Friday 18 May 2012

Back with a vengeance

Although my previous post was about the idea that stress can cause back pain, and that one has to treat most such pain through dealing with unresolved emotional issues, rather than treat them as physical damage - and the shifting pain(s) I had been suffering had eased (if never quite gone) - I am sad to report that they have returned and worse.


This is not just the dull aches of the hernia, for instance, but serious pain in the neck, and between the shoulders. At the moment it feels as though someone hit me across the upper back with a plank. So I guess I have to return to wondering what it is trying to tell me - as I still assume it is not a physical injury (because of the way it shifts around).

Very frustrating, and depressing. Can't keep taking pain-killers, etc.

Friday 4 May 2012

It's all the rage...

For some weeks now I have had a stabbing pain between the shoulders, and occasionally a stiff neck, or RSI symptoms in my right hand.

Very annoying.

I somehow suspect that I haven't "pulled a muscle" or "trapped a nerve" and am inclined to think that it is another manifestation of that old body-mind connection.  I read Dr John Sarno a while back, and the mere act of reading his book about what we (subconsciously) do to ourselves seemed to cure what the doctors had no idea about, but loosely called 'Prostatitis' (which doesn't mean much more than irritation in the prostate (although they couldn't find anything wrong, and tried various antibiotics, etc).

Which seemed kind of spooky, at the time.

Dr Sarno may not be alone in thinking that many shoulder and back problems do not come from any kind of illness or physical damage to the system, but represent displaced (suppressed) anger, building up to rage.  And our language seems aware of it, too, as a metaphor (things are a pain in the neck or a pain in the arse; we feel a stabbing pain in the back, etc). A stiff neck could relate to stubborness, etc.
I can't keep stumbling around like this, or taking Solpadeine on bad days, going to bed early, and all that.
It's doing my head in, so I will have to consider what stresses might be making me angry.  I know of old that I have this British thing about trying to appear to rise above things, the stoic approach, an attempt a Buddhist serenity, and so on (Oh Really? Is that so?) - all of which just means that emotions far too often do not get expressed well enough, or often enough.

But I'll make my lists in private, I think...he lists everything from work stress to relationships, getting old to stuff hungover from childhood.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dr Sarno's website

"Dr. Sarno has coined the term TMS--"Tension Myositis Syndrome"--to describe this "psychophysiological" condition. The brain, he says, mildly oxygen-deprives our back muscles and certain nerves and tendons to distract us and prevent our repressed anger from lashing out."

Read more here (or click on back picture above).