Bob's Success Story
Bob proudly wearing his Sarno Medal of Freedom!
In 2018, I married the woman of my dreams. We both enjoyed our growing relationships with our combined family, and I thought nothing could be better. But six months into our marriage while running on an elliptical machine, I felt a “snap” in my back followed by excruciating pain with electricity up and down my back and right leg. I fell from the elliptical, rolled up in a ball, and was able stand painfully with the aid of nearby steps.
The next five years I lived the standard medical “chronic pain” regime related by Dr. Sarno and the Pain Cure Clinic. According to the docs, it was surgery or a lifetime of pain. This pain was unlike any I had experienced; the excruciating pain and duration of debilitation was overwhelming. I was brought to tears and bitterness more than once, tempted by the promises of surgeons with great reputations –among their peers. Friends who had the surgery and nurses warned me away from it.
Five years into my ordeal, I stumbled onto an old article with Dr. Sarno in which he claimed to have solved the chronic pain problem - AND - he talked a great deal about his cure for debilitating chronic back pain. I located an online book of Dr. Sarno’s called “Healing Back Pain” and devoured it that afternoon. His concern about the medical community’s approach to chronic pain aligned with mine and validated my concerns. I believed I was on the right path.
After a few weeks of reading and trying to find a good set of practices, I couldn’t create the activities that would lead me to a cure. I read Dr. Sarno’s next book and learned that he had passed away. I was disappointed and felt a great secret had gone to the grave before I could be helped. I looked for clinics or psychologists who followed Dr. Sarno’s approach, but they all seemed to deviate from Dr. Sarno’s path in some egocentric or financially burdensome way.
Finally, I found the Pain CURE clinic. I listened to the initial discussion by Laura and began to feel hope. I liked the fact that John and Laura’s approach was based on Dr. Sarno’s teaching and that they offered a logical, practical path with advice on how to make it work. I felt a kinship and trust with John given that his love of physicality matched mine before my “injury”. Listening to Laura and John’s teachings, I opened myself to the possibility that I was having thoughts and feelings I wasn’t “allowed” to have. I created my action plan and disciplined myself to follow it, including the recommended readings on perfectionism and meditation. I began to slowly understand.
I determined to think of my physical pain psychologically, to confront myself with practical hope when I weakened, to hold my mind gently accountable for the pain I was experiencing. I began to see TMS not as a curse but as a difficult blessing that offered insights to my unknown inner tensions. I learned to be kind to myself and to understand that in my case, getting angry or doubting myself wouldn’t help.
It took me months to make my first progress only to see it unravel time after time. I worked harder. I began to see the difference between TMS and my aging body’s aches and pains. I began to grasp the importance of the three parts of healing: confronting my erroneous beliefs that the medical community would save me, avoiding medications/placebos/nocebos, and increasing my physicality.
TMS taught me how my creative mind could evoke symptom imperatives. When my back eased off, my dislocated shoulder hurt, then my broken thumbs, then my knees, my broken pelvis, and on and on. As I pushed closer to my cure, even my allergies began acting up with no apparent cause. Then one day I awoke and felt different. My pain had gone. As the day wore on, I expected the pain to start again but it didn’t. I realized I had finally stopped thinking about my back, shoulders and all the pains I had experienced as physical things and was addressing my pain psychologically. It had taken a long time and many setbacks to get to that point, though my relentless ego thought I had understood long before. I learned that no matter what I thought I understood, the CURE evaded me until it didn’t. It took months for me to reach the level of belief, commitment, and physicality it really took to achieve my CURE.
Now, though I occasionally have recurrences of symptom imperatives, I work through them reasonably and efficiently with the tools and practices I received from the Pain CURE Clinic. I am more active than I have been in years with a full workout schedule, and I’ve returned to things my wife and I once enjoyed together; hiking, walking, biking, swimming, and for me, weightlifting.
This summer my wife and I are realizing a dream I wouldn’t have taken on with my old pain. We’re moving to a warmer climate near an Atlantic beach, and we’re about to engage the rage of pickleball. Just six months ago I hoped for ANY non-surgical relief from my pain. Today I am cured, and I am very grateful to Laura and John for inspiring my CURE and helping to bring my life back to full throttle.
To find out the real way to heal back pain, click on the image below. Our Healing Back Pain Master Class.
