Ten years ago I had a whole miserable year of Repetitive Strain Injury (and other things too) and then had a miraculous one-day recovery after reading Sarno’s book. But I didn’t (and still don’t) agree with the way Sarno (and you) describe what the mechanism is and what the emotions are doing, at least for my own experience and the couple other people I know personally who had similar RSI experiences.
I think it’s possible to use muscles in a way that’s painful: something like having the muscles be generally tense and their blood supply constricted. I think state-of-mind can cause muscles to operate in this painful blood-supply-constricted mode, and that one such state of mind is the feeling “These muscles here are super-injured and when I use them it’s probably making things worse.”
If you think about it, it’s easy to think of lots of things could predispose people to get stuck in this particular vicious cycle, including personality type, general stress level, factual beliefs about the causes and consequences of chronic pain, and so on. But at the end, I think it’s this pretty specific thing, not a catch-all generic mechanism of subconscious expression or whatever like you seem to be thinking.
I don’t really have much confidence in any of my assertions in the OP, but I will point out some possible questions that might challenge the “narrow” view.
1. Can you always/sometimes/ever subjectively correlate individual, transient spikes of pain/discomfort to particular external stimuli, and if so, what if those stimuli turn out to be extremely variable, as in, not reducible to one specific thing like “factual beliefs about pain’s source”?
2. How does your theory explain ulcers, which don’t have any obvious relationship to muscular tension?
3. How does your theory explain the fact that I can make pain/discomfort dissipate in the span of 10 seconds by asking, specifically, “What are you trying to tell me, Mr. Subconscious?” but not by simply thinking, “Oh, this pain is probably psychosomatic in origin.”?
To comment further on question #1: when I’m in a particularly sensitive physical state, i.e. when my chronic pain is flaring up, I can walk down a street and simply take observations. I feel a flare of pain, and ask myself what’s happening in my immediate surroundings. Perhaps I just walked by a homeless person. I didn’t feel anything particular about the homeless person, but perhaps that’s because I am “suppressing” some kind of disgust/annoyance for the homeless person, an emotional reaction which would be unacceptable to my conscious mind. Such an explanation feels post hoc and tenuous, but if I keep this monitoring process up for half an hour or so, I can’t help but collate a list of pain flareups associated with events which specifically seem like they could be the kind of thing that my Id hates but my Superego is stifling.
Again, this whole topic is weird and confusing to me, I place low confidence in any particular beliefs expressed here.
My view is that the “constrict blood vessels and tense muscles” action (or whatever it is) is less like moving your finger, and more like speeding up your heart rate: sorta consciously controllable but not by a simple and direct act of willful control. I personally was talking to my hands rather than talking to my subconscious, but whatever, either way, I see it as a handy trick to send out the right nerve signals. Again like how if you want to release adrenaline, you think of something scary, you don’t think “Adrenal gland, Activate!” (Unless you’ve specifically practiced.)
I guess where I differ in emphasis from you is that I like to talk about how an important part of the action is really happening at the location of the pain, even if the cause is in the brain. I find that people talking about “psychosomatic” tend to be cutting physiology out of the loop altogether, though you didn’t quite say that yourself. The other different emphasis is whether there’s any sense whatsoever in which some part of the person wants the pain to happen because of some ulterior motive. I mean, that kind of story very much did not resonate with my experience. My RSI flare-ups were always pretty closely associated with using my hands. I guess I shouldn’t over-generalize from my own experience. Shrug.
“Constricting blood vessels” seems like a broad enough mechanism to be potentially applicable to back spasms, RSI, IBS, ulcers, and all the other superficially different indications we’ve all heard of. But I don’t know much about physiology or vasculature, and I don’t put too much stock in that exact description. Could also be something about nerves I guess?
Ten years ago I had a whole miserable year of Repetitive Strain Injury (and other things too) and then had a miraculous one-day recovery after reading Sarno’s book. But I didn’t (and still don’t) agree with the way Sarno (and you) describe what the mechanism is and what the emotions are doing, at least for my own experience and the couple other people I know personally who had similar RSI experiences.
I think it’s possible to use muscles in a way that’s painful: something like having the muscles be generally tense and their blood supply constricted. I think state-of-mind can cause muscles to operate in this painful blood-supply-constricted mode, and that one such state of mind is the feeling “These muscles here are super-injured and when I use them it’s probably making things worse.”
If you think about it, it’s easy to think of lots of things could predispose people to get stuck in this particular vicious cycle, including personality type, general stress level, factual beliefs about the causes and consequences of chronic pain, and so on. But at the end, I think it’s this pretty specific thing, not a catch-all generic mechanism of subconscious expression or whatever like you seem to be thinking.
I don’t really have much confidence in any of my assertions in the OP, but I will point out some possible questions that might challenge the “narrow” view.
1. Can you always/sometimes/ever subjectively correlate individual, transient spikes of pain/discomfort to particular external stimuli, and if so, what if those stimuli turn out to be extremely variable, as in, not reducible to one specific thing like “factual beliefs about pain’s source”?
2. How does your theory explain ulcers, which don’t have any obvious relationship to muscular tension?
3. How does your theory explain the fact that I can make pain/discomfort dissipate in the span of 10 seconds by asking, specifically, “What are you trying to tell me, Mr. Subconscious?” but not by simply thinking, “Oh, this pain is probably psychosomatic in origin.”?
To comment further on question #1: when I’m in a particularly sensitive physical state, i.e. when my chronic pain is flaring up, I can walk down a street and simply take observations. I feel a flare of pain, and ask myself what’s happening in my immediate surroundings. Perhaps I just walked by a homeless person. I didn’t feel anything particular about the homeless person, but perhaps that’s because I am “suppressing” some kind of disgust/annoyance for the homeless person, an emotional reaction which would be unacceptable to my conscious mind. Such an explanation feels post hoc and tenuous, but if I keep this monitoring process up for half an hour or so, I can’t help but collate a list of pain flareups associated with events which specifically seem like they could be the kind of thing that my Id hates but my Superego is stifling.
Again, this whole topic is weird and confusing to me, I place low confidence in any particular beliefs expressed here.
My view is that the “constrict blood vessels and tense muscles” action (or whatever it is) is less like moving your finger, and more like speeding up your heart rate: sorta consciously controllable but not by a simple and direct act of willful control. I personally was talking to my hands rather than talking to my subconscious, but whatever, either way, I see it as a handy trick to send out the right nerve signals. Again like how if you want to release adrenaline, you think of something scary, you don’t think “Adrenal gland, Activate!” (Unless you’ve specifically practiced.)
I guess where I differ in emphasis from you is that I like to talk about how an important part of the action is really happening at the location of the pain, even if the cause is in the brain. I find that people talking about “psychosomatic” tend to be cutting physiology out of the loop altogether, though you didn’t quite say that yourself. The other different emphasis is whether there’s any sense whatsoever in which some part of the person wants the pain to happen because of some ulterior motive. I mean, that kind of story very much did not resonate with my experience. My RSI flare-ups were always pretty closely associated with using my hands. I guess I shouldn’t over-generalize from my own experience. Shrug.
“Constricting blood vessels” seems like a broad enough mechanism to be potentially applicable to back spasms, RSI, IBS, ulcers, and all the other superficially different indications we’ve all heard of. But I don’t know much about physiology or vasculature, and I don’t put too much stock in that exact description. Could also be something about nerves I guess?