I shared this story with a client today and she asked me to write a post about it. Intellectually and theoretically, I understand the mind body connection. However, until I experienced it for myself, I truly had no idea just how strong this connection is.
Starting just after my third child was born in 2007, I began experiencing numbness and tingling in my left shoulder blade (the infraspinatus, specifically). This numbness and tingling ebbed and flowed with increased and decreased annoyance and pain over 13-years. I saw an RMT for it, but for the most part it was tolerable- sometimes it was even gone for months or a year. In the spring of 2020, I started experiencing low back pain that was no longer tolerable. The next year was one of the most challenging years of my life as I was in constant pain, severely sleep deprived from the pain, and scared this is what the rest of my life would look like. When moments of reprive came in, I would become scared of the pain returning, and I was depressed. I did not want to live like this.
I sough help: more massage, chiro, physio, TCM, acupuncture, IMS. I bought a little gadet that stuck between my shoulder blades to ensure I had proper posture and any time I slouched it would zap me. I bought pillows for proper posture during sleep. I bought equipment to sit and work properly at my laptop. I stopped doing yoga because I wondered if I was doing it wrong. I changed my exercise regimen. I spent hours a day massaging the painful spots with a hard ball against a wall. I used heat and cold. I’m probably forgetting some of the things I tried and did.
The weird thing was, there was nothing I could pin point that caused the pain. Nothing I did- yoga, swimming, biking, walking, no exercise at all- made it better or worse. It just came and went, when it did, for as long as it did. The pain also jumped around. Shoulder blade. Middle low back. Left side of low back. Right side of low back. Shooting (what felt like an electrical current) pain up the left side of my neck. This was also the order of severity. Numbness and tingling was an indicator. The rest was progression. It was tolerable until it scaled to the right side of my low back and neck. Once the pain was there, I knew it was there to stay for a while, and I wouldn’t be sleeping. I also “put my back out” repeatedly during this time, periods in which I could not move or could barely move, with excruciating pain (I never put my back out before this experience and it has never happened since).
Then I watched Gabor Mate’s documentary, The Wisdom of Trauma, in the spring/summer of 2021. During the series of talks following the doc, I watched a presentation in which a book was recommended: Healing Back Pain, by John Sarno. The speaker noted that if back pain is chonic, it is an emotional problem, not a physical one.
I thought: there is NO way. I could FEEL the physical pain. However, I was desperate. I had tried everything. And it was just a book. $25 compared to the thousands I had spent to date. So I ordered the book and started reading.
Early in the book, Sarno noted my pain would be gone within two-weeks. I was too scared to hope. While the pain wasn’t 100% gone in two-weeks, it was back to only numbness and tingling in my shoulderblade for small amounts of time, so it was completely tolerable. It also did eventually go away completely, within a month. There have been moments in which the numbness and tingling has come back, but now I know what to do. As well, the numbness and tingling now serves as an indicator and no longer scares me. My body is talking to me, so I listen and respond.
Sarno notes chronic back pain is anger. I am not an MD and I do not study this for a living. However, I am no different from the folks Sarno talks about in his book. My chronic back pain was not physical, it was emotional. Some folks will need therapy to work through their anger, but most, as Sarno notes and like I experienced, only need to talk to their anger. And stop treating it like a physical problem. No more physio, massage, chiro etc! PHEW.
There were also life events I look back on which ended and started the pain- not physical events like practicing yoga or walking which is what I initially was paying attention to, but emotional events. While I am not trained to know if your problem is physical, I am trained, and have personally experienced, to recognize problems which feel or appear physical, that may be emotional. If you have chronic back pain, I invite you to pick up Healing Back Pain, by John Sarno. I don’t know if it will work for you, but I believe it is worth the time and read.
In solidarity,
Deb
