What a wonderful article!
What incredible work you have done through the years. And, the most inspiring thing to me is knowing the depth to which you walk your talk…the degree to which you “take yourself on” in discovering and dealing with your own mind/body connections.

Congratulations!
With love,
Thea

Thanks for this thoughtful and important article. I have read all the books above, and then some (Marc Sopher, Scott Brady, Monte Heuftle, Fred Amir), but unfortunately, I was unable to save my wife from her obvious TMS, and unable to persuade her to see a TMS doctor or psychotherapist. In fact, the more I tried, as tactfully as I could, the more her resistance grew.

She separated from me two days after we’d first heard of Dr. Sarno, after two and a half years of going througn the medical establishment trying to find a cure for her chronic back pain, but to no avail. When I read Sarno, it seemed clear that this was the answer, but my wife read it and rejected it, and got very angry at me for even suggesting it. Then she went to visit her mother, who turned her further against me and TMS, and persuaded her to divorce me. In the meantime, I was reading everything I could find, hoping to find that key that would let her see the benefits of accepting this diagnosis. Instead, she saw a neurosurgeon, and had a spinal fusion surgery without telling me, which improved things a bit for awhile, but caused other problems too. She separated from me in 2004, and we were divorced in 2007.

Julie, my wife, had a difficult childhood, her mom divorced her father when Julie was 7, then her mom married an abusive alcoholic, became an alcoholic herself, and Julie had to leave the family at 15, just to survive. She had created a business for herself, had a good life for herself when we’d met when she was 35, and her back pain came on at age 42. In the meantime, she’d repaired the relationship with her mom, who’d gotten sober and was on her 4th husband by then, and we had what I thought was a wonderful marriage up until then. But now I can understand why she didn’t want to face her long repressed emotions.

Unfortunately, Dr. Sarno was not so well known in 2004 as he’s come to be since, and there was no one else of her friends who had heard of him, so he was rejected as a quack. Now with the Internet, his fame is spreading more rapidly. I have a Google Alert for ‘Dr. Sarno’, which alerted me to your fine article, and hardly a day passes now without one or two alerts. So that it is good. I think he should get a Nobel prize for the pioneering work he has done, and the sheer number of people who have found relief from their pain through his ideas and books.

Thanks for the fine article.