Commusings: The Bounce-Back Factor by Marisa Peer

Dear Commune Community,

What does it mean to “bounce back?”

Well, you experience “bouncing back” all the time. You sprint up a hill or have an uncommonly enthusiastic roll in the hay (perhaps more rarely). In response, your heart and breath rate spike. And then when you “consummate” the activity, within minutes, your respiratory rate naturally decelerates to between 12-16 breaths per minute and your heart rate finds the warm porridge of 60-80 beats per minute.

To “bounce back” refers to your ability to recover from imbalances. This concept is often used in the context of resilience in the face of the inevitable challenges of life. Indeed, our ability to return to a previous state of equilibrium may be the greatest measure of our well-being.

The body is engineered to “bounce back.” This recalibration is relentlessly occurring under the crust of consciousness. Our bodies thermoregulate and maintain a delicate pH balance around 7.4. The liver titrates with great precision to maintain balanced blood-glucose levels. Fluid-electrolyte balance, blood pressure regulation, hormone counter-regulation … the dance of homeostasis is happening everywhere.

Bouncing back is not only the province of the physiological. Life continually tests our ability to recover from distressing and traumatic experiences. We confront failure, criticism and disappointment. By moving through negative emotions and finding meaning and growth in challenges, we regain our balance. We find our center. We bounce back.

Ironically, the deliberate application of stress in the right doses enhances the ability of the body-mind to recalibrate. In this manner, stress is an opportunity. This eustress is the focus of my upcoming Commune course Good Stress – the self-imposed protocols that foster balance – that help you “bounce back.”

Deep gratitude to Marisa Peer for sharing her wisdom and experience of bouncing back in today’s essay. Her recently released Commune course, Hypnotherapy for Mental Health, is a resource I highly recommend (and free for 4 days).

Here at [email protected] and stoically enduring insult on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

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The Bounce-Back Factor By Marisa Peer

When you have had a career as long and high-profile as mine, you will always find there are naysayers or people who want to doubt your success. Honestly, that’s fine with me.

However, there’s a recurring misconception that often comes up from these doubters. They seem to think that if you take the tenets of my therapy technique, Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT), on board and master the rules of your mind, nothing bad will ever happen to you. Using me as an example, they reason that if anything bad has ever happened to me—which, of course, it has because I am human—it’s proof that my methods don’t work.

I began to notice this when I went public with two cancer diagnoses and recoveries several years ago. These anonymous commenters would say, “Well, if RTT works so well, why’d she get cancer?” I’m not foolish enough to try to reason with anonymous internet commenters; their pain is always evident in their anger. However, their misunderstanding offers a good lesson. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about RTT, my life, or yours: bad, inconvenient, heartbreaking things will happen. It’s how you choose to face and bounce back from them that determines the trajectory of your life and your long-term mental health.

I first started to learn this lesson as a young adult. A doctor told me that I would never be able to get pregnant and that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to carry a healthy child to term. As I was just embarking on adulthood, I wasn’t even trying to get pregnant at the time, so it was quite a strangely alarmist diagnosis to give such a young woman.

It was in that doctor’s office that, perhaps for the first time, I heard a voice speak up with a very clear directive: “Don’t let that in.” I could sense that it was not helpful to listen to this doctor give me this negative diagnosis at this stage in my life—especially because I wasn’t yet trying to have a child. I decided to leave the doctor’s office and not dwell too much on what he had said.

Years later, when I did become pregnant with my daughter, doctors similarly told me the pregnancy likely wouldn’t be a successful one. They said even if I did manage to give birth at full term, my daughter would likely be underweight. They advised me not to even try. Again, I decided not to let that in and gave birth to my daughter Phaedra at a healthy weight nine months later.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t listen to doctors or seek their care, but rather, be careful about letting in what they’re telling you, because it doesn’t have to be your destiny. I learned this lesson again in 2015, when I was diagnosed with womb cancer. For the first day or so, I felt shocked and devastated in quick succession. To be totally honest, I couldn’t believe this had happened to me.

One thing I’ll never forget is when I asked the doctor if, after surgery, the cancer would come back. He knocked his fist on the table and said, “The cancer has your address. It knows where you live, so even if we remove it with surgery, it will probably come back.” Again I thought, “I cannot let this in.”

I was advised that the best course of medical action was to schedule a hysterectomy. Of course, this was a big surgery, and it had to be performed quickly. I decided that other than entrusting the skilled doctors to ably perform my surgery, the rest of my treatment and recovery had to be up to me. After all, I had lots going on in my life at that point. I was just about to launch my new RTT training school, and I had speaking engagements and travel commitments in just a week’s time.

So I began to tell myself, “This is just a blip. I will go for this surgery. It will work, and my body will recover swiftly and fully.” Doctors advised me that I had to be in the hospital for days after the surgery. I would be on bed rest, and travel was out of the question any time in the near future. Respectfully, I told them that while I entrusted them to perform the surgery to their highest capabilities, the recovery process would be under my control.

I ended up staying in the hospital for just one night. A week later, I was on stage speaking. And three weeks later, I flew to fulfill my professional commitment in Costa Rica. I knew that what would make me happy and help me heal faster was not lying in bed and thinking, “Oh, I’m so ill. I’ve had major surgery, and all I can do is lie here.” I may have had cancer, but I wasn’t going to let that take over my entire life. After all, I had so much to live for.

My doctors and nurses were amazed at how swift my recovery was and even asked me how I had managed to do it so they could inform other patients it was possible to get back to health so quickly. One of the main things I did was create a new narrative in my mind. Instead of telling myself I was so unlucky to get cancer, I talked to my body and mind and said, “This is actually great. I don’t need a womb because I’ve already had my child. I’m so lucky. It could’ve been an eye, a leg, or a bone, but it’s an organ I don’t need. What a stroke of luck.”

After the first cancer recovery, life moved on, and for a while, I thought cancer and I were done. And then, in 2017, I was diagnosed again, this time with a different cancer. Once again, I found this very difficult, perhaps even more difficult than the first time because unlike my womb, this organ couldn’t be removed as easily. (In fact, I opted to forgo the surgery to fully remove it for various reasons.)

I worried that perhaps I had become too blasé and assumed cancer wouldn’t come back again. However, despite my own doubts—and the people who had doubted me after my first cancer experience—I returned to what I knew to be true: I had too much to live for, and I was not going anywhere.

This second operation and its recovery were admittedly more difficult than the first time around, and while I didn’t get back to normal quite as quickly as I’d planned, I still knew that I had to decide how to feel. So again I used hypnosis during my recovery. Because I had to live on a very limited diet of essentially just water, vegetables, and fish, I hypnotized myself to not desire coffee, snacks, or anything that would stand in the way of my healing. By hypnotizing myself to have this very powerful state of mind, I bounced back to where I was before, and after having the surgery in September 2017, I was back teaching RTT in London in late October and in LA teaching my next RTT course in November.

Finding a Purpose

Throughout both the cancer diagnoses, the knowledge that I had an RTT school to lead kept me going. In the moments when I wondered how I was going to get out of bed and find the strength to teach, I remembered that I simply had to, because there was so much I still intended to accomplish. I believe that aspect of my healing was very important: I had a purpose. I had a reason. I had determination, and I was doing what I really loved, which really helped.

Looking back at my life, I realize that I learned this lesson as a child watching my parents, who had two very different approaches to life. My father was a head teacher, and he deeply loved his job, determinedly leaving the house for school every day with his briefcase under his arm. He experienced cancer twice in his life, but you’d scarcely have noticed it. It was simply not on his agenda to dwell on his sickness, and I don’t think he ever took a day off work.

My mother, on the other hand, was always sick, and her bedroom contained so many medications it looked like a pharmacy. She was always rushing off to the doctors, concerned about this or that. Knowing what I know now, I think the purpose of her constant illnesses was to make her feel important—the doctors and nurses and endless diagnoses gave her the care and attention she wasn’t getting elsewhere. In keeping with the cultural norm at the time, she did not have a career or job outside the home. While some women find raising children is plenty to keep them fulfilled, I don’t think she was one of those women, and I think her life really suffered for it.

My father, without either of us realizing it at the time, served as my greatest teacher. He showed me that having a purpose that fulfills you in life helps blunt the pain and give you strength when hardships come up. That’s something those critics I mentioned earlier don’t seem to understand: it’s not if life goes wrong or awry; it’s when. No one gets to live a perfect life. But we all get the gift of deciding how to respond to what comes up, including sickness and serious illness like cancer.

Would I have preferred not to get cancer twice? Of course, I would have. Would I prefer to live in a world where I could ward off all inconvenience, trauma, sadness, bad luck, and misfortune? You bet. But our triumph does not come in preventing anything bad from ever happening to us; it is in overcoming them when they do. It is in not allowing your childhood, diagnosis, history, or abuse to be the thing that defines the course of your entire life. It is about choosing a better story to tell yourself—and in my case, it was that I was not a person unlucky enough to get cancer twice, but rather a person who was lucky enough to overcome it twice. We can choose what we want to let in, and what we won’t allow in.

I also want to say, in case this isn’t already abundantly clear, that healing ourselves thoroughly is not an either-or endeavor. (Indeed, I am not suggesting that RTT cures cancer.) When you’re ill, it’s advisable to look at every avenue for healing. If you have a heart problem, you change your diet and do gentle exercise as well as exploring surgery with a cardiac specialist. If you have a bad back, you take some medication and go to see a chiropractor. RTT is never offered in place of medical treatment but as a powerful enhancement of it.

It’s so limiting and reductive to think we have to choose between alternative healing modalities and conventional medicine. The truth is that there is a great deal of mystery in how humans heal themselves, and while we gain so much from the rigor of science and innovation of modern medicine, that is not the be-all and end-all of what we know or how we heal. And growing bodies of science are increasingly proving what many mystics and ancient cultural traditions have long known to be true: your thoughts influence your reality.

I’m sharing my story here because I hope it teaches you that you have this power too. I call it the bounce-back factor—the idea that we all have the capacity to be like a big rubber ball. I believe in it when a relationship ends, when a career or job ends, and certainly when you get an illness too. So much of that bounce is down to your belief and expectations.

Do you imagine yourself springing back up into the air with grace and ease after something difficult occurs? Or do you see yourself stuck forever? When life is hard, do you get up every day and tell yourself that life always changes and you are participating in creating that new reality? Or do you simply accept that life will always be bad?

So much of my work with RTT is changing the image in people’s minds and giving them a new sense of agency over their own life. It’s in telling them that they get to choose how to answer that question and whether and how they bounce back. We all walk around telling ourselves stories every day, so why not choose to tell ourselves the story that gives us everything we’ve ever dreamed of?

Named Britain's best therapist, Marisa Peer is a pioneering hypnotherapist, motivational speaker, and best-selling author. She is an internationally award-winning therapist because her work is laser-focused to bring about powerful transformations and ultimate confidence in people. A best-selling author of five books, Marissa has spent over three decades working with a client list that includes international superstars, CEOs, royalty, and Olympic athletes.

Adapted from Tell Yourself a Better Lie: Use the power of Rapid Transformational Therapy to edit your story and rewrite your life with permission from the author. Available on Amazon.