Sciatica Pain - Slowly, something shifted

For years, I lived like I was made of glass.

I stopped picking up my daughter. Stopped playing weekend basketball. Stopped sleeping on my right side because mornings brought that deep, piercing ache that made me want to crawl out of my own body.

My lower back wasn’t just hurting, it was screaming, a hot wire of pain that shot down my left leg whenever I bent forward, stood too long, or dared to think I could live like a normal thirty-eight-year-old.

I tried everything. Spent thousands on specialists who poked, adjusted, needled, and manipulated my back. I bought a standing desk, an ergonomic chair, a new mattress. I stretched religiously. I iced, I heated, I foam-rolled until my muscles were tender. My wife started looking at me with that mix of concern and exhaustion. Friends stopped inviting me to things. “He can’t,” they’d say. “His back.”

The worst part wasn’t even the pain. It was the fear. Every twinge felt like a warning. Every good day felt temporary. I moved through the world braced for collapse.

It was my sister who found Dr. Sarno’s work after her own chronic pain journey. I was skeptical. Another cure, another promise. But I was also desperate.

The central idea hit me like a splash of cold water. My pain wasn’t purely structural, but my brain’s way of distracting me from uncomfortable emotions - rage, anxiety, fear - that I’d spent years suppressing.

The pain was real, but the cause wasn’t the bulging discs everyone kept showing me. It was tension. Psychological tension manifesting physically.

I wanted to dismiss it. It sounded too simple, too much like blaming myself. But then I started paying attention. The pain always spiked before stressful meetings. It flared when I argued with my wife. It vanished entirely during that weekend I spent laughing with old friends, only to return the moment I walked back into my regular life. The pattern was undeniable.

So I tried Dr. Sarno’s mind-body approach. I stopped physical therapy. I threw out my back brace. I started writing every morning, Angry, messy pages about work stress, about feeling inadequate as a father, about resenting my wife for things I’d never said aloud. It felt ridiculous. It felt terrifying. My inner voice screamed that I was making a mistake, that I’d hurt myself, that this was reckless.

Slowly, something shifted. One morning, I bent down to tie my shoe without thinking, and nothing happened. No pain. I froze, waiting for it, but it didn’t come. A week later, I carried a box of books upstairs. Then I played catch with my daughter. Each time, I braced for punishment that never arrived.

The fear was harder to overcome than the pain. Even after weeks without symptoms, I’d catch myself moving carefully, protectively. So I started deliberately doing the things I’d avoided. I went for a run. I lifted weights. I slept however I wanted. And I kept journaling, kept acknowledging the emotions I’d buried under layers of physical worry.

It’s been three years now. I’m not pain-free every single day. Sometimes my shoulder tightens up, or my jaw aches, but I recognize these signals for what they are. My body asking me to pay attention to what I’m feeling, not what I’m doing. I don’t fear my body anymore. I listen to it differently.

My specialist would probably say I got lucky, that the discs somehow healed. But I know better. What healed wasn’t my spine. It was the relationship between my mind and my body, the space where I’d been storing everything I couldn’t face.

I think about all those years I spent trying to fix my back, when what I really needed was to feel my feelings. It sounds absurdly simple.

People want scans, surgeries, certainty. I did too. But sometimes the path requires believing that we’re more powerful than we think, and that healing begins the moment we stop running from what we feel.

Robert

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