single person tuning in to this show who doesn’t experience stress. There’s something that you call stress illness that has evolved into a widespread epidemic in the 21st century. I don’t think there’s anyone tuning in who would dispute that.
Why aren’t the profound hidden forces disrupting our ability to cope commonly taught in medical school? Look at how you are helping people. I have experienced doctors, too. They have no psychological understanding. Not only that, no one taught them about bedside manners either, I could say. Why hasn’t the medical field caught up, or the psychiatric part blended or shared with the other part? Is there a reason for that?
Yeah. We’re starting to see that change. The reason is that it’s such a different way of thinking. You have to develop some interview skills to be able to talk to people about the experiences they went through and to be able to have the empathy to understand when they’re explaining this to you what it’s like for them. These are psychological skills. They are completely different than dealing with organs and structures.
On the other side, the mental health professionals in their training are typically not taught about what to do with people who have physical symptoms, such as migraines, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, long COVID, or chronic fatigue. Chronic back pain is another big one. For mental health professionals, that’s not part of their training either.
These patients tend to fall into this giant blind spot in the system where the medical clinicians don’t learn the psychological aspects, and the mental health professionals don’t learn the physical aspects. That’s starting to change. The reason is that we’ve got research from well-respected centers across North America that are showing the impact of this.
The Boulder back pain study is a great example. They had patients with chronic back pain for ten years, and within a month of the new neuroplastic recovery therapies that my colleagues and I have developed, their pain score dropped by 75% in 4 weeks after 10 years. This was published in JAMA Psychiatry, which is a very prestigious journal. You don’t get anything published in there unless it’s been rigorously conducted.
There are other studies that are confirming this, everywhere from Halifax to UCLA. It’s starting to get attention. I’ve been teaching in multiple graduate schools for a decade, including my local medical school. Both medical schools in Slovenia are teaching this. It’s popping up in different places. We’re starting to see that change.
Decoding Stress: The Five Common Emotional Pain Triggers
To this, I would say bravo. It’s about time, you would think. Tell us what the five common types of stress are so that everyone reading can relate to one of them. I’m sure they probably will. What are the five common types of stress that come from emotionally painful experiences?
You’re touching directly on my process. When I have a patient with symptoms, the first thing I do is make sure there’s not an organ disease or structural damage. I’m doing the diagnostic tests. This was 2/3 of my practice throughout my career. If there is no organ disease or structural damage that can explain the patient’s symptoms, then I’m doing what I call a stress evaluation. I’m looking at these five different major areas.
The first one is very simple. It’s, “What’s going on in your life right now?” If the fluctuations in the level of symptoms are connected to fluctuations in levels of stress for somebody, for example, then I know I’m on the right track. I have a simple example. This patient’s other doctors hadn’t figured this out. He was only getting his pain when he was driving to work. You’ve diagnosed him already.
I’m imagining he must have had quite the boss.
What happened to him was that he was in a two-person office in a big corporation. His partner was transferred 1500 miles away, so instantly, his workload doubled. That was what led to his condition. A very simple but slightly more complicated case was a gentleman with 25-plus years of low back pain every single day, except two weeks out of the year. You can probably guess what he was doing during the two weeks.
A vacation?
Exactly. That was clearly not structural back pain. The second major area is stress when people were children, which is what we call Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs. This can be severe, like the abuse that my patient with the severe constipation suffered, but it can be much more subtle than that. It can be anything that makes you feel less about yourself as a kid, like feeling like you’re second-rate or not measuring up, or, in some cases, worthless. That can have a significant impact on people as adults and create all kinds of stresses long-term that people may not fully recognize.
When I ask people to think about their childhoods, I’m asking them to do more than just look back. I’m asking them to imagine what it would be like for their own child to be in that same situation. “What would it be like to watch your child try to cope with everything that you did?” People often get a much more accurate sense of the burdens that they were under when they were kids. They’re able to connect with that and explain it to me more, and then I can look for the long-term impacts that they’re still struggling with. That turns out to be the case in a majority of my patients, especially the ones who’ve had symptoms for longer than a year.
The three other areas that I look for are simply mental health conditions, but it turns out that, as common as they are, they can manifest primarily with a physical symptom rather than a mental health symptom. We’re talking about depression, anxiety disorders, and post-traumatic stress. Many of my patients with depression don’t necessarily tell me that they feel all that depressed.
They may admit to being stressed, exasperated, or frustrated, or they’ll express desperation that I can alleviate the physical symptom that they have, but they’re saying, “I don’t feel all that depressed.” I have to go into more detail and ask them about more specific symptoms that are connected to depression. These include not sleeping well, low energy level, low appetite, losing interest in activities they used to love to do, crying for little or no reason, and feeling like their life is not worth living. It is those kinds of things.
For the anxiety disorders, some of my patients have been so anxious for so long that it feels normal to them. The clue is that their symptoms are more severe or more frequent when they’re away from what they consider a safe environment. One of my patients had 100 attacks of symptoms over a 9-month period of time, but every single 1 of those attacks happened away from home. She spent half her time at home, so statistically, half of her attacks should have happened at home. Instead, not a single one did.
Finally, post-trauma. Often, the trauma happened right before the symptoms began, but the patients don’t connect it. You have to ask them specifically. A colleague of mine in Tucson tells a story about a woman who’d been going from doctor to doctor for months with no explanation for her symptoms. Her husband said, “I wonder if the fact that she had been a hostage during the robbery of a store right before her symptoms began could be connected to this.”
Often the trauma happened right before the symptoms began, but the patients don't connect it. Share on X
It turned out that for 30 or 40 minutes, she had a handgun pointed at her neck. She had all kinds of post-traumatic stress symptoms, flashbacks, and nightmares. She was being vigilant and avoiding certain situations because they reminded her of the trauma. My colleague in Tucson knew to look for this. Unfortunately, most clinicians have yet to learn about that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would think that sometimes, all these repressed emotional causes and symptoms are not told because, first of all, people have shame. If they had a terrible childhood, they’ve repressed it. They don’t want to talk about it. They haven’t carried it. Maybe they’ve got a mental health condition. In this society, there’s a lot of shame attached to those kinds of things. It’s very easy to bury that stuff. Someone like you is talking with them gently and kindly, and bringing that out. They have been hiding that their whole lives. Would you agree with me?
That is one of the major long-term impacts. People are made to feel like they’re not good enough. , or they’re worthless, in some cases. One of the most moving experiences that I had in my career was a 22-year-old who’d been ill for 5 years with no explanation for her condition. It turned out that she had been sexually abused by her father.
In her early years of that happening, she had sometimes been able to evade her father and prevent it from happening. When she was nine years old, she realized that when she was successful in avoiding him, he would take out his frustration by beating up her little brothers. She made the choice at age nine that she was going to stop trying to avoid him so that she could save her little brothers from getting beaten up. What an incredible, moral choice that she was making. What a sacrifice of herself at age nine.
I’m usually not speechless in the exam room, but I was after she said that. I did not know what to say. I’m sitting there, staring at the wall, helplessly wondering how I can possibly respond to that when the next thing she says is that she had felt so ashamed by the sexual abuse, even though she should have been incredibly proud of herself for making a sacrifice to save her little brothers. She had the complete opposite reaction and was carrying that shame to such a degree that it was affecting her physically.
That’s amazing. What about her mother? Where was Mommy during all that time? Also abused, battered, or something? I can relate to that on a less poignant level, but I can relate to that story. There’s also the feeling, probably for her, about being abandoned because no one came to help her.
This is another area that many of my patients struggle with. They have a lot of anger about what happened to them. It can be anger at both parents, both the abuser and the other parent who didn’t rescue them, didn’t save them, didn’t prevent it, or didn’t intervene. There can be a lot of anger at that person as well.
All emotions are felt in the body, especially anger. If you have repressed the anger, if you have taken the anger in order to survive your childhood, and you have learned how to take those emotions and bury them somewhere, then the physical manifestation is still there. The physical manifestation of the emotion that is always a part of the emotion is still there, but it’s disconnected from the conscious experience of the emotion. All you’ve got is this physical experience, whether it’s pain or a non-pain symptom. You’re wondering, “Where is it coming from?” You start focusing on the body instead of the real source of it.
You probably feel good because it’s not in your consciousness or in your awareness. You put it somewhere, but you don’t realize that where you put it is affecting your body. While you got it out of town, it went to town here.
That’s right. The level of severity is astounding. This was something I had to learn. A lot of the clinicians assume that you can’t have a severe symptom from this process, but these symptoms are 100% real. They can be as severe as those caused by organ disease or structural damage. They can last for years or even decades.
My personal record patient had abdominal pain for 79 years, but she was successfully treated. I was asked to see a 17-year-old girl on her 70th day in the hospital. She’d had unexplained abdominal pain for eighteen months. When I was asked to see her, she was getting morphine around the clock in massive doses. You’re never going to convince a patient like that that her symptoms weren’t real. She was successfully treated as well by uncovering what the stress issues were, intervening in the family in a way that those stress issues could be alleviated. She started turning down her own dose of morphine.
Beyond Physical: Common Neuroplastic Conditions and Personality Links
That’s amazing. For everyone tuning in, are there common neuroplastic conditions and personal traits linked to those symptoms that lead to the diagnosis and treatment? What are the chronic things that happen to people? For some people with certain personalities, are they more prone to these symptoms than others?
The answer to that question is yes. Let’s start with the conditions that can do this. It’s from head to toe because the nervous system goes throughout the body. If the mind is expressing distress, it can choose nerve pathways that go every which way and, in fact, can affect the body in multiple locations at the same time.
The nervous system, extending throughout the body, allows the mind to express distress via multiple nerve pathways, affecting various locations simultaneously. Share on X
Let’s start at the top. Migraines, dizziness, ringing in the ears, temporomandibular joint pain or stiffness, visual disturbances, pseudo seizures, difficulties swallowing, and certain kinds of rashes. Pain in the back or neck is a common one. Pain in the chest, difficulty breathing, unexplained cough, irritable bowel, fibromyalgia, pelvic pain, bladder spasms, chronic fatigue, long COVID, joint pains, functional neurologic disorders, and complex regional pain syndrome. I’m sure I’m leaving some out. There’s also brain fog. The list goes on and on. The only common denominator is having more than one at a time. It happens quite commonly.
I have to ask you. I know so many people with tinnitus. Is that from a stress response, usually?
Often, it is. It happens enough as a stress response that the stress evaluation I was talking about earlier should be part of a complete evaluation of patients. Anytime you have a symptom that the doctor doesn’t have a definitive physical explanation for, a stress evaluation should be done.
What about personality traits? Are some of us more prone to get these things than others?
Yeah. It turns out that when you have experienced adverse childhood experiences, the child can develop certain personality traits as a way of coping with that environment. One of the things that they’ll do is try to be the best little kids they can be. That can end up in a person who’s highly self-critical, a perfectionist, and with low self-esteem.
They have a focus on the needs of other people in their world to the point where they fail to put themselves on the list of people they take care of. You are choosing individuals to be in close personal relationships with who are toxic, who have needs, or who have problems that you end up needing to solve. It ends up being an unbalanced relationship where you are giving the other person a lot more than you are giving back. Lack of assertiveness is another one. There are people who are so busy taking care of everybody else in the world that they never play. They never take time for their own joy.
The people-pleasers of the planet.
That’s because that’s what they grew up doing, trying to solve the problems in their household.
A Miracle Unfolds: Curing 15 Years of Hospitalizations in Under an Hour
You’ve got an inspiring story of a patient who was hospitalized at a major university 60 times in 15 years, and you cured her in less than an hour.
That is one of my favorite stories, not only because it was so dramatically successful, but also because it came at a time in my career when I was questioning myself as a procedure-oriented gastroenterologist who spent 2/3 of his time in the office putting endoscopes in people, which is a very technical specialty. I had no formal credentials in psychology.
I had learned this approach from Harriet Kaplan. I was having success with it, but I kept thinking, “Somebody’s going to come along someday, put their hand on my shoulder, and say, ‘Dave, we’ve got people who know how to do this, and they’re better at it than you are. You can stop doing this now.’” That was what was in my mind when this patient was hospitalized with an attack of severe dizziness and vomiting that needed to be hospitalized.
When I went to see her, she said something to me I’ve never heard from any other patient, which was, “Thank you for coming, doctor, but don’t waste your time with me. You’d be better off seeing your other patients.” I said, “What makes you say that?” She said, “I’ve been having between 6 and 10 of these attacks every year for 15 years. Half of them are bad enough that they put me in the hospital.”
She lived in the town where there was a prestigious university. She’d been hospitalized there and gotten the best of care 60 times in 15 years. She saw a dozen specialists, but they didn’t know how to do this neuroplastic diagnosis, so they completely missed what was going on. They couldn’t find anything wrong with her. In fact, she said that. She said, “They can’t find anything wrong.” That ended up being the title of my first book.
They Can’t Find Anything Wrong: 7 Keys to Understanding, Treating, and Healing Stress Illness:
They got so frustrated that they had a psychiatrist see her. Psychiatrists don’t necessarily know the kinds of issues that can make people physically ill as opposed to mentally ill. The psychiatrist completely missed a diagnosis, too. She pronounced her mentally healthy and sent her back to her regular doctor. I said, “If you can give me half an hour and tell me your story one more time, I might be able to come up with something because I’ve been making lost causes a personal interest of mine.” She sighed. Her husband was sitting there, and he stared down at his shoes, like, “Here we go again.”
It turned out there were only two pieces of information that were needed to solve her case. The first was that she’d been verbally and emotionally abused by her mother as a girl, as an adolescent. She’s 50 years old, and her mother is still doing it. The mother is in her 70s. She was still verbally and emotionally abusing her for her entire life, basically. That was information piece number one.
Number 2 was that although most of her attacks of illness took place in and around her home community, there was this little town about 40 miles from where she lived that would always trigger an attack. That, to me, is what I call A GSC or a Giant Screaming Clue. Your body doesn’t know what little town you’re in. Only your brain knows that. There was something about that town that was triggering for her. I needed to find out what it was.
The first guess was that her mother lived there. That turned out not to be true. I got frustrated trying to figure out what it was about this town. She, her psychiatrist, and all her doctors hadn’t been able to figure it out, so I said, “If this town triggers your attacks, why do you ever go there? Why don’t you avoid this place?” It turned out it was because it was on the direct route to Portland, and her mother lived in Portland.
It was anxiety.
Also, getting anger triggered. She’s driving. She’s on her way to visit mom, and she’s subconsciously thinking about how terrible the long weekend with mom is going to be. The anxiety, the anger levels, and the emotions are building up in her body, but not consciously aware of this at all. She was telling me about her mother’s abuse in the same tone of voice you’d use to read a grocery list. There was no visible emotion and no audible emotion there.
I pointed out to her what I thought was going on. She’s thinking, at least subconsciously, about the upcoming visit with mom. The enormous tension, anger, and anxiety are building up. When she gets 40 miles down the road, her husband’s got to pull the car over, and she’s vomiting all over the guardrail. She thinks about this, and she’s still skeptical. I thought I came up with this brilliant analysis of her condition, and she’s not buying it.
I had to think about some way to try to clarify this for her. I said, “What happens if you drive 40 miles in some other direction and you’re not going to visit your mom?” She thought about it, and she realized she could drive 40 miles anywhere else. She could drive 140 miles anywhere else and she wouldn’t have a problem as long as she wasn’t going to visit her mom. That was her light bulb moment. I can still remember her looking up at the ceiling and going, “I can’t believe it.” The great thing about this is that, in her case, bringing this into conscious awareness cured her on the spot.
That’s amazing. Did she feel the need to go for other kinds of therapy?
I recommended it to her. I don’t know if she ever did, but she did call me a year later when she was back in town visiting her mom. She said she’d gone the entire year without an attack. She’d been able to drive through the little town that was 40 miles away with no problem. That was very nice of her to take the time to do that.
Hope and Healing: Dr. Clarke’s Message and Resources for a Joyful Life
That’s amazing. Since you mentioned They Can’t Find Anything Wrong!, tell us about your book and your neuroplastic self quiz, which some of our readers may be very interested in taking or telling their loved ones about.
The book is a collection of four dozen stories from my practice that illustrate the spectrum of different kinds of stresses that can make people physically ill, and also treatment methods that apply to each of the different kinds of stresses that can help people overcome these symptoms. The website, Symptomatic.me, for our nonprofit, Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, has a twelve-item quiz. It takes less than three minutes. It’s for people who are wondering if any of these ideas might apply to their own symptoms.
Each question comes with a sentence or two of explanation. The more questions you answer yes to, the more likely it is that there’s a neuroplastic process going on that could account for your symptoms. It doesn’t cover everything, but by the time you’ve finished the quiz, you’ve got a lot of information that you didn’t have before.
Maybe it helps you to think about going to a therapist or some kind of healing modality.
We’ve got buckets of resources on that website. We’ve got courses, videos, and recommended books that are scientifically based. We adhere very closely to the science on this. There are scores of companies out there that will sell you all kinds of devices, gadgets, and manual treatments that have no scientific value. We are very focused on recommending to our users those modalities that have been proven in research.
That’s great. Tell me what Dave’s message about the importance of healing is that you would like to share with our readers.
The message is one of hope. Many of my patients have been trying everything under the sun to get better, some of them for years or decades. Many of them have had symptoms in multiple locations in their bodies. My personal record patient had 27 different symptoms that he personally was suffering from. I mentioned the patient who had symptoms for 79 years and another one for 55 years. They were all successfully treated. The young lady with the morphine around the clock was no longer taking opioids of any kind 30 days after we met. There’s tremendous hope for people with this approach, no matter how long or how severe you’ve been afflicted before.
It’s good if you suspect you’ve been afflicted to find out more about that, or if you’ve been repressing it. What is the famous Dr. Dave’s tip on finding joy in life?
My feeling about a well-lived life is that you should never stop searching for a place where what you most love to do and where your greatest skills are can find the best fit with what the world needs.
That’s beautiful. Thank you for bridging this crucial gap between the medical and psychological world, which has helped thousands reclaim not only their health but also their joy, purpose, and the fullest expression of who they are meant to be. Healing that transforms lives at the deepest level is extraordinary. Your commitment to uncovering the root causes of chronic pain and illness is truly inspiring. Thank you for this enlightening conversation filled with invaluable insights. Many blessings to you.
Thank you. I appreciate your bringing this information to your audience.
Thank you very much.
Guest Links:
- Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms
- They Can’t Find Anything Wrong!: 7 Keys to Understanding, Treating, and Healing Stress Illness
- The Story Behind the Symptoms Podcast
- Become a member of ATNS
- Connect with Symptomatic.me on Facebook
- Connect with the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms on Instagram
- JAMA Psychiatry
About Dr. David D. Clarke
David D. Clarke, MD is President of the Association for Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms. He is also Assistant Director at the Center for Ethics and Clinical Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology Emeritus both at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA.
