Shelly Sood
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today we have Amy B. Scher, bestselling author of four books, including, This Is How I Save My Life, How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can, How to Heal Yourself from Anxiety When No One Else Can, and How to Heal Yourself from Depression When No One Else Can. Amy has been featured on CNN, CBS Good Morning America to name a few. She’s proud to serve on the associate board for Literacy Partners and be a mentor for teen girls through the Girls Write Now program.
Thank you for joining us, Amy.
Amy B. Scher
Thanks so much for having me.
Shelly Sood
Absolutely. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey.
Amy B. Scher
So that’s always such a loaded question like, “Where should I start?” So essentially, I’m a writer, and I write books to help people heal better and faster and in the ways that they need to most so I focus mostly on emotional healing and energy healing, which means balancing the body in relationship to emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.
And I came to this work through my own journey of struggling with chronic Lyme disease, autoimmune diseases and lots of other things I lost count.
And for me, I did all of the medical treatments that I knew; I traveled all over the world for medical care, but also realized that there is an emotional piece of healing, not that it means your emotions necessarily cause any illness, there’s no blame here, but that when we address our emotions, we are using a holistic approach to healing and when we address emotions and stress, which are known to have a impact on the physical body, we can heal faster and better and get to get back to living sooner.
Shelly Sood
Okay, okay, so how does trauma tie into it? Because I’ve read a lot about childhood trauma, and that having a huge impact on your healing journey, and some of the stresses that you have later in life, depression, anxiety, those kinds of things, how does that tie in?
Amy B. Scher
So traumas sort of can fall under the category of stress on the body, and of course, trauma is a big deal, and it should never be minimized. But even smaller traumas, like being teased over one thing in school in second grade that you barely even maybe remember, can actually really be held in our body, if they’re not dealt with, it’s not dealt with.
So I always have, through my books, helped my readers to figure out what maybe they wouldn’t consider as trauma from their childhood or even from 10 years ago, but it’s still traumatizing them. And there’s so much around people who are people pleasers perfectionist, that just build up a lot of stress and pressure in their system around who they are and how to be in the world.
And those types of pressures, feeling like you have to be perfect, like you have to make everybody happy, like you have to take care of people can really have an impact on your body in all sorts of ways as far as registered as stress on the body.
And whether it’s a trauma, huge trauma, or something smaller, like a belief that you have to make everybody happy, that can really quote unquote, sort of stress your system and our stress hormones. And you know, our entire body is affected by that. And over time, when you’re holding that stress for a long period of time, it can definitely have an impact on your organs, glands, muscles, and so forth, that all contribute to physical symptoms.
Shelly Sood
Yeah, and that can manifest you’re saying as depression or anxiety or…
Amy B. Scher
Chronic pain conditions. And that doesn’t mean that the anxiety or depression or fatigue or pain isn’t there, it doesn’t mean that it’s imagined. It just means that the stress that you’ve been holding on in your body over time, has sort of weakened your system to a point that these things are able to manifest more easily and often going back and doing the emotional work, to release that stress from your body can help to instigate the healing process and support that process along with whatever else you’re doing with your doctor.
Shelly Sood
So when you talk about the emotional work you’re doing, what does that exactly mean? Because we know about you know, psychotropic medications for depression. We know about you know, cognitive behavioral therapies, things like that. So how does the emotional healing component fall into that equation?
Amy B. Scher
So for me, the work that I used on myself and for myself and what I write about is something called energy psychology, which is using the body’s subtle energy system and rebalancing it in relationship to thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. So instead of talking about your emotions, or taking medication to alter your chemical, you know Your chemical balance or makeup, what we’re doing is we’re using the body’s energy system to actually release the stress energy from the body.
So it falls sort of on a line between dealing with your emotions in a way where you would in terms of cognitive behavioral therapy, and also bodywork, so like acupuncture. So it’s tapping on certain acupressure puncture points on your body, it’s repeating certain phrases that help speak to your subconscious mind to kind of let go of these old things. So I would say it falls more under there’s a lot of scientific data now or two studies to back up things like Emotional Freedom Technique, EFT, which is one of the techniques that I use.
And also, there’s just so much we know about how our spiritual healing and our own reflection and willingness and desire to let go of old things we’ve been carrying have a positive impact on our physical and mental health. And so it’s really just about sort of letting go getting the body essentially, to chill out and relax. Because in that place, your nervous system is able to to relax or balance. And from there, that is really where the where healing comes from.
Shelly Sood
That makes sense that makes sense. I read a great study by Dr. Shapiro, Harvard Medical School, and he was talking about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, and depressive symptoms, what are your thoughts about using mindfulness and meditation is one of the components to healing.
Amy B. Scher
So those are my techniques of choice. So I struggled with a lot of pain and anxiety during my decade of of chronic illness. And for me, I feel like I just I not that I wasn’t able to meditate, but that wasn’t at certain points, I think it’s not helpful to certain people. And for me, it wasn’t helpful. It created a lot of anxiety to close my eyes and be quiet. When you for those of you out there that are listening with anxiety, you might know what I’m talking about the worst thing ever, for some people with anxiety is to have to be quiet and then hear those thoughts.
Amy B. Scher
It’s hard to shut it off. It is hard, some person so yes, it’s so it can be hard. And I lived in India for a time and I studied meditation and yoga. Wow, yes. And I actually got quite into chanting. And so that was really helpful for me, because I feel that’s a type of meditation in a way where, but it gives your mind something to do instead of just sitting there trying to like hold that sort of blank space.
So I think whatever I love mindfulness and meditation for whoever it resonates with, for me, it was a meditation and yoga were never I tried so hard, but they just weren’t, they just weren’t my, it just doesn’t click Yeah, it just wasn’t for me.
And so for me, the techniques that have worked are emotional freedom technique, which is tapping, and essentially you’re tapping on certain parts of your face and body, while you’re talking about or thinking about the stress or the difficult emotions.
And for me, I think having an action, the tapping the talking the that really, really in addition to the science behind EFT now about how it balances cortisol levels and helps heal from PTSD, in addition to all the sides, for me, it gave me a direction for my anxiety gave me something to do, versus sitting and being for other people. That’s not helpful.
So I think as I think we both know, finding the right medical treatment, finding the right you know, spiritual practice, finding the right technique for whatever is so personal. And for me, I just needed to do it in a way that I felt very active and active participant instead of sort of be.
Shelly Sood
That makes sense. That makes sense. So tell me a little bit more about EFT; I don’t know a whole lot about it.
Amy B. Scher
So EFT is essentially used in a lot of veterans hospitals and programs. I teach it here in a hospital in New York City, to help essentially calm the body and the nervous system in relationship to stress. So again, it’s a specific way of tapping and talking about the stresses that are happening in your life.
And the combination of talking and tapping, essentially help release the imbalance in your body that is present because of that stress. It’s really, really easy. I used to teach it to kids a lot. And so that’s something that I love about it. I teach it in all my books. You can also learn it free on my YouTube channel, if you just look me up, and it’s on my website as well.
But I think it’s really important to do something that feels accessible because when you’re in that place of depression or anxiety, having to learn a whole thing or it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. I can do something that feels really uncomfortable.
I know we all have to sit with discomfort, but the time to do that is not when you’re in the worst place of your life. Because it’s very hard to do something from the worst place in your life. So I like that EFT has a lot of studies behind it, that it’s used in hospitals, that it’s very accessible. Even kids can learn it, that you don’t have to be out of bed or sit up or close your eyes, it’s essentially tapping through a certain sequence of points and talking out loud about what’s bothering you. And sometimes, my readers, and my clients will just tap and say, I just feel so stressed. I don’t know why I’m so sick of this.
And just bringing that balance to the body while tapping in conjunction with bringing up the emotion. So it can be released is such a magical, like I said, there’s so much science behind it in so many studies. But it also can be a magical process where when you’re done, you just feel like you’re not holding as much of that in your body. And so that’s one of the techniques that I really encourage people to learn whether it’s through my YouTube channel, or books, or just somewhere else.
Shelly Sood
That’s great. So did that really help you in your healing process?
Amy B. Scher
It really helped me and helped me so much. I would say it was definitely one of the things that helped me the most. And by the time I had started using EFT, I had been to every doctor I had been, I’d done so many different treatments, I’d spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I think for me, one of the things that I hadn’t addressed was some of those emotional patterns that we talked about earlier, the people pleasing the perfectionism. Those really stressed your body. I didn’t have any major trauma, so to speak, like growing up, of course, I had difficulties and my family did like all most families do. Right. But for me, it was a lot of internal stuff.
Like I was a very sensitive child, I have a very hard time seeing anybody suffer if somebody on the street is in need, like I carry it for weeks. So for me, it was almost like my personality worked against me in that way. And I really use EFT to release some of the beliefs that I had, or the perceptions I had around life and having to take care of everybody and having to do everything perfect and make sure everyone was safe and under. Everything was under control. And I’m sure a lot of people are smiling or laughing or nodding right now. So many women especially relate to that. But the pressure just really really gets to us. It really does.
Shelly Sood
There’s just too much noise out there. Right? Know what, it’s so much difficult to turn off that noise.
Amy B. Scher
I mean, yes, media has made it. I mean, social media is so great in so many ways. I tell people, I’m not against social media. But the noise is just all the stuff coming at you all the time is jarring and disruptive send nervous system anyway. And then all of the overt messages about work harder and your hustle. Yeah, yeah. And seeing what everybody else is doing on their curated feed, where they’re only showing us the coolest stuff they’re doing is really, really does get to some people.
Shelly Sood
Yeah. And I think we have those belief systems, and they’re embedded in us as our personality develops, when we’re children, when we’re growing up, what we hear from our parents, all of that really shapes our belief systems, and we try to we’re almost like our own worst enemies, I feel.
Amy B. Scher
Yes. And we have to learn to undo it right like and I always say like, “it’s not your parents fault.” Every parent we’re all doing the best that we can. But inevitably, your parent will screw you up in some way, even if they’d love to teach. And we always joke like, I used to be like very claustrophobic. And I always say always, because like, my parents loved me so much, they smothered me like they would always like hug me Hold me, my mom says, like, “oh, my gosh, I love you too much, I screwed you up.”
There are so many things. And looking back, we’re like that really affected me. And you know, it was all so much of it was well meaning from the people around us to either keep us safe or give us good advice or whatever. And the way we take it and interpret it and then it becomes the rules for our life. You know, especially people who grew up with alcoholic parents and parents with mental illness can become really, really afraid to rock the boat, share their own emotions have their own needs. I see this a lot with my readers and students and clients in this space. And it is as you grow up, we have to learn to undo some of that and try to find that sense of safety within ourselves.
Shelly Sood
Absolutely. I think a lot of our behaviors are fear based. So really rooted in fear and trauma that we have not healed.
Amy B. Scher
Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s part of just like the life’s journey, right is to heal that. And then I always tell people, you don’t need to do it all at once and you certainly don’t need to fix everything. I was you know, very chronically ill for 10 years and I have now been well for well over a decade. Thank you so much.
But I still have stuff like I still have emotional stuff I didn’t get to at all once in a while something pops up for me. I’m human, that it didn’t stop me from healing. And so I like to tell people when we talk about this, you don’t have to fix everything. Like some things are just stressful.
You don’t need to worry if you feel stressed, like, I get stressed all the time and it just doesn’t sit in my body the same way you still I think people want immediate gratification to yes, they want instant immediate gratification, because that’s the way the world works today there’s so much information, people are trying to absorb everything, do everything at once it’s too much activity going. Yeah. So our minds become programmed that well, this needs to work now. And I don’t have time for to wait and have the patience to really let it work. But nothing happens overnight.
Shelly Sood
How long does these typical treatments usually take? I mean, I’m sure they vary, but…
Amy B. Scher
Yeah, so a lot of this can just be done at home by yourself, if you do have a lot of trauma, I always suggest working with a practitioner, just like you wouldn’t try to do your own medical, you should try to do your own medical treatment. And you should always work with a licensed practitioner. So it just depends. I no longer see clients privately, but I used to, and sometimes in one session, somebody would just feel better.
And some would take months or years; it just depends. But if you think about little by little, I always say like a pot of boiling water with the lid on if you take the lid off and let a little bit of steam and pressure out at a time you are over going. But you are over time going to keep that water from boiling over, you are going to release that pressure that’s sitting on the body. And when that pressure is released to a certain point, your nervous system is able to balance and that’s where healing happens.
So there we say like some people are one-session wonders and they feel so much better all the way better in the session because of whatever however they released or whatever, I definitely took longer than that I’m one of those people who takes longer to let go of everything. Even if it’s a grudge, I hold it for longer than then some people. So it really depends.
But I would say doing the work little by little is going to get you further than doing nothing. So that’s what I suggest in terms of just even 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day, it doesn’t take that much. It’s not sitting for hours a day, it’s not crying on your bed. It’s not sometimes not even a super emotional process to kind of figure out what’s been stuck, and then let it go.
Shelly Sood
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s wonderful. So tell me, Amy, a little bit about your journey of becoming an author; what motivated you to really start writing?
Amy B. Scher
So I always knew I wanted to be a writer, even from the time I was little. But I never knew what to write about. Like I never knew what I would write a book about. And then I went through this really arduous healing journey myself. And through it, I decided, even though I never intended to write about healing, I decided well, that’s there to write about. And I feel like that’s an important thing for people to, to hear about. I think that every time we share our healing story in whatever capacity that is, it can give people hope.
And hope is a lot of what got me through my 10 years of you know, some of it, I was pretty much bedridden some of it I was I was very, very, very sick. And so I feel like sharing our stories are always important. And so I set out to write a memoir. But I ended up writing a couple of self-help books, one or two, I can’t remember before I wrote my memoir.
And now I’m writing a novel because it’s so interesting to me that as we evolve in our own healing in our own life, the things that interest us evolve, like I’m so past, at this point writing about healing because I wrote everything I think I have to write on the subject that I’ve shared it shared it on the subject that I’m like, I haven’t been ill for, like I said well over a decade, which was amazing. And I feel like I really shared from my heart, all the things that all the stories and all the techniques and everything that I feel like could help people.
And now I’ve moved on to writing other things. And so I think it’s important as we heal, not to hold on to our own store our old stories, and I see that I’ve had to recognize that for myself, because I thought that after I healed when I started writing it up about it was like this is what I’m going to write about. Now after a while I realized no, just as my body moves forward, I need to move forward to and I think that’s very hard when you’re sick or when you’re not feeling well is that everything becomes everything comes about with that right for me for so long. Everything became about searching for the cure and everything became about healing and getting better and what my symptoms were and what medications I was on.
And I actually had a doctor, I received some medical treatment in India and I had my doctor there tell me, “you have to have another focus; you can’t get better when you’re so focused on your healing.” And first I was really offended and I was like, “what is this?” But it was also a different a different medical culture when I came from the United States where I had been tracking symptoms for my doctors and exactly what I ate, and I was told not to ever eat any carbs, or any sugar or any very restrictive.
I’m from Southern California, where it’s like wellness and health and being perfect around that is really a culture. So I thought it was doing everything right. And when I got to India, my doctor was saying, “no, what you need is to chill a little like, you need to have some chocolate.” Sometimes she would send me away and be like, “You need to like go shopping, instead of reviewing your medical records.”
And for me at first it was so it was such a terrifying feeling to not be focused on my healing all the time, because I thought that I would lose it, I would lose the opportunity. But what I learned was that my tight grip on my, my need for control over every aspect of my life and healing was actually stressing my body even more. Worse. Yeah.
And when I ate some chocolate, guess what, I didn’t die, nothing happened. When I went shopping, instead of reviewing my medical records or being stuck on message boards, guess what, it didn’t die, nothing terrible happen. And really, in the end, I think, relaxing, and having a life outside of healing, even though I was still so sick. I couldn’t do a ton, but the tiny things I could do, were so worth doing for my healing.
And so now, I always invite people to look at that, like, is your whole world about illness? And does it really need to be? Is there one or two things you could do? Like, I used to only read self help books. And now looking back, I’m like, I should have just read something fun once in a while, because there’s no way? Yes, there’s just no way to move on from something when you’re so obsessively focused on it. It doesn’t make sense.
Shelly Sood
No, it just becomes an obsession then really no control, you say the word control. And yet the has so much to do with what happens in our bodies. Yeah, we’re holding on to certain beliefs, we’re holding on to certain ideas, we feel like, like you felt like you had to heal yourself, you had to do all these things in India and deprive yourself of chocolate or this. And that was just a control mechanism that we can’t let go up. And I feel like when you relinquish that control, it can open up all new things.
Amy B. Scher
It’s so true. It’s so true. And when I was in India, interestingly, it was easier for me to give up control because I was in such a foreign place, not only geographically, but as far as the culture and the medical system. And I like at home, I knew the name of like every medication test, and like it was so foreign. And so they would the doctors, and the nurses would come in to my room, and they would give me something or say they’re going to do this.
And it was like, at some point, it was like, I can’t keep up like, I don’t know, I guess Oh, yeah, it is. So unlike my personality, because I like my family always called me like, I’m no doctor in the family because I and I’m not, but I know so much from what I’ve been through or there. I actually knew nothing, almost because it was just such a different. You know, it’s such a different era India. I was in Delhi.
And so it was so good for me to be so thrown out of my comfort zone that I had to let go of everything. Because it’s almost easier to let go of everything. When you don’t recognize anything. Like it’s hard to hold on to pieces of your old life and control when, when everything’s foreign, like it was kind of easier for me to just go like, Screw it.
And also, I kind of had this moment where I laughed because I was so organized and so in control and knew everything. And then I thought, well, I ended up in Delhi for medical treatment. Like clearly, I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I don’t know what I’m doing because I ended up in the right place. But I controlled so much and yet it hadn’t worked. I wasn’t well. So it was like, oh, like there was this lightbulb moment where it’s like, Oh, I’ve been doing that. That’s actually not very good. Nothing’s working. Nothing’s working. Because obviously trying to control everything doesn’t work. And I had this thought like, what if I’ve controlled myself away from some of the things that would have been held?
Shelly Sood
Exactly. It’s like you create blocks in front of you that barriers because you’re controlling every every single step of the way.
Amy B. Scher
Exactly. There’s that meme that says relax. Nothing is under control. And I love it’s terrifying for a control freak. But I also love it because it’s so true. It’s like, I don’t know, I think sometimes life is just a little bit of like, let’s throw up our arms and just go with it.
And one of the biggest problems is people don’t live in the moment either. They don’t live in the present. They’re always looking back to the past. They’re into the future. What’s gonna happen next try to control what happens next. And yeah, last thing is just to let go.
Amy B. Scher
Yeah, we really don’t have control. I think we have control in terms of showing up to do our best. Yeah, and showing up to do our piece. But we aren’t the whole even though I write books about self healing, so much of self healing, is knowing when to surrender to a friend to and surrender means just giving up the control and, and being reliant or putting your trust in a medical treatment that might support you, or a technique or whatever it is not controlling, but just kind of surrendering to flowing with things instead of fighting them.
Shelly Sood
So true. So true. And mindset, it’s so important to have the right mindset.
Amy B. Scher
It is it really is.
Shelly Sood
Well, thank you so much, Amy, for being with us. Where can people find you?
Amy B. Scher
Thank you. Yes, yes, yes, we’re, I’m on amybscher.com. And I’m also on YouTube, I’m on Instagram, you can basically find me anywhere these days as everybody can be found.
Shelly Sood
And your upcoming book. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Amy B. Scher
It’s a little too early to talk about. But I’m writing a fun fiction book. I’ve only written nonfiction so far. And so I’m writing a fun nonfiction book or fun fiction book. And it is a lot about the journey of letting go and trusting life’s path. So I think it will be helpful helpful to people in a new way.
Shelly Sood
Beautiful. We cannot wait to see what thank you so much for joining us.
Amy B. Scher
Thank you. I really had a great time here. Thanks so much.