4/24/2019 10 Lessons From Healing Back Pain by Dr John Sarno: Part 1 -

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10 LESSONS FROM HEALING BACK

PAIN BY DR JOHN SARNO: PART 1
Posted By Brenda Wille
M O R E S TO R I ES L I K E
Along my journey to becoming a life coach and working with people
THIS
who struggle with chronic pain and other trauma after e ects, I came
across several books and resources that helped me change my life. My Sign up for noti cations when

intention with this blog is to share some of these with you. Learning more stories are posted.

about how other people transformed their lives inspires me and helps
me stay on the path of pain-free living. I hope sharing these resources
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4/24/2019 10 Lessons From Healing Back Pain by Dr John Sarno: Part 1 -

and stories about my healing will spark some magic for you on your
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journey to live without pain too.

Please note that my posts are not meant to be formal reviews of any of
the resources. My goal is simply to share with you my biggest learning
nuggets and how they helped me. In most cases, this probably involves
making the material a whole lot simpler than any of the creators C AT EG O R I ES
intended. Any mistakes I make along the way to simplifying the material
enough for me to understand and communicate easily are all mine and  Chronic Pain

I beg forgiveness. I have no intent to o end!

 Mind Body Syndrome

There’s so much meaty stu in my rst resource, Healing Back Pain, that
 Stress Management
I decided rather than skimping on the magic, I’d write this in two parts.
Read on for my rst 5 learning nuggets in this post… there’s more over  TMS
here when you’re ready.
 TRE
Foundations of a new life

When I read Healing Back Pain by Dr John Sarno, I felt like my world
had quite literally blown apart. Although it wasn’t the rst mind-body,
C O N TAC T B R E N DA
personal growth or self development book I’d read, it made a signi cant
enough impact at the time to change the trajectory of my life. I’ve read
For a fresh perspective on living
a couple of other home-run hitters since then, but I’ll save those for
with intention, vitality and
stories all of their own.
passion, contact Brenda.

While I was reading Healing Back Pain, it dawned on me for the rst
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time that it might actually be possible to live a di erent life to the pain-
lled one I’d landed up in. It seems so bizarre when I look back now, but

I honestly never thought that living without pain was feasible. I’d lived
brenda@bluechairwisdom.com
with aches and pains of varying descriptions for so long and heard so
often that there was nothing that could be done, that there was no  LinkedIn
obvious cause of my pain and that I would just have to learn to live with
it, that that’s what I was doing. Living with it. Believing it. Accepting it.

It didn’t even occur to me that pain and discomfort didn’t have to be my

norm.

It turns out I was wrong about so much.

Introducing Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) / Mind

Body Syndrome (MBS)

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In his work at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York,

Dr Sarno saw many cases where his patients didn’t respond as he
expected to the conventional treatments of the day, considering the
physical symptoms with which they presented. He noticed that in
addition to their complaints (mainly back, neck and shoulder issues), his
patients often shared a common pattern of underlying tension.

In Healing Back Pain (and his other books), Dr Sarno introduces the
concept of Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). Today TMS is often
referred to as Mind Body Syndrome, and in my mind the terms can be
used interchangeably. At the time, Sarno de ned TMS as ‘a change of
state in the muscle that is painful’ – while this is undoubtedly
technically accurate, personally I don’t feel it does justice to the
somewhat complicated animal I’ve come to understand as TMS. It is,
however, as good a place to start as any…

I’ll talk about the many faces of TMS in another post, but I think it’s
important to recognise at the outset that this condition can manifest in
so many di erent ways. Dr Sarno worked initially with back, neck and
shoulder pain, but there are many more examples of how TMS
manifests as painful symptoms and conditions. These include
headaches, migraines, pelvic pain, irritable bowel and other
gastrointestinal complaints, chronic fatigue, bromyalgia, carpal tunnel
and repetitive strain syndromes, TMJ, vertigo, dizziness, insomnia and
even psychological equivalents such as anxiety, depression, phobias
and disorders.

Even though lots of new research has been done about the mind-body
connection and how the brain works since Healing Back Pain was
written, I often nd myself coming back to the solid foundation Dr Sarno
established for learning about TMS. There’s so much valuable content
in all his books.

This is what I learned from Healing Back Pain…

1: It’s more than ‘just’ physical

Quite possibly my most dramatic discovery from Healing Back Pain was
the notion that physical pain doesn’t necessarily have (only) physical
causes. It seems like such an underwhelming thought now, but when I
rst read that emotional pain could and did manifest as a variety of
physical symptoms, I felt like I’d won the lottery. Think lights ashing,
horns tooting, bells clanging – the whole shebang. It was a massive

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relief to realise that the pain I’d been experiencing for so long could be
healed – and that no invasive medical intervention was needed.

It helped that my bolt of insight was corroborated by the fact that I

started to feel dramatically better. Almost overnight. I know (now) it
doesn’t happen like this for everybody, but the instant physical relief I
felt motivated me to keep learning and nd out more.

2: Squashed, stu ed, buried, ignored and repressed emotions

For people who have TMS or MBS, our built in tendency is to repress
unpleasant, painful or embarrassing emotions. When we repress these
emotions, our bodies respond to the real and perceived threats that
make up our lives, even though we’re not aware of all the action that’s
happening ‘below the skin’, so to speak.

3: The role of oxygen deprivation

While we’re bottling our emotions, our very clever autonomic nervous
system activates our ght, ight or freeze response. As part of this, the
oxygen in our blood supply is channeled to all the large organs needed
to mount a defence against the threat. This e ectively means it drains
away from smaller bits, like our muscles, nerves, tendons and
ligaments. The oxygen deprivation means we experience tension,
dysfunction and physical pain.

Repressed, ignored and/or unresolved emotions can cause physical

pain. It really is that simple. And that powerful.

4: The unconscious mind: a complicating factor

Unfortunately, though, things get complicated by the fact that most of

us, most of the time, aren’t even aware that we’re repressing our
emotions. For some of us, controlling, hiding from and/or ignoring our
emotions has become such an integral part of how we live that we
don’t even realise we have emotions.

As Dr Sarno explains:

“It is an interesting fact that the overwhelming majority of emotional

and mental activity occurs below the level of consciousness. The
human mind is something like an iceberg. The part that we are aware of,
the conscious mind, represents a very small part of the total. It is in the
subconscious mind that all of the complicated processing goes on…

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… This condition begins and ends in the unconscious.”

While I was reading Healing Back Pain, I recognised that I didn’t know
yet WHAT was going on below my conscious mind, but knowing that
SOMETHING was going on that was causing a reaction in my body was
an encouraging revelation for me. It gave me much needed con dence
to start accepting this new way of thinking about my pain.

5: The power of distraction

Working with a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr Sarno discovered that

there’s another, more active ‘component’ of TMS, one that purposefully
works to distract you from guring out what’s going on in your
emotional world. Physical distractions (i.e. pain) work really well as
defense mechanisms against our emotions bubbling to the surface
because “they have the ability to really grab ones attention, particularly
if they are painful, frightening and disabling”. Yeah. Been there, done
that, can attest to the truth of those words.

It’s almost as if the mind decides that a physical pain is preferable to an

emotional one. Understanding this helped me see more clearly the role
physical pain was playing in my life and how it was helping me avoid
some not-so-pretty emotional stu . There’s so much more going on for
someone with TMS than just the physical pain of the moment.

Talk about a double whammy.

Continue to Part 2.

If this is resonating with you, and you’re already curious about exploring
how TMS / MBS may be playing out in your life, contact me today. I’d
love to help you look at your pain di erently so you too can live without
pain. It could be the journey of a life time!

 Chronic Pain and The Boiled Frog

10 Lessons from Healing Back Pain by Dr John Sarno: Part 2 

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