One learns that worlds are made by words and not only hammers and wires.
Many years ago I was asked to see a young woman who everyone thought had appendicitis. I didn’t agree with the diagnosis, and after observing her it became apparent that her problem was a ruptured ovarian cyst, which did not require surgery. A few years later, the woman’s younger sister, a talented musician, tripped at home and fell into the fireplace, seriously burning her hands, arms, upper torso, and neck. When she was sent to the Yale–New Haven Hospital emergency room, the family asked me to care for her.
Her hands were disfigured, and she was seriously depressed knowing this would end her musical career. I admitted her to the hospital burn unit, and each morning I would debride her burns while she screamed at me, “I hate you.” Her words really made me think about why I had become a doctor and whether I wanted to continue, if this was the reaction patients had to me when I was trying to help them heal. (Years later her mother told me that one morning I said to her, “Madeline, maybe someday you’ll love me.” I don’t recall that moment, but knowing how I behave, I probably said that to ease my own pain and frustration.)
One summer day, when the temperature was well over ninety degrees, into my office walked Madeline for her routine visit. She was wearing a turtleneck jersey with long sleeves. I asked her why she was dressed that way on such a hot day, and she said, “Because I am ugly.”
She also told me she was looking for a summer job, and I said, “Oh, I know a nursing home that needs some aides. If I can get you a job there, are you interested?” She said yes, so I worked it out and called her back a few days later to give her the information. What I knew was that she would have to wear a uniform, which would reveal all her scars to the senior citizens she cared for.
At the end of the summer, Madeline came for her office visit, and I asked her how the job had gone. She responded, “I love my job. And no one noticed my scars.”
“When you are giving love, you are beautiful,” I told her. She looked at me, and her eyes filled with the light of understanding.
Madeline went on to become a nurse, and shortly after she graduated I received a phone call from her. “Doctor Siegel, I am getting married, but my father died two years ago. Would you be my father at my wedding?” I can still feel the tears I shed when she asked me. After shouting words of hate at me while she was in pain, she now spoke words of love. Of course I said yes, and the greatest gift to me was when we danced after the wedding to a Kenny Rogers song, “Through the Years.” It was Madeline’s way of saying that over the years, especially when she struggled, I had never let her down and I had helped her turn her life around. It helped me to heal a physician’s lifetime of wounds.
One guy suggested to his friend that she could change the negative things in her life by simply changing her words. He told her, “Instead of saying I have to pay the bills, or I have to go to work, try saying, I get to pay the bills, or I get to go to work.” When his friend practiced doing that, she found her outlook on everything changed from one of resentment and worry into one of gratitude and grace. She realized that all aspects of her life, from tedious small tasks to big challenging difficulties, were gifts. Changing one word changed her life. One word — how powerful is that?
Many years ago one of our children brought home a canvas he had decorated in his school art class. He had filled the entire canvas with one word: words. As a surgeon, I know you can kill or cure with a sword or scalpel. But what immediately struck me about the image on canvas was that you can also kill or cure with words, when wordswordswords becomes swordswordswords.
Physicians are not taught how to communicate with patients. Because of their fear of being sued, they tell people about all the adverse side effects of therapy and never mention the benefits. Every time I hear a TV commercial mentioning how the pill being advertised can kill you, I wonder why anyone would try it. Similarly, one hospital, in order not to be sued, would tell surgical patients the risks and possible complications of surgery — just before they went into the operating room. These patients had a higher cardiac arrest rate.
I began to realize that a patient’s beliefs were more important than the diagnosis. In a sense this idea is summed up by something I was told about psychiatrist Dr. Milton Erickson. He was seeing a patient who needed some positive feedback. After writing something in her chart, he excused himself and stepped out of the office for a minute, leaving her chart open on his desk. This patient peeked at the chart and read the words “Doing well.” How therapeutic. Those two words would have helped her to believe in herself and given her the boost she needed to keep working.
As I learned the power of words, I began to pay more attention to what was said in the operating room, and I changed even simple things like preparing a child for an injection. Rather than say it was going to feel like a bee sting, I’d say it would be like a mosquito bite. When an anesthesiologist talked to the patient about the patient’s “going out,” I would ask the patient, “When was the last time you went out on a date?” and he or she would go with a smile.
During surgery I would ask my patients to divert the blood away from the area of surgery and not bleed while I was working there. Before they awakened from surgery I would say, “You will wake up comfortable, thirsty, and hungry.” Later I had to amend that with: “but you won’t finish what’s on your plate,” when my patients all began to gain weight.
What really opened my mind to the power of words was my experience as a pediatric surgeon. To reassure children that they would not be in pain when they were undergoing surgery, I would tell them while in the emergency room: “You will go to sleep when you go into the operating room.” I was shocked to have children fall asleep while they were being wheeled into the OR. One boy flipped over and went to sleep as we entered the OR. When I turned him over for his appendectomy, he awakened and said, “You told me I would go to sleep, and I sleep on my stomach,” so we had to reach a compromise.
Then I began therapeutically deceiving more kids by rubbing them with an alcohol sponge, prior to drawing blood, and saying, “This will numb your skin.” A third of them had total anesthesia, while the others had at least a less emotional and less painful experience — and told me it didn’t work. I apologized and blamed the defective alcohol sponge.
With the parent’s cooperation, we also reduced the side effects of their treatment when we relabeled vitamins as hair-growing, anti-nausea, or pain pills, and the kids responded according to the label.
One woman I know was feeling nauseated after her chemo. She asked her daughter to get her a Compazine pill, since she wasn’t wearing her glasses. Her daughter gave her the pill and her nausea went away. Hours later, while wearing her glasses, she asked for another pill. When she saw it, she told her daughter, “That’s not my Compazine; that’s my anticoagulant, Coumadin.”
“Well, Mom, it worked fine the last time I gave it to you,” her daughter responded. They were impressed by the power of suggestion to make changes in the body, even when it wasn’t intentional.
I’d rather tell a therapeutic lie to a patient than list the side effects of a treatment and, in doing so, induce all of them, because what people hear from an authority figure has an even greater effect. When I did have to share information about negative side effects, I would add that they didn’t happen to everyone, just as not everyone is allergic to peanuts.
Our bodies respond to our beliefs. One woman was told she was terminal owing to leukemia, and that it was a waste of time to drive for hours to receive chemotherapy, since it would only make her feel worse. Her cousin, a nurse’s aide, knew me and told the woman to come up to New Haven for treatment because “Doctor Siegel makes people well all the time.”
I admitted the woman to the hospital not knowing about the aide’s comment. I sat on the patient’s bed and explained that I would ask an oncologist friend to come and see her, as I could not treat leukemia with surgery. Then I gave her a big hug and went to call the oncologist. He told me later that he agreed with her doctor about the likely outcome, but would give her treatment to make her feel there was hope. His notes to me after the chemotherapy sessions began with the comment “doing well” and ended with: “in complete remission.” I heard later that she said, “When Doctor Siegel hugged me, I knew I would get well.”
As I learned about the power of words, they became my therapeutic tools. Using my Paradox technique and humor, I was able to readjust people’s thoughts and feelings. I was the police surgeon in New Haven, Connecticut, for many years, and I got to know many police officers through that work. One day a policeman I knew called my office. When I picked up the phone he said, “Doctor Siegel, I am going to commit suicide.”
I answered, “Jimmy, if you commit suicide I will never speak to you again.” He hung up the phone and fifteen minutes later was in my office, mad as hell, shouting that he had been holding a gun in his mouth and look how insensitive and uncaring I was.
“And did you notice you’re not dead?” I asked. Then he laughed and we became buddies.
Do you remember when you were a child and someone called you names? You probably answered, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” I can tell you now: that statement is not true. Words can hurt and do a lot of damage. Words can kill or cure. Words, particularly those spoken by the authority figures in our lives, have power to affect us and alter our lives.
How you perceive something determines how it works for you, and the choice of words used for something plays a part in your perception. Consider four chemotherapy drugs used in a protocol named after the first letter of each drug: EPOH. One oncologist noted that if you turned the letters around, it became HOPE. He changed the name for his patients, and more of them responded to therapy.
A child’s drawing was criticized by her first grade teacher, who said it would not be displayed with the others because of how she used the color purple. In second grade, when asked by another teacher to draw a picture, the child left her paper blank. This teacher came over, placed his hand on her head, and said, “The snowfall — how clean, white, and beautiful!” His words gave her permission to be creative again, and that event later inspired her to write a poem titled “Purple.” You can read Alexis Rotella’s poem in my book Love, Magic & Mudpies.
Animals, too, are subject to our perceptions based on words. One family adopted an older rescued cat who had been so traumatized by his experiences with people that he would never enter a room with people in it. He came out to eat only when the family went to bed. After several unsuccessful months of trying to gain his confidence, they consulted an animal intuitive and told her the cat’s name was Spooky.
“Change his name to something macho,” she suggested. “You may be projecting your expectation of his fear by the name you gave him.”
They renamed the cat Rambo. Almost immediately the cat’s behavior began to change. The family reported that Rambo was not only hanging around the house when they were awake, but he also had taken to sleeping on their beds at night instead of staying downstairs.
When Betty Croker was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer in 1962, her doctor told her the cancer was terminal. “How long do I have?” she asked. “Six months” was his reply. Imagine the impact his words had on her. Her two little girls would soon become motherless. Betty went home prepared to die, but her husband said they should ask for a second opinion.
Betty’s husband went to the Yale Cancer Center and asked for a doctor on the oncology team to see his wife. While she was undergoing more tests, Betty recounted how she and her husband had fallen in love at a big band swing dance. She reminisced about the fun she and Fred used to have at their favorite dance club, and how everyone else would clear the floor so they could watch the couple dance.
Betty kept up a cheerful front throughout the testing procedures and after, as they waited for results, but Fred knew she was terrified for her two girls. She admitted to him that the first doctor’s words “terminal” and “six months” had nearly taken all her hope of survival. I have seen people die in a week when hope was taken away.
When they sat down with the Yale oncologist, the doctor looked at her and smiled. “Betty, you will not be dying in six months,” he said. “In six months, we will have you dancing again.”
The doctor’s words gave her hope. Six months to the day, Betty put on a new dress and wore her red dancing shoes. Her girls watched with excitement as their parents got ready for their big night out. Years later, I had the opportunity to work with one of Betty’s daughters. She told me, “I still remember how happy Dad was and how beautiful Mom looked that night. They were like a couple of kids going out on their first date. That doctor gave my mom permission to live,” she said. “I’m sure it was because of him that we had her for three more years. I will never be able to thank him enough.”
From “terminal” and “six months” to “dancing” and “you’ll live” — that’s the power of words. If your doctor or health practitioner doesn’t believe in your recovery, fire him or her. Find someone who believes in miracles — someone who believes in you.
A coach encourages his team with phrases such as You can do it and Go out there and live up to your potential because he knows his words will ring in the minds of his players when they face their opponents. His encouragement can make or break the team’s spirit, and that is often the decisive factor in whether or not they give it their best effort.
A good coach realizes that the key is to know that you did your best, and that you are not a loser if you don’t win the game. Losers are afraid to take a chance, whether facing a disease or another opponent, and they live with guilt, blame, and shame. Don’t empower your enemies by focusing on fighting and beating them, but empower your effort by giving it your best shot and believing in yourself.
The most effective affirmations are short, positive statements that, like mantras, are easily remembered, and that state something as if it has already happened. Instead of “I will recover from this cancer,” a more effective affirmation would be: “My body is glowing with health.” This statement allows you to see your true potential, your divine nature, and focuses not on what is wrong but on what is right within you. When you imagine it, your body responds as if it is already happening.
Our creator has built into all living things the ability to survive. Wounds heal, bacteria resist antibiotics, viruses resist antivirals, and trees resist parasites, all because we have the ability to alter our genes and survive. Your body needs to know that you love it, and love your life, to make the necessary survival effort.
Identify the negative statements you may hold in your mind. Write a positive affirmation for each one that helps you to turn the negative thought around. If you are worrying about something or unsuccessfully trying to control people and situations, try using the affirmation “Let go and let God.” If you are struggling with any major challenge, try: “One day at a time.” Merely the act of writing the affirmation “Just for today I will …” (for example, “stay sober” or “practice listening”) produces strong momentum in the intention behind your decision to behave differently. If you struggle with self-esteem, try using: “I am perfect just the way I am.” If you struggle with self-confidence, write: “I achieve whatever I set my heart on.”
Remember, this will not set you up for failure if you don’t live up to your affirmation. Your goal is to fake it till you make it. Act and behave as if you are the person you want to become, and keep rehearsing. Find life coaches, too, to help you practice.
Sometimes a single word painted on the wall or etched in a stone is a powerful affirmation. Words such as Faith, Peace, Gratitude, Laughter, and Beloved can help you to love yourself better. Fill your home and workplace with these. Our house is filled with mottoes to live by. One example of a good life motto is a quote of Lao Tzu: “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”1 You can also put up the serenity prayer and practice reading it out loud. Keep a deck of affirmation cards handy, and treat yourself several times a day. Even the words of a song can soothe, encourage, and inspire.
So get creative, buy some paint, and stencil a loving message to yourself on the wall you walk by most often. I have a portrait of my parents on my wall so that they are always watching me, and I don’t want to disappoint them. Put a welcome sign above the bathroom mirror, look into your eyes every morning, and greet yourself with: “Hi, sunshine. Welcome to today!”
With every dawn that you wake up to, you are like a blank canvas. Just as nature paints the horizon, you are creating a work of art, so always have more colors on the palette, and keep retouching your work until you are satisfied with the results.
A still, calm mind has a better chance of clearly reflecting on an issue and coming up with a remedy. If you need help getting started, you can use a CD I created just for this purpose: Finding Your True Self: Audible and Subliminal Affirmations to Develop Your Personal Sense of Inner Peace and Wisdom. Research studies show that subliminal affirmations and meditations are an easy and effective way to overcome mental hurdles and to give yourself better health and happiness throughout your life. Choose a specific time and a quiet, undisturbed place for your therapy. When you encounter stressful situations, you can call upon this inner peace immediately, stopping stress in its tracks.
Negative words and images fill our minds at such an early age that it takes conscious effort to later change those habits of belief. Sometimes we carry a feeling of self-pity as well, believing we are not good enough or we don’t deserve to be happy. When this happens, we need to play a different tape, learn a new song, and dance a new dance.
Sharon had been raised in a home where her mother’s mental illness prevented her from giving Sharon messages of love, messages that would build self-worth and self-esteem. While Sharon was eventually able to understand and forgive her mother, she found it impossible to believe in her own worthiness, to see herself as someone who deserved love. When we internalize our negative feelings and try to please everyone else in order to feel valuable, we lose our authentic lives. So it did not surprise me that Sharon developed breast cancer at a young age and underwent a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy, or that the depression she experienced during and after this was almost overwhelming.
As a doctor, I can tell you that her low feelings of self-worth threatened her life more than any cancer or chemotherapy drug. One day Sharon’s therapist suggested that she list her daily blessings. Every time someone showed a kindness, she should write it down. If someone called or sent a card, or even if a stranger opened a door for her or put a quarter in her parking meter — no matter how big or how small the kindness — she was supposed to write it down.
Sharon bought a journal and began keeping track of the thoughtful, kind things people said and did for her. The more she noticed the kindnesses, the more positive she felt. She began doing kind things for others as well, sometimes when they knew about it, and often when they didn’t. As the weeks and months went by, Sharon filled page after page, not only with kindnesses, but also with all the blessings in her life. Two years after her mastectomy, with a clean bill of health, Sharon read through her journals, realizing how lucky she was not only to have regained her health but also for how loved she felt. She had gained a large measure of self-worth. She knows that when she walks into a room these days, people are genuinely happy to see her. Listing the positives instead of focusing on the negatives completely turned her life around.
Studies have shown that when one person engages in a kind act for another person or an animal, both the doer and the receiver experience a warm sense of belonging caused by the release of endorphins and bonding hormones, feel-good chemicals that make your body want to live. Not only do the giver and receiver benefit, but so do the observers of a kindness, who receive the same chemical burst. It is like taking a lit candle into a darkened room. The candle glows within its own aura, but the whole room receives a portion of its light.
If each of us is here on earth to give our soul an opportunity to grow and to be of service to those whose lives are touched by ours, then it makes sense to adopt an attitude that helps us to achieve this end. When you are having difficulties, and you ask yourself, “What am I to learn from this experience?” things will change for you. These feelings and events will lead you to find nourishment for yourself and your life. And when you love your life and body, your body will do all it can to keep you alive. Another way to approach things when you are suffering any kind of physical discomfort, pain, or emotional turmoil is to ask yourself: “What has to change in order for me to change this experience?”
Sometimes the change we need to make involves being emotionally honest with ourselves. A good example of emotional dishonesty is when you are asked to go to a social event, or to take on a new responsibility, and your mind is thinking, “No, I don’t want to do that,” but your mouth says, “Yes, okay.” There is a difference between submissiveness and politeness. Trying to be a people-pleaser can get you into trouble. Remember that, just as expressing appropriate anger is beneficial, you also have the right to say no to the things you do not want to do. I like to remember that an English teacher once told me, “ ‘No’ is a complete sentence.” It is a wonderful feeling of empowerment when you learn to say no. Rather than going to the event you do not wish to attend, learn to say, “Thank you. I won’t be coming, but I appreciate your thoughtfulness for inviting me.” To the person who pressures you to take on another commitment, learn to say, “Thank you for asking, but no. I am fully committed.” If they catch you at a weak moment and you have difficulty saying no, use another tack. Tell the person you need to think about it and will let them know. Then find someone you can rehearse your responses with. As soon as you can, call the other person back or send an email. Don’t let others decide your life. You decide what you want. Let your heart make up your mind.
Notice how often you say “I have to” or “I should.” Every time you hear yourself using these words, repeat the statement, but change “I have to” or “I should” to “I get to.” Notice how different each expression makes you feel. Describe those feelings in your journal. For example:
“I have to pay the bills” makes me feel anxious, pressured.
“I get to pay the bills” makes me feel grateful, empowered.
Make a habit of doing this every day for one month, and watch what happens to your outlook and overall mood. Stay aware of the language you use, and incorporate positive words into your daily thinking and speaking, so the “I can’t”s become “I can”s.