Mitzi Perdue

Healing and Mental Attitude

What could beat the excitement, drama, and fulfillment of being a nurse working in critical care?

For Dr. Cynthia Howard, who had years of experience as a critical care nurse before becoming a psychologist practicing here in Salisbury, there’s something even better. She got an inkling of what it is when she began noticing that a person’s healing was influenced, to a surprising degree, by his or her mental attitude.

Psychology, Nursing, and Nutrition

Howard became so fascinated by this phenomenon that she decided to study it full time. Her odyssey into learning about mental attitude led her to the University of Maryland at College Park, where she got a doctorate in psychology.

Dr. Howard’s doctoral studies reinforced her impression that the most successful healing involved treating people not just medically, but also mentally and even spiritually. Her goal, as a health care provider, became treating the whole person, including body, mind, and spirit.

Treating the whole person would involve not only traditional medicine, of the sort she used as a Registered Nurse, but layered on top of that would be knowledge of psychology. But nutrition also seemed important so she became a Certified Nutrition Counselor as well.

She was now in the somewhat rare and unusual situation of having expertise in psychology, nursing, and nutrition. But she didn’t stop there.

As she marveled over the success she was having in counseling people, and as she realized how exhilarating it was to help people heal more quickly when she was treating the whole person, she decided to venture into areas outside of generally accepted medicine. She wanted to explore what non-traditional approaches, like acupressure, hypnosis, and energy psychology could offer.

Energy Psychology

Energy psychology, in particular, fascinated her. To understand it, which isn’t easy in a few words in a newspaper column, imagine the following situation. Imagine that you are her patient and that you have the following very specific complaint.

It’s that you just can’t stop eating. You crave sugar, and are perfectly capable of eating quarts of ice cream each night. But then you feel so bad about what you’ve just done that you throw it all up.

You hate this cycle, and you hate the loss of control. For you, it’s an appalling downward spiral in which you’re starting to hate yourself.

What would she, in her holistic practice, have to offer you? Howard specializes in helping people with weight issues, and over the years, she’s discovered that even though people want to stop bingeing and purging, there’s almost always some energy blockage that keeps them from stopping.

Often the block is a defense mechanism to keep from expressing what they really feel in some other area. If that were your problem, you and she would work together on finding what the real problem is and finding a constructive way of dealing with it.

It might be learning how to handle stress better or learning about better nutrition. Even such things as learning to love yourself more or connecting more to your spiritual side.

Whatever the treatment would be, for Cynthia Howard, seeing you heal and your life transform, and seeing it happen rapidly, is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. For her, it’s even more exciting than being a critical care nurse.

For more information, visit her website at: http://www.transformyourself.com

Cynthia Howard’s Wish List

That you’d make a New Year’s Resolution to give up sugar for two weeks. You’ll find that you have more energy, feel better, and you’re likely to lose weight as well.