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Can Grief Really Break a Heart? · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm glad you're here.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get right into it.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday we asked what we assume a body is.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: We watched Descartes walk through a royal garden and come out with a machine.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: We saw doctors cure a stubborn infection, not by killing more, but by replanting the garden.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we learned to see a symptom as a yellow leaf, a message about the soil.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Today we go deeper into the garden.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: If everything in a garden is connected, what about us?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Body, mind, emotion, spirit?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Can any of them really work alone?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the early 2000s, cardiologists at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore kept seeing something that didn't fit.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: People were arriving at the hospital with what looked exactly like a heart attack.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Chest pain, trouble breathing, their hearts were barely pumping, but these were people who didn't have heart disease.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: What they had in common was a moment.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just before it happened, each of them had been through a sudden, overwhelming emotional shock.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The death of someone they loved, extreme fear like being held up at gunpoint or a car accident.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: The cardiologist leading the study, Dr.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Ian Witzstein, and his team followed 19 of these patients.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: In 2005, they published what they found in the New England Journal of Medicine.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: When they measured the stress chemicals in these patients' blood, the levels were sky high.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Adrenaline was more than three times higher than in people having a serious heart attack.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And their hearts had changed shape.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Doctors in Japan had described this back in 1990.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: On a scan, the bottom of the heart balloons out while the top stays narrow until the heart looks like a Japanese octopus trap.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: A pot with a wide base and a narrow neck.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because so many of the patients had just lost someone they loved, the condition got named broken heart syndrome.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Grief reached into the body and changed the shape of the heart.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part I want you to hold on to.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: When these patients arrived, their hearts were pumping at about 20%.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Two to four weeks later, they were about 60%, which is normal.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: All of them recovered.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: The same condition that let grief break a heart let it heal.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Why does this matter?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because when care looks at only one part of us, it misses the cause.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Many of us have lived this.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: We go in with real symptoms, exhaustion, stomach trouble, pain that moves around, a racing heart.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The tests come back normal, and we hear everything looks fine.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or worse, it might just be stress.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Said in a way that sounds like it's all in your head.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't all in our heads, and it isn't all in our bodies.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's in us.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: One person.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: When we see that, two things change.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: We stop being dismissed, and we gain far more ways to heal because every part of our life starts to count.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where I stand.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I believe we are not four separate parts.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: We are one person.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Body, mind, emotion, and spirit are one living system.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: What touches one touches all of them.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a soft idea.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: You just heard the evidence.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: A shock to the heart, the emotional kind, showed up in the heart, the physical kind.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't believe good care can stop at the skin, and I don't believe it can stop at the mind either.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: We need care that looks at the whole person because that's what a person is.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's test this together right now.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's observable and it's repeatable.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it as many times as you like.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to picture this.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Picture a lemon, a bright yellow one, cool from the refrigerator.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Feel its bumpy skin in your hand.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now picture a knife slicing it in half.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The juice runs onto the cutting board.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: You lift one half, bring it to your mouth, and squeeze sour juice right onto your tongue.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is your mouth watering?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: For most of us it is.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no lemon.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not one drop of juice touched us.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: A picture in the mind made the body act.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: We know this already in a hundred small ways.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: We blush when we're embarrassed, our stomach flips before we speak in front of a crowd, tears come when we hear a song from someone we lost, our shoulders creep up towards our ears on a hard day at work.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: None of those are only in the head.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: None are only in the body.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're one person responding all at once.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what's happening underneath.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: When we're afraid or under heavy stress, the body releases adrenaline and other stress chemicals.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: The heart speeds up, breathing gets fast and shallow, muscles tighten, digestion slows down, because the body has decided this is no time for lunch, sleep gets light.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good design.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's built to help us survive a moment of danger and then settle again.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: But many of us live as if the danger never ends.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Bills, deadlines, a hard marriage, old memories.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: The body keeps answering the alarm.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And when we wonder why our stomach hurts, why we can't sleep, why our neck is always tight, that's not a broken machine.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's a whole person answering an alarm that never shut off.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's exactly what we saw in those broken hearts, in its most extreme form.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So how did we end up being cared for in pieces?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Remember Descartes, he didn't only call the body a machine, he divided the person in two, the mind over here, a thinking thing, the body over there, a machine.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Medicine took the body, and the mind, the emotions, and the spirit were sent somewhere else.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: To the psychologist, to the pastor, or to nobody at all.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Almost 50 years ago, a physician named George Engel saw the problem.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: In 1977, he wrote in the journal Science, quote, the dominant model of disease today is biomedical, and it leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of disease, unquote.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Engel proposed a bigger picture.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: He called it the bio-psychosocial model.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Body, mind, and the life around us, all part of illness and all part of care.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was in 1977.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And still many of us carry our bodies to one office, our feelings to another, and our faith to a third.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Each one sees a piece and no one sees the whole person sitting in the chair.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Here's another study that changed how many doctors think, and it comes from a very ordinary place.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: A health clinic.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1990s at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, doctors asked adults who had come in for routine medical checkups about their childhoods.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Over 9,500 people answered.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: They were asked about seven kinds of hard childhood experiences: abuse, violence against their mother, growing up with someone in the home who abused drugs or alcohol, who was mentally ill, or who went to prison.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then the researchers compared those answers with the people's adult health.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: The findings published in 1998 were striking.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: People who had four or more of those hard experiences, compared with people who had none, had four to twelve times the risk of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempts.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Two to four times the risk of smoking and poor health.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there's more.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: The more hard experiences people had as children, the more likely they were to have heart disease, cancer, lung disease, broken bones, and liver disease as adults.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to a child showed up decades later in the body of the adult.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for the careful thinkers listening, this was an observational study, the kind we talked about a few weeks ago.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: It shows a strong pattern across thousands of people.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell any one of us what will happen to us.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the pattern steps up level by level.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The more heart experiences, the more illness.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what we'd expect if body, mind, and emotion are one system.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening and some of those experiences are yours, please hear this.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: A pattern in a crowd is not a sentence on your life.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: What's connected can be tended, and healing can travel down the same roads that the hurt did.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: So far we've talked about body, mind, and emotion, but I don't believe the system stops there.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible never treated us as pieces.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Proverbs 17, verse 22 says it plainly.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 23, Paul prays, May your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Spirit and soul and body named together, held together, one prayer for the whole person.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Chinese medicine never split us apart either.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: For thousands of years, a practitioner asked about a person's health would ask about sleep and digestion and also about worry, grief, and joy.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Not as a separate conversation, as part of the same picture.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: The split is the new idea.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Seeing the whole person is the old one.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: In my own practice, I ask about stress and emotions because they're part of the physical picture, and every part of a person is welcome in my treatment room.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I offer different kinds of care, each reaching different parts of the same person.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Acupuncture reaches the body, the mind, and the emotions.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Cranial sacral therapy works with the body and the emotions together, especially when old feelings held in the tissues begin to release.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Herbs and whole food nutrition nourish the body first and the emotions with it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Hypnosis eases the emotions and the stress the body has been carrying.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And coaching can reach the mind, the emotions, and even the spirit.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Different doors, one person.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the hopeful part.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: This truth cuts both ways.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: If nothing works alone, then hurt in one part spreads to the others.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen that.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: But healing spreads too.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: When we calm the body, the mind settles.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: When we name a grief out loud, the shoulders can drop.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: When we pray or sit in silence with God, the breath slows and the heart steadies.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: When we laugh with someone we love, something in the whole system remembers that it's safe.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: That means we have far more doors into healing than we were told.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not just one pill for one part.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: A walk, a good night's sleep, a forgiven hurt, a meal with people who know us, a treatment that calms the nervous system, a prayer.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of them reaches the whole person because there is only one person to reach.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing works alone.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so nothing we do for ourselves is wasted.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: This week we tend the garden.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here's today's practice.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometime today when you notice a strong feeling, worry, frustration, sadness, even joy, pause for a moment and ask, where do I feel this in my body?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a tight jaw, a nod in the stomach, a heavy chest, warmth across the face.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Then place a hand there.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Take three slow breaths and just say quietly, I notice you.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to fix anything.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: You're simply letting the parts of you talk to each other again.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how a garden starts to grow back together.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Today we saw that nothing in us works alone.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: We saw grief reach into the body and change the shape of a heart.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw those hearts recover.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: We made our own mouths water with nothing but a picture of a lemon, and we saw how the body answers stress and what happens when the alarm never shuts off.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: We saw how medicine split the person into pieces and how a doctor named George Ingall called for a bigger picture almost 50 years ago.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: We saw childhood experiences show up decades later in adult bodies.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we heard scripture and Chinese medicine hold body, soul, and spirit together all along.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw why it matters.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: When care sees only one part of us, it misses the cause.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: When we see the whole person, every part of life becomes a way to heal.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we go even further.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: What if there's more to the body than we can see?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Meridians, energy, the field around the body, things that can't be seen but have real effects.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we look at what's more than we can see.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'll meet you there with you every step of the way.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.