The first way you know that you're healed is when the emotion regarding the situation is neutral. You don't have that gut punch reaction or that anxiety type feeling. It's just like oh yeah, that happened to me.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

All right, you guys, welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett, and it has been three weeks since I last filmed. It's been the longest since I started the show a year ago that I have gone without doing a new episode.

So we've done some reruns for you. I ran the one about the collagen, the bone broth, which I thought was super fun. We did that last fall. That is one of the ones that I recommend to people all the time. It's all about collagen, which is all about the connective tissue in our skin and the rest of our body and helping us heal and all that.

So there've been a couple other things that have happened. We are updating some of our formatting. Do you like the new colorization? It's kind of pretty, right? So we're upgrading a little bit. We're working on adding our other YouTube platform, Virtuosa Surgery. That's coming.

I hired both of my two new doctors. I hired them a long time ago, but both of my two new doctors started, Dr. Alsup and Dr. Koshy. She's going to laugh. Dr. Koshy, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago, they are both physicians with me at Virtuosa GYN. Dr. Koshy is a MIG surgeon, a minimally invasive GYN surgeon like myself. Dr. Alsup is a general OBGYN who has dropped obstetrics to provide GYN services for us in the office. She is a whiz at menopause and hormone replacement therapy, and it has just been a ton of fun having them come into the office. That happened.

Then let's see what else. Oh yeah, we opened the new hospital outpatient department at Methodist Northeast in San Antonio, Texas. So cool. I've been talking about that for a long time. We are one of the first robotic outpatient surgery centers for HCA and Methodist healthcare system. Very proud of it.

We are Intuitive Surgical's newest epicenter for benign GYN surgery, which is a really big designation. It's a place for teaching other surgeons the skillset that we do for making surgery easier for women and get the outcomes that we do. So that center, we had our first surgeries mid-month and huge, gorgeous ribbon cutting ceremony on Friday. I'll be posting a couple of pics of that in the coming weeks. We are full speed ahead.

This week, I go to doing four days of surgery a week with five cases a day. So 20 cases of surgery a week, and that is really super high speed. So I talked before about getting all the little engines on the track, all the trains on the track. That's some of them that are coming.

Let's see. What else do I have? Oh, I went to Atlanta. That was before the hurricane. I went to Atlanta and taught my first national faculty course for basic hysterectomy. Super fun class. We had four less experienced surgeons that came to Atlanta, and we had a full day of lectures with all kinds of tips and went into the lab and learned some techniques, got to go on this robot and do some practice not on patients, which is always good. I had a total blast in Atlanta. Then I saw it got flooded this week, which is on my list of things to talk about.

Let's see what else. That one I'm going to save for the next episode. Let's see. Worked on the Virtuoso Surgery platform. That's coming. That's a platform that is going to be a sister platform to this one. It is for specifically training or teaching surgery. There are three different levels that are going to be three different channels kind of within that channel.

One is going to be for you, my patients and the general public. I will be doing a case of the week where I will take a case and draw it out on my little whiteboard. I might do some in here. This is actually a computer with a whiteboard on it. So it's fun to see how I take a patient's history and the visualization of what's going on with them and draw it out.

Then the second level will be actually site where it's not just public. You'll have to know that you're getting into it. It's going to be actually getting to see the video from the inside of the patient for the surgery itself. Then that is for surgeons and also for other providers and patients that want to see what surgery looks like when I do it.

Part of it's for patients. Part of it is for other referring providers and other doctors to know what is even possible. In fact, that's our tagline. Imagine what's possible with women's surgery. So it's an educational site where we can start showing people the level of care that we're doing and the outcomes that we're getting, which are extraordinary. I love it.

It's so much fun to have patients come back in the next week and be like, oh my gosh, that was so much easier than I thought it was going to be. Or I didn't take any pain medicine at all, which doesn't happen to everybody, but we get it quite a lot. That just makes my day because I love healing people and helping them heal.

In fact, today's talk topic is about how to know you've healed. I had this idea to do it both on the surgical side and the not surgical side. So the tagline for this show is going where the scalpel doesn't reach. So usually what I'm talking about are things that have more to do with the life coaching part of my life and my practice where we're taking the conversations that we have in the office all the time and bringing them here to you guys so that you can have the benefit of that.

But in today's talk, we're talking about how to know you're healed, and that kind of crosses both. It crosses my surgery world and physical, and then it also crosses the emotional and brain and cognitive function world of the life coach work that I do, which is all about how to manage our brains which we all need a lot of these days.

So I have three little points that I thought I'd share with you about how you know you've healed. So patients ask me all the time, how long is it going to take me to recover from surgery? The answer is well, typically less than so, but sometimes blah, blah, blah. That's kind of the standard answer.

How do patients know that they physically healed after I do surgery? Or suppose you just have been sick. How do you know you've healed? Well, the first thing is it doesn't hurt anymore. So when I do surgery, we have incisions, and they take time to heal and your body takes three to six weeks to heal an incision. If you think about how long it takes to heal a cut on your hand, it's pretty much knit together at three weeks and you kind of forget about it.

But there's a lot of modeling that goes on beyond that initial couple of weeks. In fact, since our tissues are alive, scars remodel over our lifetime less and less the older you get.

So the emotional equivalent to that would be emotionally, you feel neutral about the situation. So let's just say you had a falling out with a relationship that you had, a close family member, a friend, perhaps a spouse. That event happened a long time ago, but it's stayed in your brain and it's, it's caused you some discomfort because it sits there and festers, and you've got some trauma associated to that. Sometimes maybe you have a trigger where something similar might happen, or you might have a similar interaction with somebody else that's completely unrelated and it triggers you.

That's not a neutral emotion. That is still a hurt state of energy or hurt emotion. So one of the ways you know that you've healed from an emotional trauma, whether you've had enough time and your body's figured out on yourself, or maybe you've done the work. You've been in therapy and, or worked with a coach. Or maybe you've meditated, you've chosen the spiritual religious route, prayer. Those are all ways that we can heal our emotions and our spirit. So maybe you've done all that work.

So how do you know when it's healed? I'm going to challenge you to look at your brain is doing and the emotional reactions in your bodies, which are just electrical impulses that you can feel if you start honing in on what your body feels like when you have a certain trigger.

The first way you know that you're healed is when the emotion regarding the situation is neutral. You don't have that gut punch reaction or that anxiety type feeling. It's just like oh yeah, that happened to me. You can talk about it in a neutral way as if it was a story that happened and that book is closed, or maybe in a manner that's more like it happened to somebody else. So we call that showing the scar, not the wound. So when you're emotionally at the point where it's a scar and not a wound anymore, then that's one way that you know that you've healed.

The second way that you know that you've healed is that you can move in a manner that's stronger and with better range of motion. When we're talking about healing from surgery, when you first have surgery, especially on an abdomen, you'd have a tendency to split or favor the areas. So you don't move in the same manner that you would normally. You have a limited range of motion. It's a little weaker. You're not picking up heavy things because it hurts, and you don't want to tear down what is healing. You don't want to pop a hernia.

It's the same with an emotional healing. So when you are healed emotionally, when you've done the work or you've made it through the healing process, you can move forward in life with a stronger, less fear-based or less apprehensive mindset. You can do it in a bigger manner. You can increase your capacity. You can increase your scope of being able to handle difficult things. So both physically and emotionally, the second way that you know that you've healed is you can move stronger and better with a better range of motion.

All right. Lastly, the third way has to do with our subconscious. So, you know, we've got our prefrontal cortex, which is our brain that's doing the intentional thinking during the day. But then we have our subconscious mind. I like to call it the lizard brain because it's what's pre-programmed into us. That's always kind of like the program that's running in the background.

The subconscious healing applies to both the physical and the emotional. So physically, your subconscious will tell you when you're hurt, and you'll avoid the activity that will make the area that hurts. Even without thinking of it, you'll find yourself splinting or using different muscle sets so that you avoid hurting the area that's trying to heal. That's a lot, largely done in your subconscious brain.

In the emotional healing also, the subconscious is the part that we're working on when we're working through coaching or counseling and working through the traumas and the difficult things in our lives. So we're not favoring that anymore. We're not sitting there and perseverating on it anymore.

Sometimes the test that I like to see, which is kind of startling, is your dream life. So your dreams are your subconscious working on problems and scenarios while you're asleep. Lots of people like to attach meanings to dreams. I think that's super cool. It's super fun and interesting. I like that as much as anybody.

But one way that I know that I've really healed from a past trauma is when it represents in my subconscious in a dream, and I've healed that relationship. My reaction to it in the dream is a healed one instead of a running away or blocking it.

So that, to me, if I wake up from a really intense dream that has a reconciliation or a problem that's solved, that to me signals that my subconscious has actually healed from whatever was going on.

So those are three ways that I wanted to talk with you today about how to know you've healed. I wanted to dedicate today's talk to the victims of Hurricane Helene. I mentioned before that I was in Atlanta last week. I have friends who are in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and I want to just give you all a great big hug and reach out.

I want to encourage those of you watching, if you want to provide support, I would recommend the American Red Cross or the Salvation Army. They are both providing resources to these areas that are in bad need right now, and they are in need of healing. So be grateful for not being in those areas and not going through those specific traumas, but you know, life happens to all of us. So pray and help and reach out to our fellow men and women and children in difficulty.

I hope this helps you heal, and we will help them heal as well. I hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share if you felt this was helpful. I will see you next time on The Dr. Crockett Show. Thank you. Love y'all. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.