UCPPS - Prostatitis, Interstitial Cystitis Forum

Well apparently Freedman thinks that's possible as well...she actually suggested on my first visit that I read the Sarno books and suggested I could have gotten out of back surgery if I'd been able to get my head around it at the time.

I guess that's why she gets the big bucks. She knew it was something that might work for me.

Good for you Johnny. That's music to my ears.

Some of your posts that I just read made me remember of an Eckhart Tolle quote from the power of now:

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.

Here are some of the thoughts I have on Sarno. First of all, following Sarno's strict guidance did not work for me. Not one bit.

Sarno believes that repressed negative emotions are the cause of most chronic pain. Maybe, but he then says that by simply being aware of the mechanism and by reading and re-reading his book that will heal you (I am oversimplifying of course but it is the gist of it). It is what he calls the "knowledge penicillin". If it doesn't work, he advises to go consult with a psychotherapist.

In my opinion, You don't heal by just believing in a theory. By reading and re-reading his book, you just distract yourself and we all know that psychotherapy is hit or miss.

What got me better is not Sarno directly but what Monte Hueftle recommends. I independently discovered that feeling my emotions would make the pain leave for a few minutes but then what Monte wrote was a validation of what I suspected.

Monte struggled with Sarno also and found that you really need to reconnect directly with your emotions. It is something Sarno deems unnecessary.

Sarno offers a very simple Freudian model. He is 92 and did most of his work in the 1970s. Neurology did not offer a lot then. He re-discovered a forgotten Freud disciple, Dr. Franz Alexander (1891-1964) that formulated theories on the repression of anger. Sarno didn't bother attempting to explain his approach with neuroscience, but used instead the psychological language of the time. If he were to begin his career now, he would probably offer a more contemporary neuroscience based explanation.

Many others have developed identical theories but did not write popular and accessible books. Regardless his book "Healing back pain" is dated and some of the theories are in retrospect naive and questionable but it is still a good introduction to mindbody medicine. I am grateful for Sarno having popularized the mindbody approach.

It's very interesting what you're saying about Sarno. I'm going to respond further to this post regarding that once I've done more than just browse all of it as it's 2:45 in the morning. What I really did was just to run with the feeling of what you were saying and trust my instincts.

I have to personally thank you for posting all of this. It has absolutely changed everything for the better, and very quickly.

What's funny here...and I really do think this is kind of funny...is that when I worked in a bookstore years ago I thought Eckhard Toelle was a total huckster.

Reading what you've posted from here, I still think his writing sounds kind of ridiculous. I find this funny. Maybe I'll try to warm up to him. I guess right now I don't connect with it. It sounds like astrology...like you could take whatever he says and sort of apply it to any situation. Don't take offense. Tomato, tomahto. It doesn't really matter.

What does connect with me is what happens to your brain and body when you begin feeling your emotions, and for your posts regarding THOSE ideas, I have to again thank you.

I also have to say that it absolutely amazes me that I experienced the big and profound pelvic floor drops and was doing your steps 1-5 on my own. I really only just glanced over this thread as I was about to walk out the door, and just basically had "Sarno", "feel your emotions" and "live in the moment" in my head and I made a decision at that moment to go for it. When I came back to the thread and gave it another look (though I still have only really fast scanned all of it) I was pretty shocked to read that you'd experienced almost the exact same thing.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this once I give it a more thorough look and check out Monte Hueftle.

I hope all this information can help other sufferers. It certainly was a breakthrough for me.

Same here. I was seeing Tolle as an Oprah celebrity which was enough for me to dismiss. Zen for the masses.

But then I started connecting to what he writes via my own experience. I discovered that Tolle was very much influenced by Alan Watts.

Tolle is a master at summarizing difficult concepts in short and dense paragraphs.

Hi Ezer,

So when doing the exercise, you say "feel the emotion", does that mean I am supposed to relive the experience that makes me feel the emotion over in my brain? Without doing so, or after I try to do so, the emotion quickly fades and I am left thinking about nothing like when meditating.

On another level, I don't understand how this works as obviously anyone who has had a particularly traumatic experience that may cause emotional baggage has probably thought about the situation that caused it in their mind possibly hundreds of times (and felt the corresponding emotions). I don't see how this is any different.

At the same time I'm sure this "emotional element" is probably a lingering cause of my chronic myofascial pain/muscle tightness, years ago I got gluten and milk largely out of my diet and that helped massively, but all the other things like stretching, TRP release, meditation have not worked well enough to free me of this. I just have tight muscles and pain.

I read this post yesterday and went searching for info and there seems to be a lot of different therapies that kind of go in the same direction like "EFT tapping", tapas acupressure, etc. With those I think you are supposed to think about the situation and say a little saying like "Even though _______ happened, I still love and accept myself" or something to that effect. Even with all I have read I have still not been able to find the answer to my question at the start of the post.

Anyway thanks for posting.

Hi N2deep,
What you mention in your post is thinking about your emotions. You need to feel your emotions.

When the trauma happened, did you feel your stomach being queezy? Feel it. Feel the physical sensation. Did you blush? Feel the blood rushing. Did you freeze? Feel the stiffness.

Have you done paradoxical relaxation N2deep? It is similar but instead of feeling a part of your body (without thinking), you feel the effect of an emotion. It is not a pleasant feeling and you will resist it at first.

But the key is that you shouldn't think. That will simply make you upset or depressed. Just try to feel the emotion as an experience. You can try my exercise above with imagining yourself next to a cliff and feeling your fear of heights.

EFT, fasterEFT, NLP, and all those modalities seem very gimmicky to me. I think they are yet another distraction.

Isn't imagining yourself next to the cliff still "thinking" about the emotion, and the same thing as re-experiencing a past traumatic experience to feel the emotion you had at the time? I mean it's pretty hard to feel a fear of heights if you don't imagine the scenario presenting the feeling.

Is that what I'm supposed to do?

Or are you saying to just pick a bad emotion, like hopeless, frustrated, embarrassed etc. and try to feel that emotion based on no corresponding experience?

I find it hard to feel anything either way to be honest, no matter how horrible the past experience was.

I just replay the scenes in my mind where I felt humiliated or hurt or something else and imagine I'm there again. Sometimes if it's something someone said I replay it a few times, and then you get a little rush of the emotion. I might only feel it for 10-20 seconds, then I proceed on to some other event, or just cycle though different events.

I'm still getting remarkable results doing this. A few days ago I felt 80% better...now I'm closer to 90%. Sitting for most of the day, no valium, just pretty much back to normal.

You pick events from your life where you felt embarrassed, humiliated or whatever. I wouldn't think you'd try to just pick emotions without corresponding events.

I'm neither an expert in any of this nor someone who's particularly prone to believing this type of approach either. I'm generally anti anything that smells new-agey, but there's just no questioning the results for me.

As webslave mentioned perhaps this works for people who have had a lot of traumatic experiences.

As far as having to believe this is your answer 100%, as Sarno suggests, well, that seems to be the hard part about it. I suppose one could always just believe it and try it in earnest. For me, I don't know exactly why I went all in for this, it just felt like the way to go.

I'm certainly curious to see if anyone else experiences any similar results using this information.

Good post Johnny. That is exactly what I did.

When I say thoughts, I am referring to that incessant brain chatter in your head that constantly analyzes, talks to yourself, makes you upset, worries you etc. You can visualize yourself in a certain situation without that brain chatter. You can even understand somebody speaking to you without you actively thinking. Try it.

Simply picture yourself in the situation. It is just like looking at a picture. Look at your surroundings. You are next to a cliff. You see the white rocks down. You see the blue sky above. You feel the wind in your hair. There is no need to analyze, comment, decide. Just experience it. Feel the wind in your face. Feel the vertigo. Feel the emotion.

You have done meditation so you should be familiar with emptying your mind of all that verbal chatter.

When you drive to work. You don't think where to turn the wheels. You don't read the street names. You just drive. It is an automatism. It comes from your implicit memory. But when you drive you probably think about how detestable your boss is or how horrible your day will be. You don't think about driving.

Try to stop thinking about your boss and you will see that you can still drive to work without using any thoughts. We are addicted to thinking and we don't even realize it.

What is the name of Monte Hueftle's book(s) on this subject? I'd like to do some reading about what you say here.

I too have a hard time finding this hidden rage that supposedly dwells somewhere in my inner child as Sarno says. I'm not saying he's not correct, or that it isn't the case about suppressed rage, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to find it, and "feel" it. I just started part 3 of his book, so maybe I haven't gotten to that part yet.

I do sort of notice my subconscious paying less attention to little pain flares since I started reading about this. It's like I am able to distract myself better, and not worry that the pain is so much like lights and sirens that something is seriously wrong. It's more like the lights and sirens are wired wrong, malfunctioning, and the electrician is in the process of rewiring the whole deal, but it takes him time because he's only getting paid minimum wage.

Any other reading that "works" in getting this pain to resolve, I'm all for it. I hope to hear back from you guys. Thanks much!

...by the way. I DO believe that the repressed emotions are somehow a large part, if not the whole part of what has caused, and keeps my CPPS going.

I went through a lot of rough emotional patches last fall and into the winter - watching my father almost die several times while in the hospital. Wow, I'm getting little pain twinges just remembering it. And that was just one of several things I was dealing with through that time. So I find it easy to believe that Sarno is on the right track, in a lot of ways.

With that said, I do believe that once this gets going, the CNS, muscles and nerves not only become programmed one way, but also suffer some injury like wrapping tape or fishing string around your finger for too long a time, and then taking if off. Just because the string/tape is off, doesn't mean your finger is going to instantly feel better. In fact, it's probably going to hurt worse for quite a while during the healing period.

Of course, I say this today as I have a more clear head and less deep pain. Ask me later if I have a pain flare up. Hard as I try, I forget a lot of this stuff when I have a pain/panic flare up.

Hi Major,
Monte Hueftle has a book and you can search for it on Amazon. I never read it. I heard it is not very good, dated (2003), and very repetitive.
Everything I needed to know, I got online for free. Monte's newsletters are very good. Obviously his own understanding has evolved.

So let me make clear. I do not pretend that I know the ultimate healing key. It just worked for me.

I liked the book from Dr. Robert Scaer, "8 keys to brain-body balance" but I disconnected when he writes about EFT and other modalities. Some people like "waking the tiger" from Dr. Peter Levine. I did not connect with it to be honest.

I eventually found out that searching for the perfect book or video is your brain trying to prevent you from attending to your emotions. It is where I fundamentally disagree with Sarno. Reading books about mindbody healing is distracting you and does not work as "knowledge penicillin". This is something I learned from Monte Hueftle and I couldn't agree more with him.

Once you know what to do, then just do it. Put those books and DVDs on a shelf and stop searching the Internet for answers. Stop analyzing your pain and trying to understand daily variations.

You want to attend to present and past negative emotions. To give you some ideas: the ex-girlfriend breaking up with you (low self esteem, rejection etc.) to you breaking up with your girlfriend (guilt). Your parents catching you doing something forbidden (guilt, mortified). The teacher humiliating you (self-esteem). Obviously childhood emotions are quite damaging because they are not processed by reasoning.

The other common mistake is to believe that there is a central trauma that explains everything. It is not likely. It is an accumulation of negative emotions past and present, not some horrible and pivotal incident.

Feeling your emotions is simply a way to reprocess them in a healthy way.

Here's Hueftle talking about TMS = tension myositis syndrome



More videos from Monte
http://www.runningpain.com/tms_videos

ezer, thanks for posting this. I definitely believe emotions are connected to my symptoms. I distance myself from emotions in general. Somehow it makes me uncomfortable to show my emotions, positive or negative.

People would say I am very calm because I appear somewhat cool, calm and collected, but inside I know that's not the case. I don't really have a way to express sadness or joy if I can put it that way. I am more 'in my head'. When my symptoms started 18 or 19 years ago, I was especially feeling a sense of rejection, sadness, isolation, and inadequacy, which I never really expressed.

I understand the process you referred to of feeling emotions. But I am wondering if you actually put aside time each day to lie down and relive moments in your past in order to feel the accompanying emotions (if so, for how long?), or is it more like from this day forward you are supposed to pay attention to your emotions? Or maybe both?

Thanks for any comments.

Thanks Mark. Interesting. I did not see that video. Monte obviously is catering to Sarno failures (like me) that were failed by the "knowledge penicillin" or cognitive only method.

Everybody has a slightly different experience. Sarno allegedly healed from severe headaches by just being aware of the process. Dr. Schechter in LA cured severe knee pain the same way. Monte needed to attend directly to his present emotions (not so much the past ones). I personally needed to address past trauma.

Cmt23 I am so much like you. Completely unable to show my emotions. I appear like John Lennon but inside it is a perpetual turmoil.

Therefore, I spent 2-3 minutes daily to reprocess so to speak my past emotions (it seems like a ridiculously short time but it is intense and unpleasant). I also tried to be aware of any emotion arising in the now. Trying not to avoid my current emotions

I also as mentioned before tried to not go down into negative thinking. Stopping that constant negative and useless chatter in your head. There is no need to do all of this perfectly but for some reason, your mind will do its best to distract you and it is hard to get going at first.