Kevin Barry

I come from a family background that is strewn with alcoholism. My father was a heavy drinker who was not alcoholic but he worked all of the time and his presence was lacking. He was a great guy and it would have been great to have had him around more. But we were not well off and he was just doing what he needed to do to keep the family going. My mother was a functioning alcoholic who forcefully kept her alcoholism in check never getting out of control. On the surface she was a great mother that made sure all of the our external needs were met. Emotionally however, she was shut down, rigid, and controlling. I do not remember her hugging me once.

When I was 8 years old I experienced an incident having to do with my mother’s alcoholism that was very traumatic and I repressed it for over 20 years. The repression was a very strange phenomena. One minute it was there in my consciousness as a kid and then poof! the next minute it was gone, only to pop back in my head many years later as if it never left. So I do know first hand the power of the unconscious. I talked with my mother about the incident right before she died and she remembered it also making it very clear that my repression was real. Looking back now I amazed at the power of the mind to completely wipe a memory from consciousness and the realization that it was there all of the time anyway.

It wasn’t long before I rebelled against my mother’s control. I began drinking at around 13 and by the time I was 15 was drinking alcoholically. I drank for 20 years and at 33 was forced to get sober or die. I got very lucky and met some very good people in AA who helped me in ways that I could never repay. When I got sober I went back to school and got my undergraduate degree along with two master degrees. I became a social worker and worked for 20 years in a number of different social work capacities. Ironically, I did my social work internship at NYU hospital in the early 90’s and was very familiar with the Rusk Institute not only through my internship but I lived on the corner of 34th Street and Third Avenue which is just a stone’s throw from Rusk.

After I got sober and went back to school I started having a number of different back problems. Nothing too major but it became a drip, drip, drip, of Chiropractors, NSAID’s, doctor visits, yoga, massage therapy, acupuncture etc., etc., with all different kinds of aches and pains here and there. Along with the physical feelings however, my discomfort also carried with the ominous feeling that I was defective. I internalized the idea that I had a weak back but there was no real cause at the time other than minor aches and pains. But also attached to this was the fact that I was recovering from alcoholism and had come to realize how debilitated I was emotionally.

From an internal perspective I envisioned myself as being an emotional cripple. This wasn’t far from the truth since after years of alcoholic drinking and repression I still had the emotional makeup of a teenager. And although I never made the connection I can now see that this was a parallel process that was being worked out between my mind and my body. Subjectively I felt severely damaged and at the same time there were things occurring with my back physically that were verifying that I was damaged. As you can imagine this generated a lot of fear anytime something happened with my back because it was not only about my back but my whole internal psychic structure.

Something good that came of all this though, is that it spurred me on to be very pro-active with trying to take care of myself physically. For the last 20 years I have gone to the gym regularly and have worked to take care of my body with the idea I needed to take care of my back. Also, working as a social worker and being a recovering alcoholic forced me to be in therapy myself. I was in individual therapy with a very well trained therapist for 9 years and I regularly attended AA meeting for many years. But without a conscious awareness of TMS this was to no avail, and I was destined to succumb to the power of the unseen. Unless you can see and accept something for what it really is, you can’t change what it really is. I could go to the gym all I wanted to try and keep my back healthy but it would be to no avail unless I was able to unearth the unseen psychic forces.

Probably not coincidentally when my mother was the same age as I am now, she started having crippling back problems. For the last 10 years of her life she was in constant pain and severely limited as to what she could do. I had always thought that something must have happened to her when she was a child because she was totally shut down emotionally. The alcoholic family she came from was probably even crazier than the strict, rigid, must-be-perfect, family that she tried to make and that I inherited. Looking back I can’t help but think that her back problems were the result of TMS also.

In 2010 I was under a lot of stress and my back went out on me for the first time. I did research on back exercises and was able to work my way through to becoming mobile again. But the incident really scared me and reinforced the thinking that my back was defective. It also seemed to create a chain reaction of different back ailments that manifested over the next 7 years with times of acute problems, some more debilitating than the others. During this time my fear of having a chronic back problem like my mother’s increased. I continued my work at the gym and began to include extensive stretching before working out using hard rollers and lacrosse balls for triggers points along with a steady diet of heating pads, ice packs and a different assortment of back braces and pain meds. Looking back now, I can see how the TMS was always working.

In 2013 I moved to Southeast Asia back problem and all. On a trip back to the states for a visit in 2015 I had an experience really made me wonder what was going on with me. I landed in New York with a terrible flare up of back problems that I attributed to the sitting and sleeping in plane seat for such a long time. For the first couple of weeks of my visit I just suffered using my usual treatment methods of over the counter meds, ice, heat, back braces and vigilance over my activities, all the while researching the internet for anything that would help. Sure enough I came as something called a sacroiliac belt. I diagnosed myself with my pelvis being out of alignment and immediately ordered a belt from Amazon. As soon as I started wearing it my pain miraculously disappeared for the rest of my visit to the US. Thinking I had solved my problem I was overjoyed until a few weeks later when I was back in Asia and the pelvic belt quit working and the problem returned full force. In hind sight this is classic TMS and is something that occurred a number of times that I can remember with symptoms cropping up when stressed only to disappear miraculously with some arbitrary intervention.

Beginning in 2016 I had another incident where my back went out on me and it began an episode of having a sharp pain in my right glute that radiated down my leg along my sciatica to right below my calf. For this I did an extensive acupuncture treatment with a trained practitioner from China here in Myanmar that help somewhat. It helped me get mobile but the problems with my glute and sciatica still remained a felt presence. Then in October of 2017 the sciatica and the pain in the glute just seemed to explode and it became hard for me to even walk 100 meters. I came across a Japanese pain clinic in Bangkok and paid them $600 for 10 sessions of massage, electric stem and manipulation. I only did two sessions before I needed to go to Myanmar to go back to work.

After a friend saw how bad I was she took me to a clinic in Yangon where I paid $250 a week for ultra sound, electric stim, and spinal traction without any relief. Then one night I was searching the internet for anything on back relief when I came across a survivor of TMS story. I was basically grabbing at straws not thinking that anything would come out of it. I was amazed when I identified with the women’s story so completely and knew instinctively that everything that she was saying about TMS and the unconscious was true.

I immediately got Dr. Sarno’s kindle books and read them with amazement and relief. For me TMS is very real. Along with a basic intellectual understanding of it I feel it on a deeper level of knowing. I know that all of my symptoms are not a result of physical problems but are manifestations of unconscious feelings of anger and fear. Today is my last day of the 6 week TMS program and I am not cured by any means. I know I will never be cured and I will always have to be vigilant about what is going on for me unconsciously. But what has happened in these 6 weeks is that I have gone from being totally immobile to being able to do anything with symptoms that am able to work through.

I am very grateful to Dr. Sarno for the commitment and care that he gave to his patients. It is obvious that he really cared about what was going on with them and did not just rubber stamp what he saw. He used his training and powers of observation along with his heart to come up with a truth that is not easily seen in its individual parts but can be recognized when looked at from a wholistic perspective that starts with the premise that we are first and foremost human beings. We are not automatons where symptoms or a pain can be followed back on a logic board of synapses to a rightful conclusion.

Today I have to take into account that there is an unseen world within and that in order to be whole I have to acknowledge it and give it its due. I have to be willing to look at my pain in the light of day and continue to deal with it in terms of TMS. There is probably always going to be unfinished business when it comes to the unconscious but at least today I am not unconscious and can deal with whatever it is. And now that I know the truth I am more than willing to do whatever I have to do to not have to suffer unconsciously. I am incredibly grateful to the amazing Dr. Sarno and to all of the people both new and old that add to the TMS Wiki with the their wonderful generous spirits. Thank you all for my life.