Who was Dr. John Sarno?
John Sarno was a doctor of rehabilitation medicine at the Rusk Institute at New York University. Over decades of treating back pain, he kept noticing the same thing: what he saw on scans often didn't match his patients' pain. Two people with the same disc bulge could feel completely different, one in agony, one with no pain at all.
He came to believe the body can create pain to keep difficult emotions out of awareness, especially anger we were never allowed to feel. For him, the pain was a distraction, and once a person understood that, the pain often lost its grip.
He wrote about this in Mind Over Back Pain, Healing Back Pain, The Mindbody Prescription and The Divided Mind. He died in 2017, and his books have helped people heal all over the world, often after nothing else had worked.
Why the name keeps changing
Sarno himself later switched to tension myoneural syndrome, and then simply the mindbody syndrome. Today you'll hear people say mind-body pain or neuroplastic pain. Doctors now use a related term, nociplastic pain, for pain driven by changes in how the nervous system processes signals.
The names come from different people and different eras, but they all point toward the same thing: pain can be real without damage behind it.
How I use his work
I found Dr. Sarno's work when I had barely been able to walk for almost a year. I read his books, I journaled, and I stopped fighting the pain long enough to listen to it. Within two weeks, it lifted completely.
I went on to train in the SarnoXSachs Chronic Pain Practitioner Training. Today I bring his work together with breathwork and somatic practice, through a decolonial lens.
Sarno wrote a lot about the pressure we put on ourselves to be perfect and to hold everything together. I believe the pressure the world puts on us belongs in that picture too.
With love,
Leyla
