This Is the Start of Something Shifting

I have lived with on-and-off back pain for most of my adult life. It started during college. As a Division I athlete, I often pushed to lift the heaviest weight I could and definitely felt some tweaks that I knew were not right. When I graduated, I had this righteous feeling like “nobody can force me to work out again.” I really lived by that, only doing physical activities that felt fun and never getting into a routine, other than eventually introducing daily walks many years later. So whenever the back pain came for a visit, I blamed it on the strains of college training and my lack of consistency afterward.

Two years ago, it got worse. After weeks of long walks, heavy garden work, and nonstop cooking, I ended up with what the doctors called “a lateral shift,” caused by “overuse.” My spine had shifted visibly to the point where my upper torso leaned several inches away from my lower half, obvious to anyone in the room. The pain was excruciating. I could barely stand. Over the first few days, the physical therapist helped guide it back into place, and then came the MRI and a bleak prognosis from the spine doctor: an abnormality in my lower spine that, they said, was causing the pain and would only get worse over time. Nothing to be done except anti-inflammatory injections. I tried one, and at a thousand dollars a shot, it did nothing.

Over the next two years, I settled into what I thought was my new normal, living inside carefully balanced routines of specifically curated sneakers, long-but-not-too-long walks, and gentle strength training. I was always trying to hit that elusive ratio of sitting, standing, and moving that might keep the pain at bay. Even so, the pain was still there, woven into my days.

Then, last weekend, another lateral shift arrived, less severe than the first but enough to remind me how fragile the balance felt. The next evening I still made it to a dinner party, and that is where the subject of back pain came up, and everything shifted in a different way.

At the dinner table with some friends, one of them mentioned a book that had completely changed his experience of back pain. The title was Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno, M.D. Almost immediately, others chimed in with their own stories of people they knew. Someone’s persistent pain had disappeared after finishing the book. Another swore by it as the turning point in their recovery.

I listened, curious and intent. For years I had lived under the assumption that my pain was a permanent condition, structural and irreversible. But here were people, casually and convincingly, pointing toward something else. That night I logged onto the library’s website and put the book on hold. Days later, I had it in my hands.

I devoured it in a day. The premise was startling: much chronic pain, particularly in the back, neck, and shoulders, is not necessarily caused by the structural abnormalities the medical world often blames. Instead, it stems from repressed emotions – anger, anxiety, frustration – that the subconscious keeps hidden by redirecting attention to physical pain. The theory is that the emotional pain of those repressed emotions – were it to be consciously experienced – would be worse than physical pain, and so the brain initiates physical pain to keep those emotions from being felt. The brain does this by depriving muscles and nerves of oxygen, creating muscle spasms and real pain that serves as a distraction. The “cure,” Sarno argued, is not another shot, not another surgery, not another shoe, but the recognition that the pain is a distraction, and the willingness to consider what emotions might be lurking underneath. By shining a light on those emotions, there would be nothing for the mind to distract us from and no reason to trigger those pain signals.

The tools I’ve leaned on for years to manage pain — now sitting beside a book that reframed it all.

While it feels a bit woo woo at first glance, it resonated with me instantly. Besides the several grown adults sitting across the table attesting to their lived experiences with it, I’d already been told by doctors that nothing could be done to heal myself from my back pain and that it would only get worse over time. I had nothing to lose in believing. But on top of that, I’ve always been open to the unseen ways our minds and bodies influence each other, to the holistic approach to wellness that looks for the root cause rather than siloed diagnosis and symptom treatment. Reading Sarno’s words felt less like a stretch and more like a recognition of something I already hoped for and suspected, but could not find on my own.

Sarno also pointed to research showing that many of the so-called causes of pain – herniated discs, spinal abnormalities – are often found in people with no pain at all. These structures show up incidentally on scans, which means the causal link between scan findings and pain is not as definitive as we have been led to believe. That struck me hard, given the way my own diagnosis had been delivered as unshakable truth.

I know this book has already begun to change my back pain story, but I need to be patient. While the conscious mind may be quick to absorb new ideas, the subconscious usually takes longer. Even if it takes a while for my body to catch up, I’m grateful because I finally have a new story to engage with about what has been happening in my body, about what is behind the pain. The pain is real, but it does not need to be permanent. And this shift is one I can get behind.

Bramble On 🌿

Bea

Thanks for reading!