Mindful Toughness With Dr. Christine Silverstein

Uncover universal strategies for achieving mindful toughness with Dr. Christine Silverstein’s Hypno-Coaching. Learn how it can help children achieve peak performance, gain a positive mindset, and build a confident self.

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Mindful Toughness With Dr. Christine Silverstein

Good, beautiful day, beautiful souls. This is Charla Anderson, host of The Charla Anderson Show, a collector and connector of fascinating people. Everyone is fascinating, especially YOU! I am thrilled and excited to introduce you to my guest, Dr. Christine Silverstein. She is going to blow your minds with all her knowledge and wisdom. First, we’re going to do our little beginning. I call it a mini vacation, a little 22-second breathing exercise. We’re going to breathe in calm for 7 seconds. We’re going to hold for 4 seconds and breathe out gratitude. Let’s get us all grounded and centered. Here we go. Let’s breathe in some calm. Here we go, hold and release. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Looking Back

Here we are. I’m thrilled to have my guest, Dr. Christine Silverstein. I’m excited to have you. We’ve met in our Senior Tubers with Fran Asaro, our wonderful fearless leader on teaching us how to get better on YouTube. That has been a great fun gathering that we have there. We invite anyone who wants to join us in that on Thursdays. We do a little meeting on that. I want you to tell us a little bit about who you are in this world, and then we’ll talk a lot about what you do because I’m so intrigued by your journey.

Thank you. That’s a philosophical question, for sure. Who am I? I’ve been searching for that knowledge all my life even when I was a younger child because I would ask questions to my dad and he would look at me and say, “Christine, you are deep.” He didn’t know how to answer my questions. I thought that was interesting, but I didn’t know what he meant by that until I got older and realized that I had a different perspective in life about who I am. I’m still going into that to know who Christine is. I’ve had some recent experiences that helped me to understand and remind me who I am.

I speak about my early childhood and how I was the youngest daughter, the fourth daughter, in my family. I had a younger brother. There was a question when I was born. My mother told me the story after I was born. People were like, “What should her name be?” She picked the name Christine. My grandmother, so her mom, said, “Why would you pick such a name? Why don’t you pick some other name? I’ve never heard of that name.” At any rate, my mom insisted, “It has to be this name.” Her middle name is May. That was my grandmother’s name. She thought it was a pretty good name because my middle name was May.

I went to Catholic school at an early age, and I started to learn about God. My mother insisted that I go to this Catholic school. All my siblings went to elementary Catholic school but different in high school. Some went to public school. I went to a Catholic school. I was five years old when I started first grade. I was very young, the youngest in my class.

I remember sitting in the back of the Catholic church under the choir loft. It was very dark. You couldn’t see anything because I was tiny. The eighth graders were in the first row and I was in the last row. I used to listen to these beautiful stories. I loved the stories the priest would talk about that were in the Bible. I thought they were nice stories. I listened to them.

One day, he said, “God is light. God is everywhere, and He is light.” I figured, “I used to pray to the chandelier. It’s the only thing I can see in the back row. God must be in there because that’s a light.” That was my initiation into who I am. I look back and remember my Catholic education early on and how that set the stage for me for spirituality as I grew older. I didn’t know it at the time, and I didn’t realize that my mother had a purpose for my name until many years later and people started to question it.

I’m a nurse. I started at nursing school at sixteen. That was very enlightening as well. During my time when I was working as a new fledgling nurse in my first job, I would take care of people. We had an open ward. It was cubicles, but you could hear people talk from one cubicle to the next. One time, there was this wise woman. She was an immigrant from Cuba. Her name was Dahlia. I remember that because I think of the flower. She said to me, “I know why your mother named you that.” I said, “You do,” because I didn’t know. I was nineteen years old at the time. I said, “You know why?” She said, “Yes because the way you’re speaking to the patients is like Jesus Christ. That’s what your name means.” I had no idea. I was surprised. I thought, “That’s just something she’s saying.”

Later on, a doctor was listening to me comfort somebody who was an older woman. She had bladder cancer. I was talking to her and helping her. She was in the stage of passing on. The doctor came out in the hallway and said, “I can’t believe how you were talking to her and how you comforted her. You have a gift.” I was so surprised by that, but I never thought. This is who I am as a student and as a nurse.

It was years later and my mother was in the hospital. She had broken her femur and had serious surgery for three hours. She was this petite little thing at that time. She had all this anesthesia, which wasn’t beneficial for her after the fact because she was hallucinating and had challenges reviving herself. I went to visit her in the hospital. She was sitting up in the chair and they said, “She’s not eating anything. Could you feed her?” I know how to feed people because my first experience was as a student nurse.

I’m feeding my mom. She has her eyes closed. She wasn’t saying anything. She was out of it. I said, “Mom, open your mouth. I’m putting the food in. Swallow the food.” All of a sudden, she opened her eyes, looked at me, and said, “Now I know why I named you Christine,” and she closed her eyes again. That was very important for me. I was in shock. I said, “There was a reason why my mother named me this.” My name means follower of Christ, which I always knew.

Some years later, in 2023, I went to Egypt for my wedding anniversary with my husband. That was an eye-opener for me there. I didn’t expect it. I was in the process of completing my book. I was having some challenges with the publisher and the editor. Right before I left Egypt, and this was in January 2023, the editor was saying, “You have to make the book smaller. You have to cut this out, cut the stories out, and cut the history out. You’re never going to sell anything. It’s too big.” It was so negative. I remember going to Egypt, on the plane for all those hours, and crying on and off, thinking, “What should I do? How should I handle this?”

I got to Egypt and it didn’t work out on the first night. I got into this luxury hotel and there were some things on the floor that showed that they didn’t clean the room from the toilet. I stepped in it. That’s how my Egypt trip started. I’m saying, “What is happening here?” The tour guide was very nice. They gave me a special room, a suite, after that because we complained about how they needed to clean up.

From there, lo and behold, this tour guide that we had was so special. He studied Egyptology. He even studied here in the States to get his Master’s degree. He wasn’t supposed to be the tour guide. It was supposed to be somebody else but she was ill, so he took her place. Lo and behold, he listened to what I said about my book. I had this little conversation about it casually on the deck of the boat on the Nile River. He told me, “Your work is so important. It would be great if I could read that. We need this to wrestle through adversity in this country.”

He was very kind. He brought me into the temples with the group, but he would take me aside and say, “Here’s the hospital over here for the physical.” He showed me all the hieroglyphics, translated them, and told me what it meant. He then said, “Look over here. This is where the people who had mental health issues. They’re over here because they were taken care of too. Everybody was taken care of, no matter what your rank was in society.”

He was then like, “Here’s the little place over here.” They had lines in the granite that were on the ground. They made board games there for the people who were waiting to see the doctor/physician/shaman. You could see they sat down in the waiting room outside on the stone and they could play something like checkers or something like that while they were waiting. That enlightened me. I felt it was so special.

On one of the last days, we went on the Nile River. I was inspired to write the introduction to my book on the Nile River as we passed by the Cataract Hotel where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile. I’m sitting in the library, writing the introductions that I left the last time. I tried several attempts but it didn’t work out. I said, “Now, I have to write this now that I’m talking to my guide, Walid.” I wrote the chapter of the introduction, and that was very important for me.

We had this last tour in Old Cairo. That was very fascinating to me because we were standing at the crossroads there in Old Cairo and Walid was saying, “Look. There’s the synagogue over there, the Muslims are over here, and then the Catholic church is over there. We all worked together in ancient times to come together in all our faiths around the world. That’s how it was in the past.” I was very moved by that. My husband is Jewish, so he can relate to the synagogue. I’m Catholic and Walid was Muslim. That was a bond right there.

From there, we went into this church. It was a Catholic church. As soon as I walked in, I felt so comfortable in it. There were some Muslim people in there and people of all faiths in there, looking at the church. For me, it felt like home. I thought, “If I lived here in Cairo, I would come here to mass on Sunday.” That was my first thought because it felt comfortable, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t have any idea. This was the last tour on our trip. My husband had planned it. I didn’t look at what the agenda was for the tour.

Walid says, “Now, we’re going to go down into the lower level of this building, this church, and we’re going to see something that’s very amazing.” There, he explained, “Here is where baby Jesus slept while they were trying to escape from Herod and the killing of the infants. Here’s where the holy family lived for some months or maybe even some years. There was a water fountain there.” They were describing, “This is where they lived.” I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t say anything. I cried when I saw that. I knew what my mission was. I remembered, “Who are you, Christine?”

I go back to the ship and there’s a jeweler in the shop where they sell little souvenirs but also a jewelry counter. I ended up buying what’s called the cartouche. It’s what’s listed in all the temples for the pharaohs and who they are as people. I purchased a very special one. It had some symbols on the back about long life and things like that. My name was in hieroglyphics on this. It was so beautiful.

He said, “This is very special.” It was eighteen-karat gold. I said, “I’m so happy.” “Somehow, I needed this,” I thought. He said, “Since you bought this, you can buy something else for free. You can buy a dress for the ceremony.” As we left the Nile River, we had this little celebration and some fun with the group. He gave me some dresses I could purchase. They were all embroidered and beautiful.

I came back with the one that I wanted, the one that fit me the best. I said, “I’d like this one. Thank you.” He looked at me and said, “How is it to have your cartouche?” I burst out into tears. I cried. His name was Mohamed. He said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “My mother named me Christine.” Walid came out with the store merchant and he was hugging me. He was like, “I’m so sorry.” He’s patting me on the back in the middle of the store. I didn’t expect that. At any rate, I left there and felt, “This is what I have to do.”

I am in the process of translating my book into Arabic. That was Walid’s fondest wish for his people. I’m in the process of translating that into my new website, DrChristineSilverstein.com. I am translating that from English into Arabic as well. I am in the process of doing these things. It’s quite enlightening for me to go through that experience because I don’t speak a word of Arabic. It’s challenging to try to edit my book.

Winning And Visualizing

There is a book behind you. Is this the same book that you’re talking about?

Yes. Wrestling Through Adversity.

It’s primarily a mind-shifting exercise. It’s a story of your life in a way and also how you overcame it. I love the idea. This came to me when you were talking about how you saw the light or you saw a chandelier and thought God is in the light because he said, “God is light.” I remember many of those kinds of things that we don’t have the capacity at that young age.

We’re children. We see our world from a different way. Too often, adults think that we see like them. They don’t remember when they were younger. That’s true, especially for teenagers. They think that at one point, they’re children, and at another point, they think they’re adults, but they’re not. They’re teenagers in between. That’s one of the challenges.

Adults often see the world in a different way, and they usually think their perspectives are the same as their children. Share on X

You do that. That’s who you’re teaching. It’s primarily the young people and younger mindset of winning and visualizing. You teach hypnosis and all of those things. One of the things that you have on your website that I saw in a couple of places is, “Adversity is our greatest teacher when we learn resilience.” I believe that. I’m so grateful that you have taken that on at a very early age, understanding that there’s something even more inside of us than outside of us. Everything is inside of us. You learned that. You said you learned it and taught yourself at age ten.

I taught myself. I didn’t know I was doing it. Part of my motivation is because my dad told me I couldn’t because I was a girl. There were no sports for girls. I had to prove to him that there were. When he came home from work and he saw the new skates I was talking about, which I had won in a skating race at ten, he was so surprised. He said, “What are these?” My mother thought that I had taken them from a store. How did I get these skates? They were shiny and were in the box. I put them right on the kitchen table. They said, “You didn’t tell us.” I didn’t tell them that I was even signing up for the race, but I did.

I strapped those metal skates on my feet every day, rain or shine, and skated around town. I then went to the site where the skating race would be. It was a 60-yard dash. That’s what they called it. I was in this height class that was called The Mights. I was ten years old. I thought, “The might, what’s that? It’s like a little bug. I’m Mighty Mouse.” I envisioned myself like that.

I saw myself crossing over the finish line first in that first race in my hometown. Also, I had positive self-talk. It’s all the things I use now, mental rehearsal and positive self-talk. I set goals. I also worked with my skate equipment. My skate key was vital to keeping the skates on my feet because they were metal with a clamp.

Also, I’ve learned how to put the fastest wheels on my bull-bearing wheels on my skates because they were hand-me-downs. I took all the wheels off and put the best ones. First, I rolled them across the big floor so that I picked the fastest wheels. I put them on my skates and adjusted them to the size. I only had one pair of shoes I could wear with them. They were saddle shoes from the Catholic school, the uniform. I had permanent dents on the side of my shoes because of the clamp.

You’re talking about those old-fashioned little metal clamps on skates. That’s what you won in a race at ten years old against only boys primarily.

This was against girls. What opened me up to it was girls were allowed. They didn’t restrict girls and boys. I was skating against people who were female and also according to your height, your weight, and your age. At any rate, I felt a sense of pride in winning the hometown and winning these skates because they were the first pair of skates that weren’t hand-me-downs. They were all shiny and had red inserts. There’s a picture of the globe skates I won in my book.

Wrestling Through Adversity

I want you to talk a little bit more about your book. You’re overcoming and having the mindset way before it was cool. We talked earlier. You were talking about how you were doing hypnosis and things like that before. Mindset is a big deal now. Back in those days, those doctors knew everything and all that with the white coats.

It was 28 years ago that I started my business. I started it from scratch, as you would say a recipe. You didn’t have the cake in the box in the supermarket. You make your own cake. That was very unique at that time. I needed to find a solution to help my children. I have four children and they were all involved in sports.

My older children were teenagers at that time. They were having all kinds of issues at school, like social situations in sports because they were involved in gymnastics, wrestling, and track. My youngest daughter has already been playing the piano since the age of five. She was about nine. They were having challenges on the day of the event.

I knew my son was gifted. He was very talented from the first time he walked on the wrestling mat. He had challenges on the big events, but that wasn’t the only thing. There were teenage challenges in growing up. The hormones are rushing through. I brought my son initially to a psychologist, thinking maybe he needed some help.

I’ll never forget this. I brought him and the psychologist called me in after seeing my son and said, “There’s nothing wrong with your son. You are the one who needs it.” I was so shocked. I was like, “Why is he saying this to me? What did my son tell him?” At any rate, I said, “That’s not the way to go.” I wanted to help my children to help themselves because no person was able to do that. There’s no coach and no program that would train them to have their own thinking about what they can do and how they can do it.

It was around that time that a friend of mine introduced me to the concept of taking some courses and studying hypnotism. I thought, “It’s interesting.” I had, years earlier, used self-hypnosis when I had challenges with fertility. I had four miscarriages. I was told at the time, “You’re never going to have a baby of your own. You’ll never be able to hold the baby in your arms.” I was called a habitual aborter because I had these miscarriages. They were like, “You’ll never do it.”

I went from doctor to doctor. This one doctor I went to changed my mind in a positive direction for me looking back. He was examining me and was saying, “We have to have all this testing done of your fallopian tubes and everything.” I had traveled from New Jersey all the way to the tip of Long Island to see this specialist by myself. My husband was at work. It took me hours to get there.

As a woman, you’re in a vulnerable position with your legs up and stirrups. He was telling me, “You’ll never have a baby but you’ll have to have these tests.” I said, “Doctor, why would I have to have these tests to see if my fallopian tubes are open if I had four miscarriages?” I became pregnant. My challenge is to hold on to the baby full-term.

He gave me this prescription. It was called DES or diethylstilbestrol. I knew at the time because I was a nurse and with research that caused cancer in babies later on in life and also in females or women. I took the prescription, put it in my purse, and drove home. I ripped it up and threw it in the garbage when I got home. I said to myself, “Christine, you have to make a decision. What do you want to do?” I knew there was nothing out there besides pills or something that somebody could give me.

What I did was I decided to have an expectant mind. I called it that. I expected to see myself pregnant and holding my baby. I was like, “If other people can do it, I can too.” I also studied nutrition and had the best supplements, etc. The biggest thing was I started to meditate. I took lessons from the Maharishi Yogi and had my mantra, and I did that faithfully every day.

I had three miscarriages before my son was born. On this fourth pregnancy, I couldn’t sleep at night. I was up all night worrying because I had had miscarriages in my bed. There was all this stain on the mattress underneath me. I put a plastic cover over but I knew it was there. I was petrified it would happen again at night, so I couldn’t sleep.

I looked up in the Yellow Pages, which is what we had those days to travel. I looked up this hypnotist. He was a psychologist. I don’t know how I got there on my own, but I had the map of New Jersey. He was in New Jersey. I found it and I went to three sessions there. He said, “This is what you have to do. This is self-hypnosis.” I used that every day three times a day, especially in the middle of the night when I needed it in a positive self-talk.

Six months later, I had my beautiful, healthy baby. I had another miscarriage between my second and third child. I did the same thing to get myself back on track. I had four babies but eight pregnancies all through the course of those ten years, which was very challenging. I attribute that to this new mindset pretty much like what I had as Mighty Mouse when I was a little girl. I was like, “I can do this.” It’s very important.

Since I’m a nurse and I know anatomy and physiology, I’m very much interested in neuroscience. I always have been. The brain and the mind have something to do with fertility. I didn’t know that back then, and neither did the neuroscientists. Mindset is important in the autonomic nervous system that we can learn to work with through the power of the mind, which is how I work with clients. Even with stroke recovery, I work with them with the power of the mind because there is no anatomical structure. You’re working with the subconscious mind that governs all our body functions. People think, “That’s way out there.”

It’s woo-woo.

I’ve even had it called voodoo in the past. That’s the idea. You can use the power of your mind certainly if you change the way you’re thinking, what you’re saying, the way you’re taking care of yourself, and what I call, as a peak performance coach, getting in the zone. That was my basic knowledge. I decided to take this hypnosis course years later and apply it to my work as a registered nurse. That’s how I started off, but I wanted something for my children to use. I wanted them to learn techniques.

Inner Healing

About Dr. Christine Silverstein

Dr. Christine M. Silverstein, peak performance coach, behavioral health RN, and clinical hypnosis expert at The Summit Center for Ideal Performance has assisted clients of all ages for 27 years to reach their best performances in health, athletics, academics, business, and performing arts. She specializes in working with children, teens, and young adults, using Mindful Toughness® skill sets, such as self-hypnosis, mental rehearsal, positive self-talk, and feedback loop analysis. As a researcher, historian, and best-selling author, she has presented her works on Hypno-Coaching and history in the US and globally to promote mental health. Her current book is “Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults to Win in Life”.