Back Pain - What came out scared me

For three years, I couldn’t make it through a grocery run without gripping the cart like a life raft.

The pain started as a dull ache in my lower back. The kind you chalk up to sleeping wrong or lifting something awkward.

I saw five doctors. Got two MRIs. Heard words like “degenerative disc” and “lumbar irregularity” spoken with such clinical confidence that I stopped questioning them. I became someone who said I have a bad back the way other people say I have brown eyes. It was just who I was now.

I stopped hiking. Stopped sitting through movies. Stopped saying yes to weekend trips because I couldn’t predict what kind of pain day I’d wake up to.

A coworker mentioned Dr. John Sarno and the idea that back pain is basically repressed emotions, almost as an afterthought. She laughed a little when she said it. I laughed too. I went home and ordered the book mostly to prove it was nonsense.

I read it in two sittings. The first time through, I was defensive. I have a real diagnosis, I thought. I have imaging. The idea that my brain was generating pain to distract me from emotions felt like someone telling me I was making it up.

But something caught. A sentence I kept returning to: The pain is real, but the cause is not what you think.

I started keeping a journal. Not about pain levels or stretches or what I ate. About what I was feeling. And what came out scared me.

To see how much anger I’d been carrying without naming it. Anger at a job I’d outgrown. Anger at feeling invisible in my own marriage. Old grief I’d packed away so efficiently I’d forgotten it was there.

There was a Tuesday night - ordinary, unremarkable - when I was washing dishes and I just started crying. Not about my back. About my mother, who had died four years earlier and whose loss I had handled by staying very, very busy. I stood there at the sink and let myself feel it. All of it.

The next morning I woke up and swung my legs over the side of the bed without thinking.

I didn’t notice until I was already standing.

I won’t pretend it was linear after that. There were setbacks. Days when the pain flared and the old fear rushed back in.

I learned to talk back to those moments out loud, which earned me some strange looks from my husband until I explained what I was doing. He became my unlikely ally, reminding me when I started catastrophizing.

The doubt never fully disappeared. But slowly, the pain did.

It’s been fourteen months. I went hiking last September - six miles, a trail I’d scribbled off my list years ago. My legs were tired in that good, honest way. My back was fine.

What Dr. Sarno gave me wasn’t a technique or a treatment. It was permission to look inward instead of being afraid of what was inside me.

The body keeps score, yes, but it can also be set free.

Marie

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