The Mindbody Prescription—Healing the Body, Healing the Pain
By John E. Sarno, MD
I have read many great books in my life, and I have even read a few self-help books in my life. Some of the self-help books that have influenced me greatly were given to me by friends during especially difficult times, like my parents’ divorce, my father’s passing, and when I was trying to get a handle on my alcoholic proclivities. However, I have never read a book as unique as Dr. Sarno’s the Mindbody Prescription. Potentially, his book gives me the right tool to deal with every one of my perceived problems, or it may give me a really good excuse to understand my perceived problems as constructs of an angry unconscious mind…nonetheless, this is a seminal work in the field of medicine that also has important ramifications with self-destructive behaviorisms.
I came to read Dr. Sarno’s work after a friend loaned me a copy of the Naked Mind: Find Freedom, Discover Hppiness & Change Your Life…a book by Annie Grace. She used Dr. Sarno’s paradigm-busting work as the basis of her first chapter, and she referred back to his construct using the duality of the Conscious and Unconscious minds, which is a concept originally introduced by the famous psychotherapist Sigmund Freud. I needed to read Dr. Sarno after reading the Naked Mind, and I was reluctant to buy a copy given that Dr. Sarno’s work deals entirely with curing back pain. Back pain is not my problem except on occasion after heavy lifting, repetitive bending at a mind-numbing job, or some really great sex that required contorting my spine.
The book has many testimonials from his cured patients, it has enthusiastic reviews from distinguished doctors, and validation from different eminent institutions. Yet, it is about back pain, and nonetheless I read it from cover to cover in a short amount of time given it is only 172 pages in its paperback edition. I will be rereading it again before turning it over to a friend who suffers from arm pain stemming from an accident she had years ago, which is not assumed to be a categorically different reason than why I read this book. I read Dr. Sarno’s book to better understand my issues with alcoholism. After finishing his book, I felt metaphysically lighter, more in control of my inclination to get a drink at the local bar, ready to take on my addiction to cigarettes, and improve my work-life imbalances. It takes 172 pages to convey a simple strategy, or rather it took these 172 pages to convince me that my issues (including physical pains when they arise) are most likely due to my unconscious mind being a real jerk.
The premise is this: all humans have brains with a duality that includes a conscious and an unconscious compartment within the brain. The unconscious is the repository for everything that is too challenging to digest, in other words, the memories that are effectively blocked due to their traumatic outcomes. The unconscious will either NOT deal with these episodes or effectively unravel these traumas with dreams, conscious truisms we apply, and other baggage that we carry around. Dr. Sarno’s work is about the unconscious part of our brain being a really awful jerk and NOT doing its job of resolving life’s emotional challenges.
Science has advanced momentously from the time of Freud, yet our brains have not. We can now tell through medical imaging devices, blood tests, physical exams, and a host of other analyses when our bodies are failing or otherwise injured from real, physical trauma. Science can tell us that it is the L4 vertebra bulging that gives us excruciating back pain, or it is a fractured elbow that causes horrible issues, or it is a diseased liver that is causing us to feel awful. Science has given doctors the tools to diagnose a variety of ailments that are real and not imagined. However, Dr. Sarno believes that medical science has overlooked a forgotten element, which is the role of emotions and the unconscious to exacerbate ailments or simply be the cause of ailments despite a bulging L4 vertebra. For example, Dr. Sarno cites studies that show MRIs of people with no back pain have bulging L4s or other misalignments. How can anyone with any of these physical ailments not experience back pain if these are the telltale signs that surgery must be done to cure those with pain?
It is beyond the scope for me to rewrite Dr. Sarno’s work. However, what I can do is attest to the power of knowing that physical pain could be stemming from the unconscious division within a brain. What I will also do is extrapolate my unconsciousness as additionally heralding me toward behaviors that are not helpful as a means to alert me to my underlying emotions that need reconciliation. Maybe I am a little harsh with the previous concluding sentences that vilify my unconsciousness as being a jerk. Nonetheless, Dr. Sarno is saying that our brains do not always have the capacity to negotiate a reasonable conclusion to our respective traumatic episodes if these are shoved too far away. In effect, these traumatic episodes are effectively isolated and never reconciled with reality because this conclusion does not seem possible. Maybe at the time of the unreconciled incident was too terrible to be understood and needed repressing in order for the psyche to continue to function “normally”.
After reading this important work, I realized that maybe I am being alerted to these unresolved traumas through pain and self-destructive behavior. However, from the point of view of my rational, conscious brain, maybe I am finally to the point when all I needed was a really good excuse to start proving that I am no longer susceptible to self-destructive tendencies.
Walk into any bar as a regular patron, and you will notice or get to know a crew of people that drink there very frequently. Engage with these regulars by drinking along with them and have conversations and befriend them, and you will understand that life can be unfair, there are topics that no one wants brought up ever, there are no good excuses to drink less, and a gamut of mentalities that range from aggressive to placid. Modifying the Alcoholics Anonymous introduction to better suit my personality, my name is Charles Provine and I drink too much and I smoke too much, and I have a lot of trauma that seems responsible for my self-destructive behaviors.
A therapist coined a term to describe the stories I told him about how I walked through life and relationships and dealt with the problems that arise from knowing others really well…he said that I had a “Fuck You Complex”, which Google lets me know is not a real thing. In fact, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition) has no reference to the Fuck You Complex, which can make sense given the Internet has information on nearly everything even if it never makes it into a reference tome for the professionally educated. But, the DSM-5 also has no reference of Mindbody disorders that originate from the Freudian concept of a bifurcated mentality as Dr. Sarno proposes.
Are millions of cured people wrong, are the thousands of patients that personally saw Dr. Sarno wrong, and are the millions of brilliant minds in science and medicine that reject this paradigm wrong? Am I just a lay person looking for a cheap answer to a host of bad behaviors that I struggle to curtail and cease doing in my life? The answer is yes and no to this latter question, because I spent several thousand dollars on a psychotherapist using the Gestalt Method to work through my issues with neglectful parents, hurtful family members, and emotionally abusive relationships. I have had back pain, and I attributed this to the crappy job I started to pay the bills that would sink me otherwise. I had terrible recurring pain in my glutes that I attributed to an injury on a stair-stepping machine at 18…this pain lasted nearly 10 years until I found that yoga classes seemed to make it go away permanently, even after doctors could find no reasonable explanation for this pain and simply prescribed me pain killers for when it would rear its hurt. I have scars on my body from serious physical trauma experienced as a child that stem from a variety of accidents. I acknowledge that I am a smart guy with a lot of credentials to support this truth, but I cannot motivate myself to be as involved in a life that could be free from the day-to-day challenges I experience with bills and barely getting by financially.
I have repressed traumatic experiences. Long-term friends know about some of it and other intuitive friends can surmise I endured intense physical and emotional pain, but I have not taken the time to work through the list that has yet to be written. To be honest, I have invested two years into psychotherapy and that may be why I rarely have pain that is not attributable to a realistic source, i.e. bending too much at my crappy job. Many of Dr. Sarno’s patients would get better in a few weeks after some lectures and a couple of consultations, and others required psychotherapy from professional psychologists…yet none of the patients that cite themselves as cured from their debilitating, physical pain believe that this occurred with pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, or other invasive procedures. Albeit, Dr. Sarno is honest and attests that there are some never recover from their daily pain, albeit about 1-5% depending on the group surveyed. It should also be known that Dr. Sarno screened his potential patients to ensure they had the proclivity to understand his thesis before admitting them to his program.
With my newfound knowledge, will I have the wisdom to end the self-destructive tendencies? Time will tell, but I can honestly say that my back feels great, cessation of the cigarette habit has now begun in earnest, the alcohol is free from my system for several days now, and a couple of meetings with smart professionals that believe in my ideas and efficacy have occurred due to me setting the times and showing up! I have started down these paths many times, and many times I have ended my journeys by allowing one or more of the paths not begun to derail me. This will be my first journey with all the paths commenced simultaneously and with a conscious direction to follow all of these paths with a peaceful mind that comes from understanding my brain simultaneously operates with both conscious and unconscious bifurcations. My mind is better than it ever has been before given that I know it has endured serious trauma even if all of the bad things in my life have not yet been registered and categorically understood for what they are, the lowest points of a lifetime that were beyond my conscious control. Was it Dr. Sarno’s book or simply the coming together of all the knowledge I have taken in over the last several years as I endeavored to be better than I was starting a long time ago. At this point, my wisdom (as separate from others’ knowledge) has the wherewithal to finally resolve my past trauma and deal with my current predicaments as a reflection of this trauma rather than my own innate shortcomings. An adage I coined a long time ago goes like this: Knowledge comes from others, Wisdom comes from experience, and Genius is their unison. Searching on Google alerts me that many others have eloquent adages within this vein, but none have said it as I have.
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