John E. Sarno > Quotes

“There's nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“It is perfectly acceptable to have a physical problem in our culture, but people tend to shy away from anything that has to do with the emotions.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“What one must then do is develop the habit of “thinking psychological” instead of physical. In other words, I suggest to patients that when they find themselves being aware of the pain, they must consciously and forcefully shift their attention to something psychological, like something they are worried about, a chronic family or financial problem, a recurrent source of irritation, anything in the psychological realm, for that sends a message to the brain that they’re no longer deceived by the pain. When that message reaches the depths of the mind, the subconscious, the pain ceases. That”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Acknowledging the important role of the emotions in health and illness, medicine must reexamine its concepts of disease causation.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Most of the structural changes in your spine are natural occurrences.” “The brain doesn’t want to face up to the repressed anger, so it is running away from it.” “By laughing at or ignoring the pain, you are teaching the brain to send new messages to the muscles.” “We’re going to help you take the Sword of Damocles into your hands instead of having it hang over your head.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“If you ask people to ease up on you because you’re emotionally overloaded, don’t look for a sympathetic response; but tell them you’ve got pain or some other physical symptom and they immediately become responsive and solicitous.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Franz Alexander quotes Einstein as having said that Aristotle’s ideas of motion retarded the development of mechanics for two thousand years (also in Psychosomatic Medicine). It would be a pity if Cartesian philosophy were to do the same thing to the study of the influence of the mind, particularly the emotions, on the body.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Patients often report pain in a new location as the old one gets better. It is as though the brain is unwilling to give up this convenient strategy for diverting attention away from the realm of the emotions.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“First, a sad paradox. Medical research has become more laboratory oriented in the last fifty years. To be sure, this shift has produced some impressive results. But at the same time, human biology is not exclusively mechanical, and there are limits to what the laboratory can accurately study. The laboratory study of infectious diseases has been magnificent—it is very straightforward. But its very success has deflected attention from the influence of emotions. As a result, medical research has failed abysmally in many areas.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“The decision maker in the brain has decided that the overt expression of unbridled rage would ruin the person’s life, and to prevent that from happening, it automatically initiates physical symptoms in the body without consulting the conscious, rational mind.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“For example, if surgery is employed to relieve back pain due to TMS, it will prove to be only a placebo “cure,” and similarly, if Prozac is used to treat depression, it will prove to be only a chemical “cure.” In both cases, the patient will soon develop new symptoms. The TMS and the depression are not disorders in themselves; they are symptoms of unconscious conflicts and must be treated with psychotherapy to avoid the inevitable return of new”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“• The pain is due to TMS, not to a structural abnormality. • The direct reason for the pain is mild oxygen deprivation. • TMS is a harmless condition, caused by my repressed emotions. • The principal emotion is my repressed anger. • TMS exists only to distract my attention from the emotions. • Since my back is basically normal, there is nothing to fear. • Therefore, physical activity is not dangerous. • And I must resume all normal physical activity. • I will not be concerned or intimidated by the pain. • I will shift my attention from the pain to emotional issues. • I intend to be in control—not my subconscious mind. • I must think psychological at all times, not physical.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Strange as it may seem, people with an unconscious psychological need for symptoms tend to develop a disorder that is well known, like back pain, hay fever, or eczema.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“As Snoopy, that great contemporary philosopher, once said, “There’s nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.” Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, is clearly a perceptive man.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Put another way, painful or otherwise distressing psychosomatic symptoms are designed for self-preservation, not self-flagellation.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MINDS There is a section in Studies on Hysteria entitled “Unconscious Ideas and Ideas Inadmissible to Consciousness—Splitting of the Mind,” written by Breuer. Today, we would substitute the word emotions for ideas, but that disagreement aside, the concept that we humans have two minds is very important to an understanding of TMS. It is clear that we are two different people—one of them conscious and the other unconscious.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“Neck, shoulder, and back pain syndromes are not mechanical problems to be cured by mechanical means. They have to do with people’s feelings, their personalities, and the vicissitudes of life.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“People often say that they have a very stressful job and that’s why they’re tense. But if they weren’t conscientious about doing a good job, if they weren’t trying to succeed, achieve, and excel, they wouldn’t generate tension. Often such people are highly competitive and determined to get ahead. Typically, they are more critical of themselves than others are of them.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“It’s all in your mind” is almost insulting, implying there’s something strange or weak about you or that the symptoms are in your imagination. This is most unfortunate, since the symptoms are very real, the result of a very physical process.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“to see that the danger and emotional pain remain contained. My experience with TMS has convinced me that the purpose of this repression is to protect the individual, to prevent the painful, dangerous feelings from coming to consciousness and causing even greater distress. The psychosomatic symptoms that accompany this repression, while sometimes extremely distressing, are not some form of punishment but are generated to distract the conscious mind and therefore to assist the process of repression.”
― John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders

“Many feelings and behaviors are no doubt left over from childhood. Children feel weak and vulnerable; they are dependent, and they feel that dependency strongly; they don’t think much of themselves; they have a constant need for approval; they are very prone to anxiety and quick to anger. They have no patience. To a degree, we all continue to generate some of those feelings unconsciously right on into adulthood. What varies from person”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Dr. H. K. Beecher is the name of one of the first serious students of pain in the United States. In 1946, he published an article in the Annals of Surgery titled “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle” (Vol. 123, p. 96). For years it was widely quoted because of its most interesting observation. But now Dr. Beecher is passing into obscurity, for what he had to say is no longer acceptable to students of pain. Dr. Beecher questioned 215 seriously wounded soldiers at various locations in the European theater during World War II shortly after they had been wounded and found that 75 percent of them had so little pain that they had no need for morphine. Reflecting that strong emotion can block pain, Dr. Beecher went on to speculate: “In this connection it is important to consider the position of the soldier: His wound suddenly releases him from an exceedingly dangerous environment, one filled with fatigue, discomfort, anxiety, fear and real danger of death, and gives him a ticket to the safety of the hospital. His troubles are over, or he thinks they are.” This observation is reinforced by a report of the United States surgeon general during World War II, noted in Martin Gilbert’s book The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), that in order to avoid psychiatric breakdown, infantrymen had to be relieved of duty every so often. The report said, “A wound or injury is regarded not as a misfortune, but a blessing.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“The work of Dr. Hans Selye is credited with first drawing attention to how stress affects the body; his research and writing were prolific and stand as one of the major accomplishments of medicine in the twentieth century.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay’s excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: “Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape” (italics added).”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. It is intended to focus one’s attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“Robert Ader, a research psychologist at the University of Rochester, was engaged in an experiment in which he was trying to condition rats to dislike saccharin-sweetened water. This was similar to the classic experiment of Pavlov in which he conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. In order to develop an aversion to the saccharin, Dr. Ader injected the rats with a chemical that made them nauseated so that they associated the sweet water with nausea. What he didn’t realize until later was that the chemical he injected, cyclophosphamide, also suppressed the rats’ immune systems, so that they were dying mysteriously. But the striking thing was that now all he had to do was feed the rats saccharin-sweetened water and their immune systems would be suppressed, even though they had not been injected with the chemical, because they had learned (been conditioned) to associate the sweet water with the nausea-producing chemical. Now, simply feeding saccharin could produce suppression of the immune system. This was a landmark discovery, for it demonstrated that a brain phenomenon, in this case aversion to a taste, could control the immune system.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“he decides that bringing up children is the woman’s job, his children are in trouble. Either”
― John E. Sarno, The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain

“these patients have little trouble recognizing that they are the kind of perfectionist, highly responsible people who generate a lot of subconscious anger and anxiety in response to the pressures of everyday life.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“We have postulated that in TMS the autonomic system selectively decreases blood flow in certain muscles, nerves, tendons, and ligaments in response to the presence of repressed emotions like anxiety and anger. This state is known as ischemia—that is, the tissue involved is getting less than its normal complement of blood. This means that there will be less oxygen available to those tissues than they are accustomed to, and the result will be symptoms—pain, numbness, tingling, and sometimes weakness. These things happen because of the critical importance of oxygen in all physiologic processes. When it is reduced below its normal levels, one can expect a reaction that will signal that fact.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

“In my experience, structural abnormalities of the spine rarely cause back pain. That ought not surprise us, for this epidemic of back pain is very new. Somehow the human race managed to get through the first million years or so of its evolution without a problem, but if the structural diagnoses are correct, something happened to the spine during the last evolutionary eyeblink, and it has begun to fall apart. This idea is untenable. One suspects that these spine abnormalities have always been there but were never blamed for pain, because there was no pain to blame them for. Fifty years ago, back pain was not very common, but, more importantly, nobody took it seriously. The epidemic of back pain is due to the enormous increase in the incidence of TMS during the past thirty years, and, ironically, the failure of medicine to recognize and diagnose it has been a major factor in that increase. Instead of TMS, the pain has been attributed primarily to a variety of structural defects of the spine.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection