Healing back pain john sarno pdf free download

The Divided Mind is the crowning achievement of Dr. Sarno traces the history of psychosomatic medicine, including Freud's crucial role, and describes the psychology responsible for the broad range of psychosomatic illness.

The failure of medicine's practitioners to recognise and appropriately treat mindbody disorders has produced public health and economic problems of major proportions across the western world.

Sarno's books - how and why this happens is revealed in The Divided Mind. Sarno's distinguished career as a groundbreaking medical pioneer, going beyond pain to address the entire spectrum of psychosomatic mindbody disorders Sarno, is, in my opinion, the most brilliant doctor in America In the past twenty years I have recommended his books to dozens of friends and acquaintances experiencing chronic pain, including several on the verge of surgery.

Sarno brilliantly explores the chasm between the conscious and unconscious minds where psychosomatic ailments originate. Peter Firchow is professor of English at the University of Minnesota, author of several books on modern and modernist literary subjects, including books on Huxley, Conrad, and Auden.

In these turbulent times, just about every solution you can think of has been put forth by someone, somewhere, as a way to calm the waters and live with more happiness and ease. But the fact is you cannot think your way to a better life. Change isn't something your mind can accomplish alone. It calls for mind and body to work together in a deeper unity than you may ever have imagined. Neuropsychologist Mario Martinez is a pioneer in the science of the mindbody--his term for that essential oneness of cognition and biology--and a passionate advocate for its power to reshape our lives, if we work with it consciously.

In The MindBody Self, he builds on the foundation he laid in the critically acclaimed The MindBody Code to explore the cultural conditions that co-author our reality and shape every aspect of our lives, from health and longevity to relationships and self-esteem.

Then he offers practical tools we can use to shed outworn patterns and create sustainable change. Each chapter concludes with exercises and experiential processes that make complex scientific discoveries not only accessible, but applicable.

My most significant advice is HANG TOUGH, the book states it takes weeks to recover totally and also it has taken me a lot longer than that, do not be discouraged if you are still in pain after that timespan. Stop hiding your sensations. In the past, if a person stated something offensive towards me, I would cover up the feeling by thinking of it, justifying why they stated, what they stated, the context, blah but the FEELING is what is necessary.

Healing Back Pain Audiobook Free. I am ok. Stop letting your ideas abuse you. In the past I would let my head spin in worry for hrs and hours, believing oh possibly this will happen, yet what happens if that occurs. Take charge and say NO to your worry ideas. It will draw for some time since fear is a habit and also it requires time to break so you will be stopping your ideas A WHOLE LOT however eventually the worry slows down and also dissipates.

The osteopathic techniques are however also wonderfully suited for self-treatment. This is where personal body-awareness comes into play. In this book, Thomas Seebeck conveys the principles of osteopathic treatment, and a variety of exercises for back pain relief at all areas of the spine.

This book is a subset of the book "Osteopathic Self-Treatment" written by the same author. The main cause of spinal pain is the degeneration of the spine. It is very common at night or at a time of waking up as compared to the pain experienced during the day. Other psychological causes of back pain are anxiety and stress. These phenomenon causes tension in the muscles leading to curled up position for sleep thereby causing pain in the back, shoulder, and neck.

The manageability and intensity of back pain are quite different for every person. One person may have a large herniated disc and feel no pain at, while another person may have muscle strain and cause excruciating back pain and difficulty in movement, and could get itself heal in a few days. The pain experienced may flare up from time to time and eventually subsided for a short period, only to flare up again after a few weeks.

What is back? What are the overlooked causes of back pain? Home and natural way to solve back pain? How to choose the best mattress? And so on. It is a guide and also a DIY tool You need these skills to alleviate your back pain once and for all. Stop taking pain killers. Stop shrieking in pain when you have to bend down to pick something up!

Back pain is debilitating, but it can be cured. By understanding how your back works, how to nurture a healthy posture and by knowing which exercises help most, you'll never suffer in pain again. Every technique I've collected for you are natural, practical and easy to fit into your average day. You can recover from the illness that is holding you, hostage, right now! He felt that he was too old to engage in psychotherapy, which is often required for patients like this. The primary benefit he derived from treatment was the reassurance that there was nothing structurally wrong with his back.

Another patient was a young man in his twenties who had his first child shortly before he opened a new branch of the family business. The simultaneous imposition of these new responsibilities in this very conscientious young man induced severe low back pain due to TMS. As soon as he became aware that the source of his symptoms was inner tension, the pain disappeared. As will be seen later, awareness is the key to recovery from TMS.

What these two people had in common was a great sense of responsibility and a strong inner drive to succeed in both business and family matters. People who get TMS are often intensely competitive, success 36 Healing Back Pain oriented, achieving and usually very accomplished. In our culture success often requires the ability to compete effectively, and they do. They are accustomed to putting a great deal of pressure on themselves and often feel as though they have not done enough.

Sometimes the perfectionism manifests itself in unusual ways. I remember seeing a young man once who had grown up on a farm. It is clear that there is a relationship between these personality characteristics and this pain syndrome, but what is it? To understand this we need to think about anxiety and anger.

Anxiety and Anger Not being trained in psychology or psychiatry I am aware that my concepts and explanations of what goes on in this psychophysiologic process may sound naive to professionals in these fields. However, this is a book for the general public, and the lack of jargon and complex concepts will probably be welcome. My lack of training in these fields notwithstanding, what I have observed about the nature of this pain syndrome and its causes should be taken seriously by psychology professionals.

We are dealing here with the almost totally unexplored territory between what is purely mental-emotional and what is physical. There is a powerful and important link which, sadly, contemporary medical science with a few notable exceptions is unwilling to explore. Anger and anxiety are discussed together for I think they are closely related and are the primary repressed feelings behind TMS and other disorders like it.

It was obvious from the beginning of my experience with TMS that most patients shared the personality characteristics described above. Anxiety arises in response to the perception of danger and is logical unless the perception is illogical, as is often the case. The anxious person tends to anticipate danger, often where there is little or none. This is the nature of the human animal.

However, he or she is often not aware of this anxiety, for it is generated in the unconscious out of feeings that are largely unconscious and are kept in the unconscious through the wellknown mechanism of repression. Because of the unpleasant, embarrassing, often painful nature of these feelings and the anxiety they generate, there is a strong need to keep them out of consciousness, which is the purpose of repression.

As will be seen later, the purpose of TMS is to assist in the process of repression. Narcissism The role of low self-esteem was described above.

Standing right 38 Healing Back Pain beside this deeply buried feeling is another of equal importance, called narcissism. It refers to the human tendency to love oneself, that is, to be self-centered to an excessive degree. I have heard it said that many of the American Indian languages had no pronouns for I and me because of a powerful sense of community and of being part of something larger than themselves.

Anger Narcissism exists in all human beings to some degree. When it is strong it can make trouble since it means that the person is easily irritated, often frustrated by contact with others who do not do his bidding, or do it badly.

The result is anger, and if the person is very narcissistic he or she may be angry all the time but never know it because, like anxiety, it has been repressed. On the one hand we have poor self-esteem but then our narcissism leads us to behave emotionally like reigning monarchs.

These diametrically different feelings are opposite sides of the same coin, though it may strike us as strange that they generally exist simultaneously. It appears to be a storehouse of often conflicting feelings and tendencies, most of which we are totally unaware of. We are angry for other reasons. In fact, anything that makes us anxious all unconscious will tend to make us angry as well. Although the production of anxiety and anger is often work related, personal relationships are an equally common source of repressed emotions.

Family dynamics often produce serious problems that may be unrecognized because of their subtlety. One of my patients was a woman in her late forties who had had a sheltered adolescence, an early marriage and, as dictated by her culture, thereafter had devoted herself exclusively to home and family.

She did an excellent job since she was an intelligent, competent and compassionate woman. However, there came a time when she began to resent the fact that she had not been allowed to go to school as a child and could not read and write, could not drive a car and had been denied many experiences because the needs of her family so dominated her life. She was totally unaware of the existence of this resentment and, as a consequence, developed a long, disabling history of back pain, including unsuccessful surgery.

When she came to my attention she was in constant pain and was almost totally unable to function. Through the education program and psychotherapy she became aware of these repressed feelings and the pain gradually disappeared. The process was not without psychological trauma, for now she was faced with the disapproval of her family and friends and her own deeply ingrained attitudes.

She was in considerable conflict and now experienced emotional pain. But this was appropriate and vastly preferable to the physical pain, of which she had been a helpless victim. Though we love them, they may burden us in many ways and the resultant anger is internalized. How can one be angry at elderly parents or a baby?

A good example: A man in his forties went to visit his elderly parents in another city. Before the weekend was over he had a recurrence of back pain, the first since successfully completing the TMS therapeutic program a year before. When I suggested that the return of pain meant that something was bothering him subconsciously, he said the weekend had been pleasant.

But then he revealed that his mother was feeble, that he had spent most of the weekend ministering to her needs, and that both of his parents were a worry to him. To make matters worse, they lived a plane ride away. So his natural intrinsic, unconscious, narcissistically inspired annoyance anger, resentment was completely repressed and, for reasons which shall be clarified shortly, gave rise to the recurrence of back pain.

Or take the case of the young father whose first-born turns out to be a nonsleeper. Not only does he lose sleep but his wife is pretty much tied up with baby around the clock. He has to pitch in during his free time, their social life is much curtailed and what was a long honeymoon before baby came is now a grind.

And to make matters worse he has become a part-time nursemaid and cook. Of course, they say, this is all subconscious. This is the so-called secondary gain theory of chronic pain. There is no getting involved with messy unconscious feeings like anxiety and anger.

All family relationships are emotionally loaded. It is one of the first things to be considered when someone has an attack of TMS that seems to come out of nowhere. The combination of real concern and love for the family member and inner resentment of the duties and responsibilities associated with the relationship are a source of deep conflict, the stuff of which TMS is made.

Here is a classic story with some interesting sidelights about the natural history of TMS. The patient was a thirty-nine-year-old married man who ran a family business originally started by his father. He told me that his father was still active in the business but that he had become a hindrance rather than a help. He admitted to conflict with his father over this and to feeling guilty about the whole thing. The pain syndrome had begun about two and a half years before, and about four months into the experience he read my first book.

He decided it was hogwash and proceeded to make his way through the medical system, determined to get rid of the pain.

He said he saw many doctors and tried virtually every available treatment, with no success. Two years later he was still in pain, 42 Healing Back Pain was rapidly becoming obsessed with it, and was extremely limited physically.

He was afraid of any physical activity and could not even bend. His explanation was that he had to go through all the tests and doctors before he was ready to acknowledge a psychological basis for the pain. Needless to say, he did very well on the program and was soon free of pain.

During the consultation I found him to be so perceptive and psychologically attuned I could not imagine that he had originally rejected the diagnosis. It was a lesson to me: One of the unfortunate realities about working with a disorder like TMS is that most people will reject the idea until they are desperate for a solution. Here is another good example of the role of family dynamics in producing symptoms.

A woman who had been successfully treated for low back pain two years prior called one day to tell me that she had now developed neck, shoulder and arm pain but was certain it was due to a painful psychological situation involving her husband and teenage stepdaughter.

I encouraged her to carry on without formal treatment but the situation remained unresolved and the pain became increasingly severe; she also lost considerable motion in both shoulders, a common consequence of TMS in the neck and shoulders. Then one day she decided to face the problem squarely and confront her husband. The result was a surprisingly easy solution that defused the entire situation, and with resolution of her personal problems the pain disappeared.

She had undoubtedly harbored great resentment, and as long as she did the pain persisted. I shall have more to say about how one deals with this kind of situation in the treatment chapter, but this case clearly illustrates the relationship between repressed anger and TMS. One of the great sources of conflict in the unconscious is the The Psychology of TMS 43 battle which rages between those feelings and needs that stem from the narcissistic impulses described above and another very real part of the mind that is concerned with what is appropriate, reasonable and mature or, even more demanding, what you should be doing.

Patients often describe in detail how their lives are governed by these behavioral imperatives. It was clear that there were other parts of her personality that were softer and more pliable, so the conflict in her unconscious must have been considerable.

I recall a strikingly attractive woman who was part of a religious group that believed in very large families; six or eight children were not unusual.

I suggested that she might be resentful of the work and responsibility for such a large family. For a long time she denied this, insisting that she felt no such resentment, and the pain continued, sometimes very severely. I pointed out that she would not be aware of the feeling since it was unconscious and repressed.

Perseverance, both hers and mine, paid off. She began to get inklings of her deeply repressed resentment, and then had a dramatic resolution of her symptoms. We have all learned to repress it so completely that we are totally unaware of its existence in many situations.

In fact, I have begun to wonder if anger is not more fundamental to the development of symptoms than anxiety and, indeed, whether anxiety itself may be a reaction to repressed anger. The following story made a deep impression on me. The man 44 Healing Back Pain was in his midforties and, among other things, had a history of having occasional panic attacks.

These represent acute anxiety. After having examined him and established that he had TMS, we discussed the psychology of the disorder and I told him that I was beginning to suspect that anger might be more important than anxiety. He said that something had just happened to him that supported that supposition.

He had become extremely angry at someone and was on the point of starting an altercation when he decided that it would not be appropriate, that he had better swallow it. Within moments he had a panic attack!

As we shall see in a moment this is precisely the kind of situation that brings on TMS and other physical reactions. Where does it come from? Repression I remember a mother telling me proudly how she had stopped the temper tantrums in her little fifteen month old. At the ripe age of fifteen months he had learned the technique of repression. He had been programmed to repress anger because it produced very unpleasant consequences, and he would carry that dubious talent with him throughout his life.

Now when confronted with the multitude of frustrating, annoying, sometimes enraging things that happen to people every day, this man automatically internalizes his natural anger, and when that anger collects and builds up, he will have TMS or some such physical reaction in response to it. The Psychology of TMS 45 The story illustrates one of the sources of the need to repress: innocent parental influence.

This may be the most common reason for learning to repress. In an attempt to make good people of their children, parents may inadvertently induce the conditions for psychological difficulty later in life. When you think about it, there are many reasons why we repress anger, all logical and mostly unconscious.

Everyone wants to be liked or loved; no one enjoys disapproval, so we repress unlovable behavior. We would hate to admit it, but unconsciously we fear reprisal.

The cultural imperatives of family and society provide strong motivation not to show anger; this becomes deeply imbedded, starting as it does in early childhood. We realize, all unconsciously, that anger is often inappropriate, springing from irritants which ought not make us angry, and so we repress. Instinctively we feel that anger is demeaning, and perhaps even more powerful, we feel a loss of control when we are angry, and that is something the TMS personality finds hard to take.

All of this is unconscious and thus we are unaware of our need to repress the anger. Instead we may experience a physical symptom, TMS or something gastrointestinal, for example.

I do that a lot. So I think about what might be causing the condition, and when I come up with the answer the heartburn disappears. It is remarkable how well buried the anger usually is. Generally for me it is something about which I am annoyed but have no idea how much it has angered me.

After a seventeen-year experience working with TMS it seems clear that, in our culture at least, we all generate anxiety and anger and that, in any culture, human beings repress potentially problematic emotions. Put another way, the psychological conditions that lead to psychophysiologic reactions like TMS, stomach ulcers and colitis are universal; they only vary in degree.

Those at the upper end of 46 Healing Back Pain the severity spectrum, with more intense symptoms, we call neurotic, but in fact we are all more or less neurotic, making the term meaningless. The concepts of repression and the unconscious are closely bound together. They were first put on a sound, scientific basis by Freud. We seem to have a built-in mechanism for avoiding what is emotionally unpleasant, which is the reason for repression.

A short time ago I saw a woman who told the most interesting story. After I had examined her and told her she had TMS and what it meant, she said that the pain had begun after she invited an older sister to take a trip to Europe, at her expense. She began to worry about whether the sister would have a good time, felt that it was her responsibility to see that she did, and then got angry and resentful about having to feel that way. The Psychology of TMS 47 This is the kind of thing from which TMS often arises: anxiety, anger, resentment, with roots that go all the way back to childhood.

I thought it remarkable of her to have come up with all that important psychological material with just a hint from me.

The universality of these psychological phenomena is supported by the strangely ignored fact that over 80 percent of the U. Back and neck pain syndromes are the first cause of worker absenteeism in this country.

This virtual epidemic of pain syndromes can only be properly explained on the basis of a universal psychophysiological process. In fact, this is what I suggested in the first edition of this book.

I had been aware since the early s that these common back and neck pain syndromes were due to repressed emotions. Eighty-eight percent of a large group of patients with TMS had a history of other tension-related disorders, like stomach ulcers, colitis, tension headache and migraine headache.

But the idea of TMS as a physical manifestation of nervous tension was somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. Stanley Coen, who 48 Healing Back Pain suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere.

It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings the prisoners from becoming conscious.

It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process. Patients have different metaphors to describe the process: that the defense acts as a camouflage; that it is a diversion or distraction. This is exactly what happens with TMS.

The common back, neck and shoulder pain syndromes have reached epidemic proportions in the United States over the past thirty years because they have become the preferred defense against the repressed emotions described above.

The mark of a good camouflage is that it will not be recognized for what it is, that no one will know that something is being hidden. Virtually no one suffering from them thinks that these pain syndromes are related to emotional factors. On the contrary, almost everyone thinks they are due to injury or a variety of congenital and degenerative abnormalities of the spine.

It has been a recurrent observation of mine that the more painful the repressed emotion, the more severe the pain of TMS has been. Though they may be serving a psychological purpose they must be investigated and treated medically. Hopefully, the 50 Healing Back Pain patient will also receive some counseling. Each of these physical conditions serves equally to assist repression. As long as the defense works it will continue. Physical as opposed to psychological defenses against repressed emotions are undoubtedly the most common because they are so successful.

They are also very effective since a patient can transfer from one to another. For example, excellent drugs have been found to reverse the pathology of peptic ulcer. As a result, the mind simply shifts to another physical disorder. One man in his midforties told me that ten years before he had started to have trouble with his low back; after many years it was relieved by surgery. A few months after the operation he began to have stomach ulcer problems, and that went on for almost two years.

Finally it stopped and shortly thereafter the patient began to have neck and shoulder pain; it had been going on for almost two years and so he had come to see me. The Peptic Ulcer Story The ulcer story is interesting. There has been a decline in the incidence of peptic ulcer in the United States and Canada over the past twenty to thirty years, due in part to the effective drugs that have been developed.

Baker pointed out that people seemed to be getting fewer ulcers. The article set me to speculating that since everyone, doctors and laymen alike, had come to realize that ulcers really meant tension, they no longer served the purpose of hiding tension, so fewer people developed them.

Could this be the reason why neck, shoulder and back pains have become so common in recent years? Is it possible that these are now much better hiding places for tension than the stomach? These include disorders of the immune system, such as hay fever, or frequent respiratory or genitourinary infections. An academic urologist of my acquaintance has said that over 90 percent of his cases of prostatitis are due to tension. I have a patient who suffers from constant dry mouth, the result of tensioninduced constriction of his salivary ducts.

Laryngitis may be of emotional origin; ophthalmologists tell us that tension-induced visual difficulties are common, and on and on. To repeat, all symptoms should be thoroughly investigated to rule out structural, infectious or neoplastic processes. This subject is reviewed in more detail in the chapter on mind and body.

While it is wise to rule out so-called organic disorders, the diagnosis of psychophysiologic conditions should be made positively and not by exclusion. A diagnosis by exclusion is not a diagnosis. What things is the person afraid of or unable to do? In the long run fear and preoccupation with physical restrictions are more effective as a psychological defense than pain.

A severe attack of pain may be over in a few days, but if the person is afraid to do things for fear of inducing another attack or because he or she has found that the activity will invariably bring on pain, even if it is not an acute attack, then the preoccupation with the body is continuous and the defense is working all the time.

In the majority of patients with whom I work this is the most important factor. Occasionally I have a patient who says that he or she has no physical restrictions, that pain is the only problem. But such patients are rare; most patients are afraid of physical activity, which tends to perpetuate the problem by inducing further anxiety and often leads to depression as well.

What one sees is truly a physicophobia, a fear of physical activity. The degree of preoccupation with symptoms is a measure of the severity of the problem.

Many patients report that the syndrome dominates their lives while others are clearly obsessed by the disorder. It is the first thing they think of when they awaken in the morning and the last at night before sleep comes.

The Psychology of TMS 53 It has been my experience that the overall severity of the pain syndrome, including obsessional components, is a good guide to the importance of the underlying emotional state of the patient. People who were abused as children, emotionally or physically, but especially sexually, tend to have enormous reservoirs of anxiety and anger.

The physical symptoms are the means by which they remain out of contact with some terrible, frightening, deeply buried feelings. Such patients will tell you that they understand why the pain will not leave, for when they begin to get close to those buried feelings they are panic stricken and can proceed no further. They invariably require psychotherapy as part of the therapeutic program.

On the other hand, in the great majority of people with TMS, about 95 percent, the anxiety level and the reasons for it are much milder and they experience no emotional reaction when the pain disappears. What has been described is universal in our culture; only the degree of repressed emotionality varies. Fortunately there is a way of stopping what is clearly a maladaptive response for most of us.

Logic tells us that the brain is reacting in an infantile fashion. However, my work with TMS has demonstrated that the brain has other attributes and can reverse the process that leads to physical symptoms.

Fear is pervasive. Anything that heightens anxiety will increase 54 Healing Back Pain the severity of symptoms. She said she almost fainted in the street and that her pain was much worse after the visit to the doctor. A young man in his twenties, with the physique of a football player, told of how he was the strong one in the family business. One day he decided to accompany his father on a visit to a back practitioner since he had experienced some mild low back pain while brushing his teeth.

X rays were taken and he was told that there was a malalignment of the lower end of the spine, whereupon his mild symptoms got worse. He was devastated. Though he had started out with mild low back pain, he now had severe pain every day and was greatly limited in his work and life. He had become disabled, thanks to the structural diagnoses that had been made and all that they implied. He now believed there was something seriously wrong with his spine and that he would never again be able to lift a heavy weight or play sports.