S2 EP260 – Being a Warrior for Your Own Health Care

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m sure most of you know by now that we don’t have the same kind of medical care we used to have before corporations purchased private practices and hospitals. 

Perhaps when this first started, doctors thought this would make their lives easier, only to find that they are no longer allowed to practice medicine in a way that’s fulfilling to them. Where they used to schedule as much time as necessary to understand what the patient needed, now they are given 15 minutes with each patient. Not only are they frustrated with the limited time, but they are not even allowed to call another doctor for a consultation, and if they refer the patient, it takes weeks and sometimes months before the specialist can see the patient.

As a result of all of this, so many doctors are leaving their jobs that there is now a shortage of doctors. I learned of an older doctor who still loved his work but quit his practice because his malpractice insurance was $96,000 a year and what he earned couldn’t keep up with this. And medical school is so expensive and causes so much debt, that fewer young people are going to medical school, although I was heartened to read that some philanthropists are donating millions to med schools to help finance medical students.

With the rise in illness due to our toxic environment and toxic food, the need for good doctors has greatly increased, but in the US, there are now fewer doctors due to doctors retiring early because of frustration, and fewer going to med school. In addition, doctors have double the suicide rate of the rest of the population. What does that say about the medical situation?

To try to fill this need, many people will first have to see a nurse practitioner, who might have only a master’s degree rather than the rigorous training of an MD. 

And how long does it take you to get an appointment? I’ve read that the average wait to see a new doctor is 26 days, so what happens if there is a medical emergency? If you go the ER, you will likely see a nurse practitioner who might not have the training to manage the situation. 

There is obviously a health care crisis in the US because what used to be the mainstay of our health care system, which was doctors being in private practice, is now on the verge of collapse due to the corporate take-over of our medical system.

Some people who can afford it choose to go to a concierge doctor where you pay a monthly fee and it’s not covered by insurance, and even with that, many people complain that they are not receiving the level of care they need. 

With our population aging, this is causing a huge problem. Which leads me to the topic of this podcast, which is about becoming a warrior advocate for your own health and wellbeing. 

One aspect of being a warrior advocate is being willing to do your own research and come to your doctor with educated questions. Another aspect is to not make your doctor’s assessment more important than your own intuitive knowing. Unfortunately, often when doctors don’t know what to do for you, they will either discount what you are saying or tell you that it’s psychosomatic and you need to see a therapist. While this is sometimes true, often it isn’t. For example, at the beginning of COVID, many doctors dismissed patients suffering from long COVID, but of course we now know that this is a very serious illness – not psychosomatic.

Another aspect of being a warrior advocate is to learn as much as you can about what creates health and wellbeing, so that you rarely have to visit a doctor. To me, this is the main way I can advocate for myself and am a warrior regarding my own health.

Are you interested in your own health and vitality? This has always been very important to me, so I have done much inquiry into what creates excellent health. Learning as much as I can about my own health is what gives me the ability to advocate for myself with health care practioners.

Before going into what I’ve learned about health and wellbeing, I would like to share what some of our challenges are to achieving excellent health.  

Some people are born with inherited health issues or inherited tendencies toward health issues. For example, my grandmother and my aunt both died of pancreatic cancer. I have known for a long time that my pancreas is a weak organ in my body, and because of this I’ve learned what I have to do to keep my pancreas healthy.

Another challenge is our polluted environment. The air, water, pesticides, plastics, hormones, and chemicals that we are exposed to daily can have a disastrous effect on health, especially in combination with inherited tendencies.

In addition, the stress of child abuse erodes the immune system. Many adults who have experienced childhood physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are challenged with health issues as adults, due to their weakened immune systems from abuse.

Certainly, ignorance also takes its toll. I didn’t know when I was younger and washing my hands in turpentine after doing an oil painting that I was adding toxicity to my body. I have shared about how my parents used “Accent” on everything they cooked, not knowing that MSG is harmful to the body. Many people have obediently taken medications for various health problems, only to learn years later that they contribute to heart disease or cancer. Millions of people believe that they are eating well when they eat packaged and processed foods, and foods from factory farms. And how many of us knew – or know now – that breathing formaldehyde from carpets and furniture might cause severe health problems, or that beds infused with fire retardant can cause illness? The list goes on and on.

And of course, accidents, as well as pandemics, can cause serious health problems.

Now let’s move on to what can help create excellent health for many of us.

Essential for health is learning about how to create a healthy gut. Research has discovered that our gut is the seat of our immune system, and when it’s out of balance due to toxic bacteria from our toxic foods and toxic environment, it causes both organ and brain issues.

So a major aspect of being able to be a health warrior is, as much as you can, eat only natural, single ingredient, unprocessed organic foods.

Another aspect is to find a form of exercise that you love so that you are consistent with it. You will not be consistent if you choose a form of exercise that you believe you ‘have’ to do, so see if you can find something that you enjoy and look forward to.

Finally, and perhaps most important, is to adopt a healthy and positive state of mind so that you are not creating stress in your body.

All these are vitally important. However, even if you change your diet and start to exercise, if you continue to think thoughts that cause your body stress you will likely not achieve optimal health.

Research indicates that stress is a primary cause of illness – both physical and emotional. Anything that stresses us causes our body to go into a fight or flight reaction, which upsets the immune system.

One of the most powerful things you can do to bring about excellent health is to change your thoughts. Any thought that causes anxiety, depression, anger, hurt, tension, or fear is harming your physical health. 

Here, of course, is where Inner Bonding comes into the picture. If you are dedicated to being in Step One throughout the day, noticing your emotions, wanting responsibility for your thoughts that are causing any distress, and then moving through the other Five Steps of Inner Bonding, you will gradually change your thoughts.

For example, Robert, a client of mine, was distressed following his check-up. His doctor told him that his blood pressure was way too high and wanted to put him on medication. Instead, in addition to modifying his diet and starting to exercise, Robert decided to work on his thoughts. He devoted himself to noticing his thoughts that were creating his stress and started to feel much better. A few months into doing Inner Bonding, his blood pressure was normal!

Robert’s situation is not unique. Over and over clients tell me about their health improvements as a result of practicing Inner Bonding – along with healing their gut, eating well, and exercising.

One of the most important changes you can make in your health is to decide that you want responsibility for changing the aspects of your life style that are not supporting your health, and changing the aspects of your thinking that are creating your stress. And practicing Inner Bonding and developing your loving adult gives you the ability to do this, and the courage to be a warrior advocate for your health with your health care practitioners. Your wounded self does not have the ability to be a loving advocate, but a loving adult does. A loving adult has the courage to speak up for yourself and not just hand authority to a doctor or other practitioner.

Being a warrior advocate for your health means having the courage to speak up for yourself when what a health practitioner is telling you to do doesn’t feel right to you. It means trusting your inner knowing rather than just trusting a doctor. It means doing your own research so that you know what you are talking about it. It means being the loving parent to your inner child that you would be with an actual beloved child. Many parents have no problems speaking up for their actual child yet have problems speaking up for themselves.

I was always a strong advocate for my children. I remember when my first child was about five years old. He was having problems that related to his tonsils and the doctor wanted to take his tonsils out. Due to my own research, I knew that the tonsils were part of the immune system, and I didn’t want his tonsils out. So I told the doctor that I would do all I could to heal him without the surgery – and I did. Through reading everything that was available at that time, I was able to heal him, and he never had to have his tonsils out. I wish my parents had done this for me. Not only was having my tonsils out at five years old a traumatic experience for me, but I wish I still had my tonsils as part of my immune system. Tonsils getting inflamed doesn’t mean that they should come out. It means that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. 

While I never had any problems speaking up for three children, until I developed my loving adult for myself through my practice of Inner Bonding, I never could speak up for myself with doctors, and it led to various forms of abuse from doctors. Now, my inner child knows that that will never happen again because I am her warrior advocate – not just with doctors and other health care practitioners but with the people in my life.    

It’s when the loving adult is in charge that we tend to be concerned about health because the loving adult is in the intention to learn about what is in our highest good. And so when we’re in a loving adult state, we are very concerned with our health and wellbeing. 

But when your wounded self is in charge, your primary intention is to avoid pain, which means that you might not be very devoted to your health and wellbeing. When your primary intention is to be loving to yourself, then you will find it easy to support your health.

Then there is another very important aspect to achieving good health, which is having a sense of community. I came to understand how important community is when I read “Outliers,” by Malcolm Gladwell. In this book, he starts with a story about a group of Italians who originally lived in a little town in Italy, and they were quarry workers. Some of them decided in the 1800’s to come to America. A few of them came and they settled in a little town in Pennsylvania. Then a few more came, and pretty soon, 2000 of them were in this little town. 

One day a couple of doctors were talking over lunch, and one of them said that the people from this town don’t seem to die of heart disease and cancer. They all seem to just die of old age. And the other doctor wondered why that is, and he decided to do some research. He started by looking at their diet and they weren’t eating particularly well. They were overweight and they didn’t get much exercise. 

Then he looked at genetics and he looked at some of the people that had left the town and discovered it wasn’t genetics, because those people that left the town had the same illnesses, the same heart disease as everybody else, while the people in this town were living well into their nineties and dying of old age. So why was this?

What it came down to is community. Community is what made them feel safe. Community took away stress. They could walk outside and there would be people who cared about them. I think this is a very important thing in terms of understanding health and wellbeing. I think we can eat well and we can get exercise and we can do our Inner Bonding work, but part of being loving to ourselves is being in community with people who we love and care about and who love and care about us.

Perhaps so many of the health problems and stress that we have has been because we don’t live in our family communities, and we don’t live with people who watch out for us, and we don’t feel safe. And feeling safe is essential for health and wellbeing.

Of course, there’s much we can do on the inner level to create safety. When you practice Inner Bonding and you connect with your higher source of guidance, and you live in truth, you create a sense of safety on the inner level. But part of taking loving action for yourself is finding those people in your life, finding your tribe, finding the people who you love and accept and who love and accept you. And that’s not always easy. I think it’s a fairly big challenge for many people to reach out and put themselves in the situation of finding the people with whom they feel loved and safe.

It’s part of loving action to do whatever we need to do, whether it’s financial, physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, or organizational to make ourselves feel safe. This is what can support health and wellbeing. Unfortunately, our wounded self tries to make us feel safe with alcohol, drugs, sugar and other junk food, or sitting in front of a TV or computer, or any other kind of addiction to avoid dealing with the painful feelings of life, avoid dealing with loneliness and heartache and heartbreak and grief, and thinks that, that by avoiding these deeper feelings, we’re going to feel safe. But in fact, it makes us feel more unsafe. And it’s this lack of both inner and outer safety that greatly contributes to eroding our health and wellbeing.

This is what I’ve discovered for myself – that when I really attend to what I put in my body, and that I have exercise that I love, and when I know how to take care of myself in relationship to others and advocate for myself with health practitioners and others, and I have people around me that love and care about me, that’s when I experience that deeper level of safety. And that’s when I have energy and health and wellbeing.

A woman asked me at one of my events, “How much control do we have over creating our own health and wellbeing?” We do have a lot of control. The research indicates that genetics influence only about 5% of our health, way less a role than researchers previously thought it did.  It’s much more about what I’ve been telling you, especially about dealing with stress. And so learning how to deal with stress in your life, physical stress, emotional stress is vital for health and wellbeing. And that is your choice. We all have the choice to learn to do that. So we do have an enormous amount of control, although not total control. As I said, the research indicates that 90% of illness is related stress, but there’s the 10% that comes from other factors, such as heredity, environmental factors, and accidents. So it’s not like we have total control, but we do have a lot of control. And we certainly have control over learning to be a loving advocate warrior for our health.

Here is a question a woman named Stella asked me in my Masterclass when I was working with her.

(Quote)“Growing up, my defense and how I took care of myself was eating junk food. And I just see right now, even with all the work that I’ve done on myself, it’s so hard to get away from that. I still isolate and binge eat, and it’s now affecting my health. The last time I was at a doctor and had tests, I found out I’m pre-diabetic.” (Unquote).

“So,” I said to her, “what you’re talking about right now is that your primary intention is to avoid being hurt rather than to love yourself, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So,” I said, “in order for you to shift out of this addictive pattern, you would have to first shift your intention. You would have to first shift into really being very devoted to what would be loving to yourself. And that means that you would need to learn to stay present in your body and be in touch with your feelings, and these are all aspects of the Inner Bonding process. Step one, being present for your feelings, wanting responsibility for them, really learning what you’re doing that may be causing the pain you are avoiding with junk food, learning to connect with your higher guidance regarding what would be loving to you. Are you practicing Inner Bonding?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve read a lot of your books, most of your books, but no, I haven’t practiced Inner Bonding.”

“So that’s what I would suggest to you,” I said, “because that’s what’s going to shift the eating and the isolating. These are ways that your wounded self has learned to avoid pain. And these are not just going to go away until you develop your loving adult. And that’s an important part of what practicing Inner Bonding does. It’s a process for developing the loving adult through learning to take loving action through connecting with your source of guidance that lets you in on what loving action is and having the courage to take loving actions. But it’s going to come from a shift in your intention. So I suggest that you start to practice Inner Bonding. You might want to get some facilitation to get you started, but this is what’s going to help you move out of these addictive patterns. It’s not realistic to give up addictive patterns until we replace them with loving action towards ourselves, because the addictive patterns are the only way you know to feel safe right now. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s true,” she said. 

“And it sounds like you are judging yourself for your addictions, is that accurate?” I asked.

“Yes, I do a lot of that,” she said

“Well,” I said, that’s what people do in their wounded self. They soothe themselves with their addictions, and then they judge themselves for that, which creates their inner child feeling so bad and so unloved that then you want to go to soothe with junk food again. So the first thing you might want to start to do is to notice your self-judgments, because this is very unloving towards yourself. So a place you could start is to just to notice your self-judgments.”

“Thank you.” she said, “And can I ask you another question? Is it possible to get into a healthy relationship until you work on all these issues?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s not realistic to wait until everybody has worked on their issues. Part of what happens in relationship is that we can use the relationship to learn, grow, and heal. That’s part of what a good relationship does – it touches off our issues and gives us an arena to heal. If you’re devoted to learning how to take responsibility for yourself and you’re with somebody who’s also devoted to that, there is so much that you can learn in a relationship. And being in a relationship is part of creating community, which I said is so important. So I don’t suggest that people wait until they think they are healed. It’s true that you’re going to attract people at your common level of woundedness. In other words, you are avoiding your pain with your addictions, and you’re going to attract somebody else who’s also avoiding their pain in their ways. But the real important thing in terms of a relationship is whether or not you and a partner are open to learning. That’s the real issue. If you are both open to learning, then you can help each other heal.

“And that’s one of the things I work with people on, helping them to move into their intention to learn and helping them discern whether the person they’re thinking of being in partnership with is also open to learning, because that’s what’s going to heal the dysfunction. Everybody’s got dysfunction, everybody’s got the baggage of abandonment issues, engulfment issues, fear of getting hurt, and everybody’s got a wounded self that acts out and protects and tries to control and gives themselves up and gets angry and acts out addictively. It’s not realistic to think that you’re going to get yourself completely healthy before being in a relationship, but what is vital is for you to move into an intention to learn and then to understand how to discern whether or not somebody else is in an intention to learn. Then the relationship becomes a wonderful vehicle for healing and growth. Does that make sense to you?”

Yes it does,” she answered, “because as you said, I think I attract, or I get attracted to people who exactly have my own issues. They’re unavailable in some sort of way, and now I’m trying to break that pattern.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” I said, “and in order to break that pattern, you need to practice Inner Bonding and move into a deep intention to learn about loving yourself. That’s what it’s going to take. And then you’re going to start attracting a different kind of person.”

“Thank you. This is very, very helpful,” she said.

I hope you can see that everything is related to everything else. Self-abandonment affects not only your health, but also your relationships and your ability to be a strong warrior advocate for yourself both with health care practitioners and in your personal relationships.

Since you may no longer be able to depend on quickly turning to a kind, caring, available, and competent doctor to advise you regarding your health, your health and wellbeing is dependent on you learning to be a warrior advocate – a strong loving adult – for your own health care, and your own wellbeing. 

Developing a strong loving adult is one of the major results of practicing Inner Bonding, so I encourage you to learn or to deepen your Inner Bonding practice. 

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership. 

And, I invite you to join me for my 30-Day home study Course that teaches Inner Bonding: “Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships.”

And you can learn so much about loving yourself, creating loving relationships, and healing from my newest book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.