Quotes from John E. Sarno

Strange as it may seem, people with an unconscious psychological need for symptoms tend to develop a disorder that is well known, like back pain, hay fever, or eczema.

For example, if surgery is employed to relieve back pain due to TMS, it will prove to be only a placebo "cure," and similarly, if Prozac is used to treat depression, it will prove to be only a chemical "cure." In both cases, the patient will soon develop new symptoms. The TMS and the depression are not disorders in themselves; they are symptoms of unconscious conflicts and must be treated with psychotherapy to avoid the inevitable return of new

The decision maker in the brain has decided that the overt expression of unbridled rage would ruin the person's life, and to prevent that from happening, it automatically initiates physical symptoms in the body without consulting the conscious, rational mind.

Put another way, painful or otherwise distressing psychosomatic symptoms are designed for self-preservation, not self-flagellation.

People often say that they have a very stressful job and that's why they're tense. But if they weren't conscientious about doing a good job, if they weren't trying to succeed, achieve, and excel, they wouldn't generate tension. Often such people are highly competitive and determined to get ahead. Typically, they are more critical of themselves than others are of them.

The work of Dr. Hans Selye is credited with first drawing attention to how stress affects the body; his research and writing were prolific and stand as one of the major accomplishments of medicine in the twentieth century.

As Snoopy, that great contemporary philosopher, once said, "There's nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems." Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, is clearly a perceptive man.

THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MINDS There is a section in Studies on Hysteria entitled "Unconscious Ideas and Ideas Inadmissible to Consciousness—Splitting of the Mind," written by Breuer. Today, we would substitute the word emotions for ideas, but that disagreement aside, the concept that we humans have two minds is very important to an understanding of TMS. It is clear that we are two different people—one of them conscious and the other unconscious.

Many feelings and behaviors are no doubt left over from childhood. Children feel weak and vulnerable; they are dependent, and they feel that dependency strongly; they don't think much of themselves; they have a constant need for approval; they are very prone to anxiety and quick to anger. They have no patience. To a degree, we all continue to generate some of those feelings unconsciously right on into adulthood. What varies from person

There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay's excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: "Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape" (italics added).

Neck, shoulder, and back pain syndromes are not mechanical problems to be cured by mechanical means. They have to do with people's feelings, their personalities, and the vicissitudes of life.

If you ask people to ease up on you because you're emotionally overloaded, don't look for a sympathetic response; but tell them you've got pain or some other physical symptom and they immediately become responsive and solicitous.

It's all in your mind" is almost insulting, implying there's something strange or weak about you or that the symptoms are in your imagination. This is most unfortunate, since the symptoms are very real, the result of a very physical process.

Those that involve the back of the head are clearly related to the posterior neck muscles that are part of TMS. Some patients report pain all over the head; others have it in the frontal region. A common complaint is of severe pain "behind the eyes." When they are unilateral (involving one side only), severe, and are accompanied by nausea, people are inclined to call them migraines. Tension headache can be as disabling as the worst neck, shoulder, or back pain.

You begin to wonder whether you have lived a full life. And, strange as it may seem, strong negative feelings about your mother or father have not gone away; instead, they continue to be repressed and may give rise to symptoms.

The sad reality is that the patient with back pain is a prisoner of pervasive fear—and fear is a prime perpetuator of the pain syndrome.