2005
http://www.drmonalisa.com/

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This is a follow-up on her first book on intuition.  It's based on Shultz's medical, psychological, and neurological studies of the brain, personal experience with intuition, intuition readings with clients, work with patients as a psychiatist, disastrous personal health experiences, and work with Dr. Christiane Northrup on women's issues. In contrast to the “you are what you eat” approach, Schultz says “you are what you feel,” and names her process of recognizing emotions and their effects and taking action to promote what is positive and neutralize what is negative “Emotional Feng Shui.”

In the earlier book she explored the mental and emotional components of intuition, using many case histories from her intuitive reading practice, with emphasis on how to recognize your unique form of intuition and access it. Here she puts special attention on how women’s brains are different from men’s, how the female brain is changing in response to the opportunities and pressures of the workplace, and what the practical effects of this are for women.

She uses her expertise in neurology to explain the connections between the organization and wiring of our brains and our female hormonal systems with unconscious and repressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions that can manifest as disease. She says that although disease has environmental and genetic causes, thoughts and emotions greatly influence how it does or does not develop - so no matter how effectively you treat the physical disease by medical intervention, if you don’t address the emotional aspects, the illness is likely to reappear or manifest in a different guise sooner or later.

She wants to help you “map” your particular neurological and emotional strengths and weaknesses and find ways to cultivate your strengths and treat, work around, or “rewire” your weaknesses. To this end, she includes questionnaires and case histories of other women to encourage you to analyze how you react in different situations so you can begin recognize your unique way of being.

She explains how women experience emotions differently from men: men’s brains are more compartmentalized, while ours are more connected. Therefore, we don’t feel just one emotion at a time. As she points out, how many men do you know who burst into tears when they are furious?

In women, anxiety and depression often exist simultaneously. Therefore it’s more complicated to sort this out and to know what to treat and where to look for the sources of the problem. An unusual and extremely useful aspect of this book is the comprehensive overview she gives of pharmaceutical, nutritional and herbal remedies that are used to treat anxiety and depression, including side effects and contraindications for specific combinations of symptoms.

She covers so much useful and new material that it’s difficult to summarize. For example, in a chapter selected at random on Mood, she addresses mood disorders, PMS and how hormones affect mood, the difference between sadness and depression, how the brain “molds to the mood,” how thoughts clog the emotional/intuitive pathways, how medication/surgery aggravates moods, what it means if you have symptoms typical of the sadness circuits in the brain but no sad feelings, the relationship of stress to depression, the relationship of environment to depression, the chemistry of joy/love, co-dependence, bipolar disorder, the importance of being able to identify what you are feeling with a questionnaire to determine your wiring for emotion, why depression can’t be separated from physical symptoms, and finally she defines the hormonal cascade and typical reactions that lead from depression to disease.

There is an especially nuanced discussion of ADD, as she has had to overcome that herself, and of attention and memory in general. Shultz provides numerous approaches to dealing with all the emotional states she describes and their effects, including conditions for which panaceas like meditation may not be appropriate.

Schultz is comfortingly secure about the unusual wiring of her own "extremely ADHD" brain - and gives some amusing descriptions of techniques she uses to function effectively. The difficult thing about this book is that it is so packed with information, and the organization is pretty right-brain - it's confusing if you want to go back and find something again, so mark the passages that are relevant for you!

From  her mentions of McDonald’s and coffee, I would not rely on her for dietary advice, and I would follow Julia Ross's very clearly explained and organized nutritional program to cure mood disorders before using either herbs or drugs.  Doctors, like all of us, see things from their own angle - mind trumps body, or body trumps mind - that’s why it’s good to keep an open mind and keep trying to get the larger picture and how it applies to you.