Swell AI Transcript: Episode 226 Dr. Brad Montange.wav

Jeffrey Besecker:
This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Disconnection. It's often the hidden role unconscious, societal, and suppressed beliefs play in how chronic illness shapes both our bodies and our relationships. This matters when unresolved psychological data drives emotional suppression and self-handicapping patterns. It not only impairs our healing journey, it also disrupts the trust and empathy at the core of human connection throughout all domains of health care. A key challenge lies in how we experience metacognitive dissonance. It holds the implicit biases, creating or shared resistance, therefore making clients feel unseen or abandoned. Yet by addressing these subconscious patterns, we can bridge the gap between clinical care and genuine relational healing. We'll uncover how rethinking these questions may unlock new pathways for compassion, resilience, and connection in the way we treat both illness and each other when we return to the light inside. When it comes to mobile service providers, many of the big-name networks leave a bad taste in your mouth, with their high-rate plans, extra fees, and hidden costs or expenses. Mint Mobile is a new flavor of mobile network service, sharing all the same reliable features of the big-name brands, yet at a fraction of the cost. I recently made the change to Mint Mobile, and I can't believe the monthly savings, allowing me to put more money in my pocket for all of the things which truly light me up inside. Making the switch to Mint Mobile is easy. Hosted on the T-Mobile 5G network, Mint gives you premium wireless service on the nation's largest 5G network, with bulk savings on flexible plan options. Mint offers three, six, and 12-month plans, and the more months you buy, the more you save. Plus, you can keep your current number or change to a new one if you like, and all of your contacts, apps, and photos will seamlessly and effortlessly follow you to your new low-cost Mint provider. Did I mention the best part? You keep more money in your pocket. And with Mint's referral plan, you can rescue more friends from big wireless bills while earning up to $90 for each referral. When disconnection and emotional empathy gaps fuel dissonance and discomfort and healing, so often it's the quiet disconnection, the empathy gaps and discomfort that hold us back from truly healing, and when chronic illness is viewed only through the lens of symptoms. we risk overlooking the disconnection and emotional empathy gaps that shape resistance to care. We miss the very human core of care itself, something Dr. Brad Montagne, a holistic physician in chronic care, reminds us is vital to restoring trust and connection. Dr. Brad, we're grateful to welcome you to the light inside today. Thank you for joining us and for sharing your pivotal insight that true healing begins when empathy is treated as medicine. Thanks for joining us, Brad. How are you today?

Dr. Brad Montange: I am doing well.

Jeffrey Besecker: I am excited to look at the role unresolved psychological data plays in implicit attitudes we often employ when navigating through chronic illness and healing, both physically and psychologically, because the two hold that very close intimate knowing and interrelationship. Brad, if you would, share with our listeners your background as a doctor and what got you interested in looking at how we relate our healing journey of chronic illness and how our attitude affects that.

Dr. Brad Montange: Okay, always a story that's behind something like that. into the whole concept of health at a very young age when I ended up in the hospital at five years old with, I'm in the emergency room, doctor's not explaining what's going on, just do this, it'll make you better, and it's the same thing that almost everybody gets. How many times I went back, I don't know, it was the middle of the night, I had gut-wrenching pain. Over the course of time, I got a lot of chronic illness at a very, very young child. And I started cooking at five years of age because I realized if I ate different, I felt different. and I couldn't eat what the rest of the family ate because I all felt like I'm sick and gonna puke and the world's spinning around me and I had all those things go on and you know you do what you can to survive and people look at me you're five years old you figure that out you're cooking well everybody's different and that's me it's always been me the Lord directed me out of what I was doing for work to go back to school I hate school got into functional medicine we've been doing that for about 40 years and we deal with some of the worst nightmare cases out there we commonly see people that have been to multiple doctors world-renowned specialists who never got any help at all and we get the bulk of those healthy again So we're really different in what we do. Our approach is really different. And working with people, to really get people on the other side, you've got to deal with a whole person. And this whole concept of this progressive breakdown of self-value, self-worth, the abandonment that goes on with not knowing what's going on and no one understanding what's going on. You get this separation from society and we're gregarious. more like a herd type of a thing. And you look in nature, when you separate something from a herd, they're very vulnerable. And you get this downward spiral of all of these valuations of self-worth because there's no answers, basically. And it drives all of these things. And then we've got all these metabolic functions that add on top of that. We've got these hormonal dysregulations that are on top of that. And you get this big ball of wax that is really malleable in a whole bunch of different ways. And all of these influences are pushing this thing all over the place. that there's not one cause, there's a multiplicity of all these causes, and you've got to address as many of those as you possibly can to get people back on the other side.

Jeffrey Besecker: Very often in our own day-to-day interactions, our own behaviors, we try to ascribe that kind of linear approach to things, yet when we really watch the nuance of our relationships, our interactions, our processes, They're very dynamic and emerging. We want to try to pinpoint so often that certainty. Well, this is the cause. This is the source. This is the one thing. Yet we tend to neglect that nuance in relationship. Wouldn't you agree?

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I'll throw Dr. Jeffrey Bland. He wrote a book called The Disease Delusion, and he talks about chronic illness. And it's got these four different parts. that really play into what you just said. The first thing of all chronic illnesses doesn't resolve on itself. It's not like a common cold. It doesn't just go away in a short period of time. Second, it gets worse over time. Third, there's a multiplicity of causes. There's never just one cause that does that for, okay, It comes from Louis Pasteur's work where bug A causes disease A, bug B causes disease B, and we all want to simplify things into this linear equation type of a thing where you can find that magic thing, there's a magic bullet, and you can make everything go away, and it just doesn't work that way. Louis Pasteur, at the end of his life, he realized that he'd wasted his time. His contemporary, Claude Bernard, taught in—they were both from France—he taught in the French medical school, Claude Bernard, this thing called physical vitalism. It's a constitution inside that allows all these disease type of processes to go on. And that's whether that's psychological, physical, we've got all these dynamics that are going on. And the fourth phase of all the chronic illness is that by the time they come to you, you have multiple systems, all dysregulated, all interacting. In this great big huge conglomerate and those that are really looking for the magic bullet or the one cause, their bias keeps them from the answer because they try and simplify something that's just too complex.

Jeffrey Besecker: Out-of-default programming tend to lean into that epistemic flattening or that oversimplification. We simply oversimplify things to try to get to that default answer or that quick answer, which is neither a good nor bad. It's just kind of how sometimes we try to move toward that certainty or that outcome. So framing that, you know, it's interesting to see how even in our psychological belief systems, our physiological belief systems, that comes into play. very often try to smash that dynamic rather than being open and vulnerable to that kind of evolution, to that path, to allow it to unfold.

Dr. Brad Montange: It's funny.

Jeffrey Besecker: We're all lazy. We can't be at times. Yeah, let's frame it that way.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, I mean, with that inherent human nature, we want to simplify things oftentimes beyond what they really can be, rather than look at this dynamic complex. Because the more complex something is, the more complex a thinker, the more you exercise this brain matter up here, it's much like a muscle. And the more that it's exercised, it's interesting what happens with a very active brain. It makes more folds, it makes more surface area with all of those folds. It gains in mass because it's being exercised and it's being used all the time, but we're primarily lazy and we got these fragile egos. that we want to simplify things so we can put it in a box, and that way it's easy to manage. But the more parameters you bring into the context to try and analyze, the more gray matter it takes, and it's exhausting. It's just plain, flat exhausting. But it's important for those who are working in clinical states to realize, okay, this could be bigger than my simplification is, or what we're often taught to look at things as simplification, and in some much bigger box. looking at, at least on the physical side of healthcare, whether you're talking medical, alternative, it doesn't matter, everybody is looking for a protocol. And essentially, as soon as you can put a name on something, that clicks it into a box, and then you can do this generic program, and it just doesn't work. for chronic illness. And that's probably the same case with our mental attitudes and psychological things. There's not just one simple thing. It's extremely complex.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, I think it's a great correlation to point out today before we dive too far into our discussion, looking at how, you know, even sometimes we're embattled with that idea of pathology. We go to that very core meaning of that word is just the path or way in which it occurs. Sometimes we conflate that, sometimes we blow that into different proportions, sometimes we diminish it and shrink it, yet we move from that nuanced understanding that's just beginning down that path to dissect it and understand it and discern it. be leveraged in that limiting aspect where sometimes we do in a treatment model, whether that's physically again or psychologically, which is inherently another extension of our physical somatic processes. We often blur that line. Where do we exercise that nuance again to realize that dynamic complex to me becomes integral either in when we're dealing with those very physical traits or when we blur that line and move into those psychological traits.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah. And the more you work with people, honestly, I think the more you realize those lines are integrative. They all tie together. There's no clear cut separation between all of it. And you talked about pathology and it's a really interesting thing. I've got 1,100, it's a Leafs 1,100, 1,200 page medical pathology book. And it's really interesting when COVID came out, I looked through that pathology book to try and get a definition of the virus that was going on. There's no defining of a virus in the textbook that everybody uses. There's nothing, and you look at physiology, the way things work, the primary, the number one resource for that globally is Guyton's textbook on medical physiology. The problem with that book is it's all compartmentalized, and it is not put into a flow of systems and interaction that goes on. It's all these disjointed parts, and that's how everybody looks at things. I wrote a book on Lyme disease and chronic illness called Exposing Lyme and Chronic Illness and I put physiology into systems flow, all of the interactive parts on how that goes together. Now clinically that's way more important to be able to understand is how these things, especially as things are breaking down, how they interact as a whole and affect one another because they're not separate. We can't separate any of it and we throw the psychological side into that same equation because you've got physical aspects that are affecting psychology and you've got psychological aspects that are affecting physical that are absolutely inseparable.

Jeffrey Besecker: No, there again, we often dissect that in the abstract way, yet very holistically, very integratively. They're one in the same course, you know, they're partners in that interaction, much like our opening conversation. How are those partners communicating is essential, not only in how we diagnose it, how we frame it, how we form our opinion of it, what results we are willing to surrender to and explore. So I think it's kind of a great way to segue, I'm seeing all of these co-relationships light up for me. It's all very embodied, it's all very somatic, your physiological side, your psychological side, the two have that dynamic relationship.

Dr. Brad Montange: It reminds me of this and this is just a huge lesson, life lesson that talked about a whole bunch of different ways, but I raised my children on a farm and we got horses on the farm and I realized shortly in that endeavor that you either spend a ton of money on a horse or you spend a bunch of time learning how to train them. I did the second, I started training horses and I trained a bunch of horses where we go to horse show and professional trainers would talk about my horses, how well behaved they were and how they interact and they're really subtle, you've got to do a lot of physical things but you connect actually with your head to theirs, your heart with theirs and when you got a really well trained horse, we trained four horses who were bridle-less You could climb on them bareback with no bridle and you could go from start to flat out and back down on a couple of those without even bouncing off the back at all. Just total connection. When you get a horse that's really you connect with, you can sit on their back, you can turn your head and look at something and they'll square up and face straight toward it. You can look at a point on the ground and they'll go to it. You can look at a leg on their ground and they'll pick it up and they'll move it the way you want them to move it. That's connection. That's some really, really intuitive, intimate type of connection, which we have all those kinds of communicative nuances available to us from one person to another. We just tend to not develop it because it's easier to do other things.

Jeffrey Besecker: To me, that speaks directly to things like our somatic attunement, our emotional co-regulation, how we're aligning, how we're integrating. So looking at that, that all kind of points us back toward where we're going today. I'm going to kind of reign that back in. Horse jokes aside, back toward our journey with chronic illness and how we're diagnosing. Looking at chronic illness and how it can often see long before diagnoses and through internalized trauma and learned belief systems, we sometimes start to form these implicit attitudes or unconscious belief systems. What role do suppressed psychological beliefs, perhaps from early childhood development, from our culture, from our family systems, tend to come up in your practice or in your diagnoses that often affect that long-term somatic dysfunction and how it tends to perpetuate the chronic illness itself?

Dr. Brad Montange: That's a pretty simple answer actually because I opened up with my own experience that is a common thing with everybody. The first thing is people just start not feeling well and then they wonder why. Then they go to all these specialists and no one can answer their question. So when there's not a question answered, there's all this self-abasement that goes on. Is there something inside of me that's broken? Why can't somebody help me? Why can't somebody figure this out? And you start to see this whole thing of this beat-up self-worth Because the way that we're interacted with, most of us equate ourself worth with what we can produce in one way or another. And when that starts to get beat up, we start to question things. But the more you go to the experts that should be able to help, and they have no idea what's going on, you start to question your own value in that. And the people that are around you, it doesn't matter how close they are, They start to go through the same thing and somebody has some open gaping wound. Everybody can look at that and go, wow, that makes sense that they're not doing well. We've got this huge open gaping wound and no one's going to question that. but when it's internal and you don't see those reflections from inside and most people don't know how to look you know and say the skin starts to get paper thin you start to see blood vessels through it, it quits reflecting light, it's non-multiple colors, it's more kind of a gray blue complexion on most people don't realize those are the signs of internal health that's failing really well and they look at you you're still whole Maybe you're losing some hair and not seeming very energetic, but no one in your circle understands. Your doctors don't understand, you don't understand, and the people around you don't understand at all. And you get this, what I call a psych cart, it's all in your head, and it's not.

Jeffrey Besecker: Again, that becomes a cultural program. We're very somatically attuned to those things, yet for various reasons, we tend to check out from them.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, and it's one of those things that as people start to check out of that, the people that you interact with, whether that's family, that's an intimate partner, whether that's friends, The longer that goes on, the less people understand, they start to distance themselves. And then you start to get this abandonment concept that goes along with that, that only increases the self abasement types of things. And people just They're completely isolated. Their health is continuing to go downhill and they find no help. And you get this question that goes on. Am I too broken to ever get well again?

Jeffrey Besecker: And the value of self. An interesting point. I'm going to hold to this. I'm kind of cutting in here. That's an interesting point. When we look at our physiological health. A lot of times we can hold that frame that something is broken or out of whack, not functioning right, and hold that without that same dissonance. We can remove ourselves personally from that aspect, especially a broken bone is a perfect example of that. We can see the incoherence or the breakdown in the system there and not be psychologically discerned to that to the same degree. as if we're holding that idea of self or that idea of our psychology, and now we're using two separate systems that are basically addressing the same core concern. Yet, we have that dissonance being the pivot there, and I'm going to hinge on that because this is a really big contingent point for me lately, is the role metacognitive dissonance plays in creating that discomfort.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, you bring something up which supports what I was just saying. If there's something like a broken bone, it's overt, it's obvious, you got a reason why it's there and there's not a questioning of that or this great big gaping wound, something along that line. You have a reason and you also have a window of healing where that's going to resolve and life can get somewhat back to normal again. But when you don't have a reason and all the authorities can't help you in that arena, because they don't have the tools to figure it out, then that supports all this downward spiral. That it's one of those amazing things that, from my perspective, I see that quite a lot. That when there's a causation, then people can overcome that downward spiral because you have something to hang on to. That's not that I'm just too broken to be able to be fixed, but I have this issue that I need to address. And once that's resolved, I can be on the other side.

Jeffrey Besecker: So, as we opened up today, you had mentioned how we compartmentalize that sometimes, how we compartmentalize our perspectives. To me, that's a key aspect here. Sometimes, you know, we all hold that idea of self very sacred. That's a very reasonable assumption for us to make. We have to have some kind of sense of sacredness to connect to that, some sense of urgency. Sometimes that drive for that stress regulation, that drive to moderate that stress, heightens that sense of urgency. I'm going to keep it fairly broad there today. And we tend to over personalize. We go into that protective model. We're starting to shield it. We're starting to guard it. We're starting to hold it with a higher regard to kind of moderate. Sometimes do you feel we have to step back a little bit to reframe? We ask that in our questionnaire with all of our guests. Can you step back from this model and see it from an external perspective?

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah. And that's something that I think we had talked about quite a bit earlier in this idea of that I got into, and I believe you did too, more of a philosophical basis where you take an idea and when you look at it up close, it can sound pretty reasonable, but if you extrapolate that way off to an extreme and you evaluate it from there, you start to see whether it really holds water. And that's what you're talking about here, I believe, is that whole concept of how does this really hold up? in different extremes. It's interesting in biological research in that we're so complex and we're so interactive, we can't isolate one thing. It's just absolutely impossible. We can concentrate on different things and play around with different parameters with all that stuff. We have all these other things coming into play that we may not even be considering. And it takes, oftentimes, another critical eye to go, what about this? Oh, wow, that's interesting. Yeah, let's kick that one around. And how can we test that? How can we see how that interaction is going on? How do we bring that into the equation to see what all is going on? And that's the whole necessity for what you brought up earlier, integrative care. We can't know all the different parts, but when you can find different people who you can dialogue with, clinically over people in HIPAA has really screwed that up. Because it's almost impossible to dialogue with somebody about cases. It's terrible what HIPAA did as far as that goes. And there's a reason for that protective side of that that is necessary. We can't know all those different parts and that's why you got these different ones where you bring more of a cohesive whole and you can really make some, for lack of a better term, magic happen in people's lives.

Jeffrey Besecker: So to frame that metaphorically, sometimes when we do experience that dissonance of uncertainty, I'm going to resonate with that word dissonance today, because it's become such an integral piece in how we approach our psychology, how we approach our framing of life, how we approach so many things. We get that sense where we have to protect or guard something to keep its sanctity. We stuff that cat in a bag, thinking that that bag's going to protect it and keep it safe. Sometimes we have to just let the cat out of the bag and see where he goes. That's my metaphorical analogy of it today. So how willing are you to let that cat out of the bag becomes the integral question there. Are you going to give it a little bit of trust? Are you going to nurture it? Are you going to turn a mindful, attuned eye to it? Or is that urge to put it in that bag and squeeze it till you stifle the very life out of it?

Dr. Brad Montange: You know, it's interesting as you're talking about that, I'm reminded of this whole concept of reflex. And we've got overt physical reflexes. Reflexes are there to protect us. You know, they're automatic things. We have reflexes in every aspect of our nature. There's a lot of psychological ones. Yes, very much so. And when you're talking about dissonance, oftentimes that's what's going on is these just reflexes. that are going on that we don't even think about. They're automatic. And you have to be very present to even recognize that that's what's going on. Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah. I found it very interesting to watch. It's not meant to be demeaning of any care provider or what our system has provided with us throughout our course of what we're attuned to and aware of currently. finding where there are some gaps in just that biological knowledge of what's potentially going on or truly going on in any of those systems, whether it's how we're logicking, how we're interacting psychologically, how that connects with our body attuning to its natural ability to heal. Do you feel like there's suddenly this big gap that we're being exposed to in our general cultural understanding of what our core biology is, and now we're making all of these monumental jumps and leaps in our discoveries?

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, it's interesting in that because we can't well, there's absolutely no way that anybody can know anything.

Jeffrey Besecker: Oh, there's so much going on. It's confounding just to even contemplate how much we take offline and discount that this is so complex and nuanced. And we tried to find those ways to kind of shortcut.

Dr. Brad Montange: I remember my own process in going through graduate school that to me it was a very humbling experience. To a lot of people it's the opposite. And something that happened in my own process was I'm a complex thinker. I took physiology, chemistry, and biology all at the same time. I went through undergrad in an insane period of time. It takes most people six years to get into grad school. I did it in 14 months. So, you know, that's me. But I'm taking all these things that at the same time, and I'm looking at different perspectives of different things, you start to challenge things in different ways. And you start to look at every time you learn something, you realize there's something underneath that. And then you learn that, and there's something underneath that. And then there's no end to the discovery of different things. To me, instead of, and I was the top of the class in everything that I did, going through insane warp speeds of the education, in my own thinking, it's like, this is such a humbling experience that there's no way to get to the bottom of anything. Absolutely none, because everything is based on underlying principles and foundations. My mind flips to those things, and it's always looking for those things, but every time you get new information, it challenges those foundations. And we had one opening lecture in one of my classes where the teacher said, 50% of what you're going to learn in this school is false information. And I said, bolt up rice, like, what am I doing here? It's going to cost a ton of money and a lot of time. should I just leave? And she followed that with this caveat that I thought was really, really good, because it really helps us fix our own perspective. And what she followed that with is we're going to teach you the current body of science that we know it today. Research is going to prove that half of what we believe is true today is wrong. And it's up to you to keep up with the research to find out what's what. And it's constantly changing, it's constantly evolving. And some of the reason why it's what we believed was true before, find out that it isn't, is because the biases that we have And then the biases, they're filters. And they keep us from trying to process with all these tangent ideas to simplify our processes. But those tangent ideas may be more important than what we focused on in the first place.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's an integral point to make. So often we try to rid or free ourselves of those biases with that notion that we get rid of those biases in our beliefs. Yet those biases simply serve as a lens. It's like going to the optometrist. We'll frame it there. Sometimes you have to click on that other lens or put on new glasses to just simply see something from a new perspective. It doesn't necessarily change the core truth of something. you just simply see it from a different angle or a different perspective. You know, yet we try to spend all of our lives freeing ourselves from those biases that just allow us to see things from a different angle, a different view.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, and there's no way that we can process without a bias. I mean, it's just impossible to look without a bias. And something that our first conversation that I thought was really refreshing is that, and I think you did too, is that when we can have conversations where we're not using all these ego reflexes of defenses, but we can interact with people with different biases to kick something around, to be able to look from different perspectives, to try and get a more cohesive whole picture of what's going on and go, okay, that's really interesting.

Jeffrey Besecker: You know, even that idea of our ego reflexes, we're very biased a lot of times, culturally especially, in only seeing the defensive aspect and often very much just forming this very broad conceptualization of it, yet not realizing that it's all a very internalized, somatically embodied processes that's guiding all of that, right down to, I'm going to slag a little bit here today on ancestral wisdom or historical wisdom of Being able to free ourselves of that or ego death. How do you die something that's very much tied to your overall livelihood? It's very connected to the majority of our somatic processes. I'm going kind of broad there, but it's all part and parcel of that integration. Can you truly free yourself of the thing that you're living with it? Can you kill that? Well, yeah, you're gonna probably die along with it. from a very biased perspective, because it is very much a semantically embodied, engaged set of processes, systems, outcomes. Yet we try to compact that again, put the cat in the bag because I'm uncomfortable with the uncertainty. Well, it serves me the most when it's protective. So that's where I'm going to orientate my confirmation biases.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, I don't know if you remember this concept that was kicked around decades ago called stripping. And with that, tell me more managers. Yeah, you imagine yourself, you go into a room, you close the curtains, you shut off the lights, you make it as dark as you possibly can, and you put a chair in there. and you sit in the chair and you go through who am I and one by one you strip yourself of all of those things. You throw your clothes outside, you end up sitting there naked and with all of these things that we fictitiously build our self-worth and our identity around and you're stuck with trying to deal with just the root core of who you are. And they coin that a dangerous process because most people base their self-worth on things that are false. They're not real tangible things like Somebody I knew, they got some new boyfriend. One of their friends got a new boyfriend, and they're interacting with this classmate from a long time ago. And I'm asking, so what's this guy like? Well, he's got a nice car. He's got this kind of clothes. He's got these outward things. But there was not one description of who this person was. And that's what that stripping was, was just taking all those external things away to try and find out who your core self is. And that's a threatening thing because we're not taught how to build that in a healthy way.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's an interesting perspective to toy with. I'm going to say toy with, because we can very much play with it. We can very much set it out there in front of us and look at it. We can very much strip it down to its essence. Sometimes it's just a matter of shifting that lens. Is it inherently not a part of us to have those nice things? Or do we form kind of a stilted or sometimes jaded perspective of that? There are part and parcel of who and what we are. There's an interaction and relationship there. This is falling back on a blog post I just put up today. That true self has many parts. It's not one thing. It's the bag of things that we put in there. including the stuff we surround ourselves with and the ideas and beliefs we have are all, if we're experiencing them, why are they not true? You're experiencing them. That's a part of your experience. It's a part of who and what you are. If you don't want to experience it, you know, what do you do to change it? It can be that approachable. I'll say approachable, and I know that can be challenging. Let's look at why that becomes challenging, is my next question. Why does that bring something up in you? And why do you not want it to be true is the biggest question, perhaps. That's very broad and philosophical today.

Dr. Brad Montange: If we bring that back into where we started with a health issue, you take a classic high schooler who's extremely athletic, extremely successful in athletic issues, they get their self-worth wrapped around that athletic issue. You take that to college level and a lot of those stars that were in the local school can't even cut it to make it on the team and you have this huge self-evasion. basement because they didn't base their value on just an inherent worth of a human being. They based it on performance and that performance you put in a different context and it fails and there's this huge, their whole world just gets rattled with that and it's very difficult. It's amazing looking at people, they can't get out of their high school years. They tend to like the same cars that they had when they were in high school and and they think life's going to stay there and it doesn't. It just doesn't. And that's the same thing, you know, that we started the conversation with. That same thing goes on with health. If our self-worth is based on athleticism and this vibrant health where we can go do something and you start chipping that away, we start to have these reflexes of a lot of doubt. and all that. And those are hard to fix the reflex without addressing some of the core issues.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Dr. Brad Montange: Like you take a simple complex idea of relational health called unconditional love. For most people, they haven't experienced that. And it's life transforming because there's a stable foundation that's unshakable from momentary interactions and things like that. The value is in their inherent value as a human being, not in what they can perform and how they interact. And it's a healthy foundation for relationships. You look at the health issue, when you start chipping away at what we accept as a normalcy, it really chips away at that. And without having answers without having resolution, it really pushes the needle.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, it can. Are you willing to look at that through your lens of stripping?

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah.

Jeffrey Besecker: Let's build that today, if you're open to that. So, let's look at a couple aspects here that have come up for me. I'm going to kind of kick into a coaching model here, for the sake of just looking at different perspectives. So, A, let's look at that idea. I'm going to jump here first to unconditional love. Does love itself or any kind of attunement to another person have conditions? And can we truly be unconditioned by it or unconditional in it? It's very rhetorical.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, there's there's always conditions. My wife told me this story that she just ran across where some girl around 20 started dating somebody and they were doing fine for about six days and all of a sudden he starts distancing himself and he says that God's telling him he needs to. And she asked the question, so what's God saying? How's he telling you that this needs to be cut off? And he finally winds it down with her picking at things that he just doesn't find are attractive. So he's using God as an excuse to escape from things. There are always different conditions for who we interact with and who we relate to, how those are going to be interacted with. And there comes a point of commitment where you accept all these idiosyncrasies in people as normal. Years ago, I got a hold of some custom jewelers to make a wedding ring, and it was three bands of gold woven into a ring. The husband, he couldn't get around to making those rings, just couldn't do it. And I was talking to his wife one day and I says, oh, okay, I think I get it. Your husband's worked with metal, he's metal perfect. I've spent my whole life working with wood and people. It's their imperfections that make them beautiful. And that broke the ice and he was able to finally go ahead and make those rings. And I got word back from the wife that that was the most intimate interaction they'd ever had on any piece of jewelry. Because they had to work together on this dance of weaving around a mandrel. That was really interesting, you know. And we look at what you just said. There's always these conditions that are there. There comes a point in time where those conditions are you accept those idiosyncrasies, and they're not cause of breaking something, but you take something like a chronic illness, and all of the, maybe not all the rewards, but those rewards start to get chipped away, and you have less and less and less and less of a reciprocity. in relationship and it's undermining all the foundations that are there. Oh, you look at the stripping issue and that's what ends up being there. You don't have the reciprocity of interaction going out on, you know, say if it's a lover, you don't have the interaction of going out on dates, the conversations become less and less, the interaction in every manner of interaction you can conceive of becomes less and less. And it starts to chisel away at that relational health that we just can't get away from. And the self-worth is completely wrapped up in both men and women in relational interactions.

Jeffrey Besecker: So let's strip that down to its essence of conditions. So to create that sense of safety, that openness to vulnerability, and that attuned connection. Let's just spitball how many conditions create the right tone and pacing for that relationship. What comes to mind?

Dr. Brad Montange: When you talk about safety, that's an absolutely huge issue, especially when you look at intimacy. There has to be this atmosphere of protective safety for that to be rich and fulfilling and free. It just absolutely has to be on both men and women's side, and they don't talk about it much. But it's an absolute reality because that's one of the most naked vulnerable things you can possibly do. And if there's not safety, you just can't go there. You look at good conversation, that's another thing. You can't have deep, meaningful interaction when you have this overpowering, threatening issue that's going on there. Safety is one of those paramount things that is really, really huge. That's one of those things that has to be given from all parties involved.

Jeffrey Besecker: So pull us into that loop now and bring that into the framework of, A, how we diagnose chronic health issues, B, how we relay that data and information to a patient, client, the other human being, and then ultimately how we assess that pushback or gap when somebody is unsettled in receiving that news.

Dr. Brad Montange: Okay, with the diagnostics, most people don't realize a diagnosis is an insurance code that allows somebody to bill for their services. It's not a root cause of what's going on, and it can be completely disjointed from the root cause. Oftentimes, a diagnosis is just simply a label, and those labels have a whole bunch of different social connotations and personal ones, interactive ones, and all that. There's a big difference of getting a label as getting what a root cause is, because a label doesn't necessarily have a resolution.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's basically like a pen and a map giving us some guidance and maybe some loose boundaries to help guide our perspective.

Dr. Brad Montange: Right. And with chronic illness, those are extremely loose and really difficult, whereas when you find what root causes are, it's like, OK, Now we have something we can really hang on to, because this is what created this. And those are always a multiplicity of things. So, once you can start to define what the root cause is, you're no longer in this vacuum of what do we do with this? But then you have these parameters. Okay, now we know what the cause is. What are the different parameters? bring that causation to bear, and what therapeutic measures can we use to resolve those things? And it brings answers. With those answers, it brings more of a healthy ability to look at the possibility of healing and getting on with life.

Jeffrey Besecker: So as practitioners in any field of human concern, I'm going to frame that really broad because they all kind of pivot on those core conditions of safety and vulnerability. Do you feel we sometimes move too quickly toward the diagnosis phase or might we sometimes reel that back and start to frame that first from establishing that anchor point of capacity and safety. Does this person feel attuned to me with trust and respect to allow that vulnerability to happen? Do I first move to addressing their concerns with this emotionally, mentally, physically, psychologically? Or am I putting the horse before the cart, so to speak, going back to our horse analogy here and not creating that same bond of resonance, emotional safety, attunement to then move into that phase.

Dr. Brad Montange: It's an interesting thing that I talk about quite a bit. To bring healing, you have to build trust. You can't go anywhere without trust. And the people with the chronic problems that are going on, you have to build trust by being vulnerable yourself. And that, as far as practitioners go, is a real fragile part of ego that most won't go there. So, it creates this huge barrier of trust because you have, instead of vulnerability, and a horizontal interaction of equality as far as value and position and things. It's just condescending, which is an overbearing type of a thing that breaks all these different reflexes that go on. So the more open and transparent people can be, the easier it is to build that trust. Because people don't have these reflexes of, first of all, they can accept when someone is speaking from a place of compassion and truth. You've got to combine those two to build trust. Absolutely have to. instead of a condescension of trying to put somebody in a box. Oh, do we move too quickly to things? The whole system of health care is set up to move people in a box because that's how the payment happens. And that's a problem. It's just an inherent problem with the way the system goes. It doesn't compensate for a healthy interaction to try and find out what's going on. It only compensates for the box. So that's just something that good practitioners have to figure out a way to get around.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's kind of a twofold problem there. Systemically, you've got that. natural drive to kind of economize and discount, which creates that empathy gap. We're not establishing that as human, which is an integral part of the healing processes, yet now we've downplayed it, now we've psychologically signaled that to the client, the patient, the human being on the other end, so we're shooting ourselves in the foot. in our ability to properly care, so that has to be addressed holistically on a systemic level. This is a very realistic part that has to be the foundation of all caring and healing, so we have to naturally build that into a sustainable model of billing and a sustainable model of practice. Whether you're the CEO of the hospital and I can speak through the voice or the reflected voice of my brother-in-law who is in that position. I'm getting kind of a secondary filter of it, but I watch and realize how that creates stress even for the top tier CEO that we often discount They are human too. It may not always seem that. Sometimes they step out of that role. How do we bridge those gaps, those empathy gaps, to attune with respect and mutual regard? Becomes the integral part. That we bring it back down to that humanistic base of basic connection, safety, and default attunement. It's a broad rhetorical. I'm going to let you run with that.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, years ago we had an administrator of a research hospital do a lecture at one of our conferences and what he said was kind of a mind blower, but the insurance companies had whittled down a medical doctor's time to interact with people down to about six minutes. That was it. And he talks about a typical doctor coming to a room. there's a chart in the door he opens up the chart and within a few seconds he's making a diagnosis within less than a minute I don't remember what the time frame was in all this but in less than a minute he's got his diagnosis then he's flipping into what his treatment plan is and he's already got a diagnosed treatment plan before he walks in the door and all the time he spends with a person is just fluff. They haven't run any tests, they haven't done anything. They've just formulated all this ideation because of the way the payment model runs. And that system has to change to allow the interaction that we're talking about to build trust and to get down to true diagnostics to find root cause issues so we can actually start to really address things and build trust in that process. The model of compensation just has to change.

Jeffrey Besecker: So you've got my problem-solving wheel spinning now, and that's where I logically go with it, naturally go with it. We've got that six-minute window. It's not necessarily maybe that the six-minute window itself is inherently broken. And we have to acknowledge it's a systemic break. It's a psychological break. And if we can't vulnerably acknowledge a break in those systems by labeling it as such, it creates that gap itself. We have to be able to logically, emotionally, epistemically hold that idea that that break itself doesn't denigrate your core worth, whether you're the client, the system, or the caregiver. If you can't psychologically and physically back yourself from that, emotionally back yourself from that, and hold it out there, there's a gap there.

Dr. Brad Montange: I remember a lecture from an eight-year-old doctor that came into our grad school, and he said, you want to know how to take a good history, come into the room, sit down eye level with who you're seeing, look them in the eye, and ask them, what do you think is going on? What do you think is causing it? And shut up and listen. 75% of the time, they're gonna be right. That six minute window doesn't allow for that kind of interaction.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, we're automatically gonna move to anxiety. If you're feeling your life and your health are on the line, six minutes of time is automatically gonna move us all into anxiety.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah. And I call history a person's story. It gives you a historical perspective. And oftentimes we got to look back generations, because a mother's health when she gets pregnant, the research shows now that it affects at least five generations. Yes. So, we've got to take the time to look through that history, dialogue with holes in it, to get some other parameters. And that takes time. You can't do that in six minutes. There's just absolutely no way you can do that in six minutes. And we've got to be honest in the system of like, oh, OK, if we're going to really start to try and fix this and do real interaction to find what real stuff is, you can't do that without a history. Yeah, you just can't. Years ago, we had a bunch of patients that were going down to one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world to do stuff, and they'd go down and they'd send their files down there. The doctors never had time to look at their files. They'd order the same repetitive tests because all they got time to do is look at the results of whatever tests they looked at, which is relying on other people, and still not take the history. I had a young man come in who had just extreme gout issues with a ton of problems and one day his wife came in within a minute or two his father came in we sat down in the room and we started talking and I don't know if it was the wife or the father said do you know that he's addicted on this medication and I looked at him funny and they looked at each other and go he has been told this. and asked me if it had any bearing on his case. I said, I'm not sure, let me look it up, I'll get back a hold of you. I looked it up and the medication he was addicted to was causing the very problem that he had. They took him down to that one clinic that I was talking about in a RV, spent a day down there, they affirmed what I said, they pulled him off the medication, the whole thing resolved within 24 hours. And all that's a historical issue, and I spend time doing history, but people, they withheld the key thing. And that's one of the things we really try and wade through in history is what's missing? Is there something you didn't address here that's really key? And that history, it continues from visit one all the way through care, because there's always things coming up that add to that, that are keys. that takes time to interact.

Jeffrey Besecker: You know, I remember the days, this is kind of divesting a bit here, when my childhood care provider physician would do in-home visits still. We would be ill. You know, I had stitches put in on my family couch in the home. You know, you had that kind of attunement. He was there in your environment. He was there interacting with you. You felt very connected and safe because you truly felt like your care provider was a part of your familial system. They were accountable because they were in your space.

Dr. Brad Montange: And you see things in people's own home, their own environment that you'll never see clinically. There can be extreme keys for everything that goes on. I still do home visits. They're not very common, but I still do. And you don't get compensated like a normal system would in a way that's equal for the time that it takes to do that. The whole issue is it's necessary. They need it. And it's one of those aspects that we talked early about building that kind of trust. You do what's necessary for people, not necessarily what's convenient. And that's one of those key issues to build that kind of interactive relationship where you can really get into the real issues that are at hand.

Jeffrey Besecker: So you still tend to a more quote-unquote traditional holistic approach, would you not say?

Dr. Brad Montange: Completely holistic, yes. And it's interesting, calls in the weekend, I've been woke up in the middle of the night by people, and sometimes that's necessary and sometimes it's not. Some people will abuse that, and you've got to understand who that is and have that kind of a filter. it's a necessary interaction to have available out there for the kind of people that we deal with because you have these dynamic things that don't happen in our convenient parameters necessarily. And the best diagnostics that you have is when something's clinically showing its face.

Jeffrey Besecker: I know we've divested a bit here from looking at dealing with chronic health, but it's all interrelated again. We're all reflecting back. I'm going to reel that back just for a second. From a business, practitioner business model, how challenging is that now? Do you still operate within the typical insurance cycles? I know a lot of psychological practitioners are dealing with those same conflicts when they accept insurance in their care. Or have you moved toward an alternative model? I know locally we have a shared cooperative that has stepped outside of that model, and you buy a cooperative share with your physician, and you go into the practitioner, and you go into the physician, you have your same core healthcare, but they're selling shares of the business to step aside from that. Now you've got me as a valued partner. I'm not stifled by that economic system. I'm able to see you and attune to you when you need me. I'm a valued partner.

Dr. Brad Montange: imperative thing that needs to be addressed you cannot be inside of the system that people are accustomed to and provide the kind of care that they need to resolve difficult chronic problems. That may work for a broken bone, common cold, some simple things but when you get into anything that's complex and chronic that model just doesn't work. So you look at the educational system, there is not one doctorate educational system that addresses chronic physical health issues. It's all based off of acute care. 75% of the people going in have chronic conditions. and the clinicians are completely unprepared in every profession to deal with those because they're not educated in those. I spent four decades in my own research and education in chronic illness. I'm an odd one as far as that goes. You got to go outside of the system to get that education. You got to go outside of the system to get that kind of research and you got 40 years down the line I'm still in physiology textbooks, I'm still digging into how things function and work on a regular basis because when you get something that doesn't fit the box, you gotta figure out why. And most, there's very few in any profession that do that. I've rubbed shoulders with people in all the physical care professions for decades and I don't think I've met a handful of people that do that.

Jeffrey Besecker: Again, I think that comes back to being vulnerable and open to acknowledge that breaks happen. Breaks in the system, breaks in how we're functioning, and if we're not open and adaptive to at least vulnerably consider that and step back. Sometimes it's a physical step back, sometimes it's just that cognitive and emotional step back. and reframe things, reset or reset. We continue down the same path. We move toward those defaults. Same with how we label and identify our self-concept. It's a concept and a theory at its core. It's a system of values and beliefs at its core. Yet, within that framework, inherently rests the foundation of a flesh and blood human being.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah. And there's a metaphorical way of looking at most of our specialization. It's this tunnel vision, microscopic view of things. And the healthier view is a 60,000 foot view where you're looking at the whole global complex. But it's so complex to look that way. It can be simplified Once you understand how the systems interact, and that's why I put so much into my book on systems flow physiology instead of all these disjointed things, because you've got to understand how things work together. And once you do, it simplifies the whole way you process everything. And I'm sure that's very similar in the way you do. Somebody can come in with a label, and it's really easy to take a bias of, okay, I'm going to look at this person in view of that label, and it takes a lot more of your own energies to step back and go, okay, what's behind that label?

Jeffrey Besecker: There again, you and I, and this is set up with a grain of humble salt, are privileged in the regard that we have predispositions to be able to discern those things from that level, to be able to pull out to that 40,000, 60,000 foot view. Would you not agree?

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah. And that's why we can converse about something and get things around from different aspects, because neither one of us feel threatened in a conversation like this.

Jeffrey Besecker: Oh, I feel threatened. Sometimes I have to acknowledge it. Sometimes I do feel threatened. I have to humbly acknowledge that also, because that does percolate in the background. And that is neither here nor there. Also, it's then that ability to acknowledge that vulnerably and pivot from it.

Dr. Brad Montange: Right, but there's some people you can be more vulnerable and be safe with, and there's others you can't.

Jeffrey Besecker: I'm not going to privilege it myself from my perspective that much that I'm going to move into that stance, you know, and that's that, again, I have to humbly acknowledge that part of the equation also.

Dr. Brad Montange: I can accept that, but when you can get some minds together who choose to back up and look more globally, you can have this mutually respective conversation kicking around different parameters that doesn't threaten the person's fear, their ego, their profession, their self-worth. It doesn't do that. It just brings out this richness of interaction. They go, wow, I haven't thought of things that way and that's interesting to add into what I'm doing and it's for the betterment of the people we work with to be able to step back and do this and maybe we can help draw some other people in out of this hyper focused issue of a microscopic view into more of a global view so we can have better clinical outcomes.

Jeffrey Besecker: It bridges that empathy gap and brings us all back together. And that to me is the ultimate maybe kismet that we need to create in guiding or setting the humble foundation of framework for others to address their chronic health issues, their emotional dysregulation, all of these other quote unquote gaps that we experience that simply disengage and disconnect us.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, I'm not sure if I caught that right.

Jeffrey Besecker: I went 40,000 foot there and I just zoomed back out very quick. So that's an instance of how I work. Sometimes I tend to jump there and there and I'm on the same page, but I lose others. And I realize that now, even in my own processing of it.

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, because you brought in disengage and disconnect. And if you're talking about disengage and disconnection from the hyper focus, then I follow what you said.

Jeffrey Besecker: Is that what you were meaning? That's where I went. And it was very quick and very fast on the pivot. And it's very disorienting. But we

Dr. Brad Montange: So that's why I looked puzzled.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's like, oh, okay. That was a key instance of how that sometimes happens in our dialogue and in how we're moving that pacing too fast. I can do it very quick, but I lost, you know, as practitioners, we can put those dots together very quick from our experience, but we lose sight of that perspective where we're not creating that capacity for the other.

Dr. Brad Montange: Well, you know, it's an interesting thing because it only took one simple question to go, oh, OK, I know where you went and now I get it and I can completely follow with that and embrace exactly what you said. There was a little gap in that, which I'm not sure if this is what he meant.

Jeffrey Besecker: That may have been an unconscious tell on my part, doing it just out of intuitive. How do I take this conversation? I don't know, but I know how to rein it back in when I become aware of it now and reattune it. So you apply that again back to your model toward another. If you're mindful of it and you don't find those bias points of disconnect, those bias points of reactivity, You then kind of have that sense of depersonalization again. It's not about me. It's I'm trying to attune toward a common goal with this other. Let's step it back in frame. And you and I are finding that space. So there again, it's that attunement, that pendulation back and forth between the two from a psychological perspective. You're going to swing. You're going to shift. Are you willing to dance along or do you continue to step on each other's toes? Do you develop that expanded capacity to move and modulate within it together and reattune, realign, reconnect? And do you form that harmony? Those are all very rhetorical, but very kind of representational qualities of a relationship. The very conditions of acceptance, alignment, attunement, respect, vulnerability, all of those things coming together. I'm lost and I'm trying to reel myself back in because we went to 40,000 foot and just kind of continued to float.

Dr. Brad Montange: So no, no, as soon as I, as soon as I understood you went to 40,000 feet, I got it. And that's how my mind works. It's just, you know, it's, it's principle based. And once, once I understand what went on, it's like, okay, I'm there. I'm right there.

Jeffrey Besecker: I just had to clarify is that what you're just very blessed from my wife because she has that ability above and beyond anyone else I know to kind of rein me back in and move along with that tendency of mine. And, you know, that's a very humbling place. Then when you can finally move to the point to say, I'm just aware of where those gaps are, I'm vulnerable, I'm able to shift, I'm able to pivot. Let's go back toward harmony. And that's not where we all are, you know, sometimes we're not always in that space. I'm not always in that space. I'm far from it a lot of times. I might stuff a lot of that down to save face, you know, and that is a performance aspect of who and what we are, you know, but when we go to our core, every act of being human is a performance. We get up and we take action on things. That is performing at its very definition. Yet we sometimes form that conflicted relationship with that idea and move into that dissonance. That's not to say that sometimes those performances might be a little quote unquote out of tune. And we just need to build that capacity to move along again in a tune and find that harmony. Just like finding the tune in a song that's a little bit out of tune. Do we accept sometimes that that beauty in jazz is that dissonance? Or do we want a little bit more harmonious attunement sometimes to find that pleasing spot?

Dr. Brad Montange: Yeah, it's interesting when you look at music, it's the rest. They give it the richness. Yeah. And the dynamics.

Jeffrey Besecker: And so much more.

Dr. Brad Montange: You know, in conversation, it's asking questions to define something that wasn't really clear on one side. It's not a threatening issue. It's just a clarification. Oh, OK, now I know where you're at. And that's that's a lot of healthy way to interact and making an assumption like, I don't know what that meant. That's really, really strange. It's just easier to go, you know, is this this context? OK, you know, if not, what was it? And then you can continue on. It's just, it's not a common thing in human nature to take those things that are just these little question marks. Yeah. And try and bring resolution. You try and bring that into, okay, what was that? So you can understand and once you can, you can move on. instead of creating these reflexes. You know, that's one of the ways that we were talking about earlier of trying to deal with those reflexes, bring some clarification. When they come up, when you recognize what's going on, get some clarification so you can shut that reflex off and continue to move on.

Jeffrey Besecker: One thing, I go back to it, I'm going to continue to ride this bike till the end of my life, is I am more than blessed and thankful to acknowledge my mother and teaching us the value that the value isn't necessarily in the answer, it's in that vehicle of the question. You've reframed that again today for us. The question marks are guiding you toward that pendulation, toward that capacity, that harmony, and that ability to reassess and retune, re-center, re-filter, kind of adjust your labels and lenses.

Dr. Brad Montange: Questioning that, the whole question of why is a sign of intelligence. It's not a threat. People are trying to process it. And that's one of the vacuums that most people in chronic illness never get answered.

Jeffrey Besecker: So to be mindful of situational awareness. Sometimes that is the very crux that crushes the human spirit because they have not been in an attuned environment where very literally, don't question me. Your questions are stupid. All of the expletives that come along with that, we have to humbly acknowledge that also, that privilege does step back in in that perspective.

Dr. Brad Montange: very much so. And that's part of that whole cycle of self-abasement that we brought up. So we're very dynamic, and we certainly covered some pretty broad subjects in a whole bunch of different angles that I think are very refreshing.

Jeffrey Besecker: So to kind of put a bullet point in things today and bring us back into that frame, when as practitioners or as the human being on the other side of the equation, we feel ourselves being pulled into that discomfort and dissonance where we're starting to move into that dysregulated emotion, when we're trying to reframe that, what are three tips we can do as the receiver and the giver? to find that central point in harmony, to reconnect with each other and reconnect with our own center.

Dr. Brad Montange: Okay. The first one is the whole idea of establishing an open communication. And when that's not there and not resolvable, it's time to move on. Another one is if the question of why is too threatening or not answered repetitively, and it can be answered, it's time to move on also. The third one is if the trial of care is not resolving on either side it's time to let go and move on also and that's something that most people are seeking care they assume that the person in front of them. The caregiver is an expert in what they're doing and that's not necessarily accurate or true. We're all human and we don't always have the tools to do it, but we need those transparent interactive issues. So patients need to have their antennas up on whether they can establish that and caregivers need to have their antennas up that they need to be active to create that. It all starts there.

Jeffrey Besecker: In your practice, when we see that gap where we are realizing we're disconnecting with that patient-caregiver relationship, is there a key or common question you find that does relatively quickly help guide that patient-client back toward that focus where we are acknowledging their sense of importance, their sense of safety?

Dr. Brad Montange: I believe there is. The simple issue of whatever is going on has a root cause and we need to evaluate what that is. And that's where the answers arise from. Most in health care don't have the tools to find those. And that's a very in chronic illness. They have those for acute, but they don't have those in chronic illness. So it's a requirement for those in health care. They've got to change their focus of education.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

Dr. Brad Montange: Or for continuing education to get the tools because you can't get it inside the institutions. You have to go outside of that.

Jeffrey Besecker: So function earlier in our conversation. And I'm catching myself here in a gap to where I'm creating my own empathy gap. So often that is pre verbal or nonverbal, as you mentioned. And it's simply that physical interaction, things like locking eye contact or unconsciously co-regulating with your breathing, you know, things of that nature, you know, Do you feel we might be overstepping that too quickly sometimes to go to that verbal answer or that kind of discomfort we experience ourselves to, I've got to say something here. I've got to exert something here to bridge that gap in that silence.

Dr. Brad Montange: You know, that's an interesting concept, too, because what that 80 year old doctor said is something that I think every clinician should really take heed to. Clinicians need to step out of of their labeling and listen to patients and not do it with a manipulation of all the games that people play to take control of the situation, but to do it with eye contact, out of compassion, not out of control, and not in condescending issues, but in a co-equal type of an exchange to listen to what's going on, because most of the time, A patient's got a good idea of what's going on and most of the time they're right in the arena that needs to be looked at. Clinicians need to have the tools to do that and we need to understand that a lot of the tools we're given are completely inadequate to give us the answers and we got to get outside of the systems we were taught to do that. instead of looking at it as a cultic or a club type of thing. Well, that's just what we do. If they're inadequate, we need to be honest with their inadequacy and look from a different perspective.

Jeffrey Besecker: I want to thank you for closing us off today with that brilliant insight, how we step back and reframe and reconnect with the client's perspective. So thank you. Thank you so much for sharing this brilliant, wonderful conversation with you today, Brad.

Dr. Brad Montange: You're welcome. I think that's been really engaging. I think it's been very, very informative and it's really been enjoyable.

Jeffrey Besecker: It truly has. I think we've built that rapport through natural bonding and natural attunement. I'm being reminded myself of how sometimes I get overly diagnostic, overly bent on moving to the answer of a question, overly bent on guiding rather than simply being present. So thank you for that.

Dr. Brad Montange: Thanks for the invite. I think it's been really, really enjoyable.

Jeffrey Besecker: This has been great. Do we want to include a way for listeners to reach out to any part of your program or acknowledge anything?

Dr. Brad Montange: I've got a free book on epigenetics. Epigenetics, a study of of how lifestyle changes your genetic expression, changes your destiny, changes your life. And it's simple steps that you can do with simple lifestyle changes to change your genetic expression. Healthfully You is my website. That's H-E-A-L-T-H-F-U-L-L-Y, the letter U, dot com. And we've got our own podcast. We've got a ton of resources on that, absolutely a ton. So both those are there and hopefully I'll have my landing page fixed shortly.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you. Thank you for humbly guiding me back to that. I have been so engrossed with the depth of our conversations that I have lost that basic need to address those core human connections. So thank you for that.

Dr. Brad Montange: Well, thanks for the opportunity to dialogue because this was, it takes something that could be very, very difficult and because there's a mutual respect and an openness to kick things around, I think we've really brought a lot of value to a conversation that isn't commonly brought.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you. Thank you. I humbly again acknowledge that connection with you as being the source of that, my friend. So this truly is always a joy to connect and share these conversations. Please come back and do it again soon.

Dr. Brad Montange: Okay. Yeah. Give me a, give me an invite and I'll set one up.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you. Namaste. The light in me acknowledges the light in you. Have a wonderful day.

Dr. Brad Montange: Thanks. You have an awesome day too. Appreciate it.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you, our dedicated listening community of therapeutic professionals. In today's conversation with Dr. Brad, we explored how chronic illness is never the product of a single cause, but rather the interwoven dynamics of body, mind, and lived experience. Together, we unpacked how oversimplification and compartmentalization often leave patients feeling unseen, When in truth, healing begins with trust, safety, and a willingness to look at the whole person. When we're reminded that just like relationships, health is about connection, attunement, and the courage to explore complexity instead of defaulting to easy answers. As you reflect on this episode, I'd like to invite a coachable inquiry. Where in your life, whether in health, caregiving, or relationships, might you oversimplify, and how can leaning into nuance help restore connection and harmony? We hope you found value and meaning in this conversation. If something resonated, please consider sharing your reflections or sending us your questions. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker.