This is a companion piece to Lilian Sjøberg’s recent interview “A Novel Approach for Reducing Stress that Fuels Parkinson's Symptoms”, on the Parkinsons Recovery Radio Show.
Lilian is a contributor to Out-thinking Parkinson’s, a Danish coach and troubleshooter, good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with chronic diseases such as Parkinson's Disease (PD) from a practical perspective for five years.
Below are the questions asked by the host, Robert Rodgers, and the precis/short summaries of Lilian’s answers, in lieu of a full transcript. The relevant timestamps are also provided, for finding and listening to the corresponding full replies.
01:50 How did your interest in chronic diseases begin?
It is a long story. My husband got cancer when we were 30 years old, and we where told that this type of cancer was over-represented with young men with a high level of education. Indeed, he is now a professor. So from that day, I knew that we could think ourselves into a disease. Major diseases always come with a specific personality trait and there is a very mental side, even where we traditionally think of diseases like cancers as a physical disease. So that caught my interest.
Later, when I became a therapist, I heard several stories about people with what we today call physical diseases, that became better due to mental therapy. As I did not like the short timeframe available for helping people with cancer, I took up chronic diseases, and made my small experiment with local people with chronic illnesses. I gave them five long therapy sessions, and every time saw that I could reduce their symptoms here and now, even if not forever.
I was amazed. If people can reduce symptoms like tremors for minutes and hours, then it of course it is possible to do it for longer periods.
I looked on the internet to see if there were others like me that were interested in, and capable of, reducing symptoms.
I only found a few therapists, but I found a lot of survivor stories from people writing about their own progress.
05:05 What did you find by seeking out stories of recovery from around the world?
I found that they all had a long list of how they reduced symptoms, telling everything they did from the start until they had recovered.
All the lists were unique at first glance. But reading more and more a pattern emerged. I could see there were four types of activities involved.
06:07 Why did you pick Parkinson's out of all chronic illnesses to start with?
To make a long story short, I chose to dig into Parkinson's Disease, as people have a normal lifespan, so no hurry. Also, the symptoms are more visible, so it is a lot easier to see when my therapy helps. Tremor is a good example. You can catch it on video, so people can see it. Yes, it is possible to reduce tremors via mental therapy.
07:15 How was learning about adrenaline a breakthrough?
I found the common denominator to all these activities which people did to recover, and that was adrenaline. So all the activities survivors did could be explained by the fact that they targeted adrenaline. The common thing was a reduction of adrenaline!
08:32 How did your biology background inform you, and what can we learn by looking at animals and their survival instincts?
As a biologist, I have a lot of background knowledge of cells, physiology, organs, and also animal behavior. So that is a very good pool of knowledge to draw from when looking at humans. and the nature of both a healthy person and a diseased person.
We can learn a lot from looking at animals. We are an animal, and even though we live in a modern world, we still have a complete set of survival instincts, this has not changed for hundreds of thousands of years.
Our brain is operating in the dark. Even though we can see, the brain still only gets inputs from our senses and must interpret that. The output is the same as for our ancestors: we go in and out of fight-flight and freeze many times a day. Some people more than others, but in this respect, we are not a lot different from the meerkats in the desert we see on television.
All-day long, we are alarmed (that is dopamine) and dependent on what the body and brain automatically calculates. We are either going back to a calm state, or the signals are converted to switching us into our danger instincts of fight, flight, or freeze.
Going into fight and fight, we see tremors as symptoms, building up tension in the body, and freeze is the same freeze state you also see in Parkinson's Disease. So Parkinson's symptoms are right in the middle of our danger instincts. In this way, people with PD show all the signs of being in our danger instincts fight-flight and freeze, and going in and out of these.
11:02 What did you learn by looking at videos of shell shock in world war one?
I have used three hours a day for three years (more than three thousand hours) searching the internet for videos and studies that could give me answers.
When I made my small test experiment with people with different diseases, I found that I could help them all with stress reduction. Regardless of diagnosis, I could help them reduce symptoms. Among these people was a war veteran with severe PTSD. So this brought me to old videos from the first world war where they mention the word shell shock. Seeing these videos is like seeing a concentration of all chronic diseases, and the easiest one to spot is Parkinson's, as tremor, stiffness, problems walking, bad posture, and frozen faces are seen in nearly all of these videos.
So the conclusion is clear from my perspective. While shellshock as is now called PTSD, it is a result of a short period of a terrible war. Chronic diseases and Parkinson's Disease, on the other hand. are a result of a whole long life in a stressful environment. Even if you have a fun job it can be very stressful, filled with pressure and ambition.
11:08 What is the best result you have achieved with working with a person with PD?
I was lucky that one of my first clients with Parkinson's Disease got a new neurologist. This doctor thought it was strange that he did not have the symptoms any longer and sent him to a new DAT scan. He passed without a sign of PD, and was ordered to stop using the medication. So he is now free of the diagnosis. He had traumas from a father that attacked his mother with a knife. This trauma made him tremor when he was out in crowds, as he instinctively was searching for dangerous people. I helped him to remove this trauma and others as well.
The problem here is that as stress symptoms such as tremors are natural, you can never be cured of them, but you can come closer and closer to normal.
The normal is to get a tremor when you are excited, scared, or worried, but going back to a calm normal state with no tremor when the source of excitement or danger is not present.
We need to remember that this is our survival instincts. We are not a master over this, it is our automatric instincts that decide. The only thing you are a master of is after hearing this podcast, is if you want to continue to have these traumas for the rest of your life or if you want to get help from me or other therapists that are specialized in diseases.
17:11 What are the blocks to your method working?
I find that people lacking time is the big problem. So if you have both children and a busy job this is difficult.
If you are a lonely mother it is difficult.
It is difficult to help people taking a lot of medication, as their symptoms are controlled by the medication. We do not know if a symptom is related to danger instincts, or it is related to a side effect of the medication.
As my coaching is based on symptoms being both natural and signs of stress, they are the key to becoming better. They are the portal to mental and physical health.
19:17 What insights does your stress test provide?
I have made a Stress Test that can help people to evaluate which stress type they are. This can be a kickstart to becoming better, and to begin to understand this new world of stress symptoms and survival instincts. It leads up to my online course, which I call HOPE shortcut, a systematic way to better health.
I chose the word HOPE as this is the first thing we need to install in a person with a chronic disease. The next thing is to help people to learn to interpret their symptoms and flare ups in stressful situations
After this, I describe the four strategies I found in survivor stories and an explanation of why they work.
I then coach people to take action going from passive to active and to help themselves.
Listen to the full interview
Including some supplemental questions and answers, after the 21:38 mark.