Which works better? Sarno’s method or neural pathways approaches?

I’ve been working out in my head whether the Sarno method is compatible or opposed to the neuroplasticity approach. (And I guess, there’s a third method—eliminating perceived danger/adrenalin.)

John Sarno says the thousands of patients healed by his method are proof enough that it works. I can’t see how anyone could deny that.

Neuroplasticity methods (ie, Alan Gordon, David Hanscom) are gaining traction, and have some scientific data to back them up, as well as success stories.

Dan Buglio (perceived danger approach) and Claire Weekes (renowned anxiety expert), have certainly helped thousands.

Personally, I have really been slammed with one heck of a TMS episode over the last three years. Haven’t been able to crack the code yet— but I consider it just a matter of time. I guess I was a little soured on Dr. Sarno because I spent six months at the beginning of this episode working his program hard, every day, with no success. (Several years prior, I had had a book healing.) Since I wasn’t getting anywhere, I took Sarno’s advice and I pursued psychotherapy for 3 years. It was hard-core and nearly killed me. Symptoms more than doubled during that time and my anxiety went through the roof until I finally dropped doing the therapy.

Now, I’m circling back to Sarno after a year of being here on the forum— and I’m seeing that things take time —probably more time than you think. And there’s just a whole lot more to learn— most of which you can only really learn from others who have healed. That’s why this form is so incredibly valuable.

Where do I stand now? I think I’m back with Dr. Sarno more than anything. However, I think the other approaches definitely soothe your nervous system and that’s important too.

Sarno himself agrees with soothing because he says this in his book, The MindBody Prescription:

It is not simply the quantity of rage that brings on symptoms, but the presence or absence of counterbalancing soothing factors.

Is it possible there are pain channels wired together in our brains (like the neuroplasticity camp says) AND our subconscious brain is depriving our body of oxygen to distract us from rage, as Dr. Sarno says?

Sarno and all other camps seem to emphasize looking at our lives and finding where we are hard on ourselves. Our traits cause TMS, they all say. But the Sarno method also emphasizes looking for what is causing inner rage. The conflicts in your subconscious mind. This requires a lot of work to find. I think some people do shy away from it, and maybe like me, leave this approach before they’ve given it time to work.

Most recently I had a little success by journaling deeper than usual, looking harder than usual for things that are hurting me, things that are hiding in plain sight. And also, by yelling at my brain and doing activities through the pain.

I happen to have ongoing situations that I cannot change that are very difficult. Sarno and all other parties agree that you don’t have to be able to leave these scenarios, but it will be more difficult to heal. But I have been able to limit and/or eliminate other difficult people in my life.

My current plan is to finish Dr. Hanscom’s app (the DOC app). I’m 2/3 of the way through that three month program— with no real changes evident yet. But, he says it will take time to build new pain-free channels in your brain around the old pain channels. His method also requires journaling every day, which I have faithfully been doing, although he says to write about anything you want, not necessarily what you are angry about.

I’m going to turn up the Sarno heat by reading from his books every day, journaling more aggressively about anger (with soothing afterward), yelling at my brain, and forcing myself to do things that I don’t want to do because of the pain (or because I’m anxious and afraid.) I’m going to stand up to my TMS, basically.

What approaches have you tried? Do you think these various methods are compatible or incompatible with each other? What are your thoughts on them, in general? What do you think of my plan?

— Sorry this is so long!

 

I'm here!

I think the biggest appeal of Sarno and oxygen deprivation for me is thinking I'm benefiting myself by continuing to exercise. I always worry so much that I'm making the wrong choice there because there's that tiny doubt that I'm doing damage.

I have tried somatic tracking and man, I stink at it. I'm sure it takes practice but I find myself constantly trying to"fix" the sensation, getting frustrated when it doesn't move or change. So perhaps my own brain gets in the way. I have a BA in psychology so neuroplasticity makes sense and yet I still have doubts. I read Hanscom as well but haven't dug deeper into DOC.

I have read Buglio too and follow his FB but I'm not great about watching him daily. I struggle with believing the perceived danger approach, although I guess it is similar to repressed emotions and how the brain responds.

Right now I'm reading Sarno and following Sachs' JournalSpeak method but I get frustrated because I feel like I'm facing my demons but not making any progress. I'm still a relative newbie though, at it about a month. I'd like to get a bit into Schechter and Schubiner too. I keep hoping just continuing my exercise will move me in the right direction by convincing my brain I'm not damaged, but it doesn't seem to be working thus far.

So glad you made this post and thank you for directing me to it!

 

I think TMS goes away when you finally get it all figured out about the demons lol! I definitely think you’re doing the right thing with the exercising. I don’t know where I heard it maybe in a Sarno book that physically showing your TMS that your body’s OK is the absolute strongest way to get it to stop. Have you ever read Steve Ozanich ‘s book? It’s called The Great Pain Deception. His story is crazy and amazing —and he used the method of just keep going through the physical pain no matter what until it goes away.

 

His is one of my favorite books so far and why I keep moving!

 

I personally do not see a contradiction in the different approaches. for me they are complementary. simply spoken, they all assume that our (unconscious) mind is causing the symptoms and we need to break that cycle of negative emotions in order to heal. My personal theory is that what helps each individual depends on how deep the "emotional damage" is for each individual and also on his/her personality type. Therefore it is enough for some to read a book and convince ourself that we are not in danger and safe while others need to work harder & longer on the underlying emotional distress. The different approaches offer different tools and we need to find out ourselves which ones best fit to us depending on our individual situation.

by the way, I am not sure whether the exact mechanism through which the symptoms occur is always oxygen deprivation, at least not for all symptoms. there is such variety of symptoms that are not physical pain (GI issues, tinnitus, neurological pain etc.) that it can well be that there are different mechanisms in place for different symptoms.

But I also think the exact mechanism does not matter so much, as the solution is always the same: to eliminate the cause why the mind is doing this (no matter how exactly it is doing it) and break the cycle.

 

Jan, as always, thanks for sharing your vast knowledge here! Of course, I could easily be distracted. I’ll be on the lookout for that. But the reason I asked is basically because Dr. Hanscom advises to keep anger out of your mind completely. Exercise forgiveness daily, even minute by minute, because anger produces adrenaline. One whole module of his app is on forgiveness (I just finished it.) I like the whole idea a lot. But then I started wondering how I could apply Sarno’s awareness of anger at all times to tell my brain I know what’s going on. The two methods feel opposed to me.

Also, on the neural pathways, you are basically developing new pathways in your brain to go around the thick heavily used pain pathways. This takes time. But Sarno’s method has shown the brain can literally turn off the oxygen deprivation instantly, if it wants. This makes me think that his healing technique is not necessarily based on neural pathways.

The ultimate reason I asked, is I want to understand what to do to get better. I don’t want to do a lot of work to build new neural pathways and then tear them down with focusing on anger. But honestly, Sarno’s method has helped me the most so far.

I guess it’s as @berlinale says…who cares? So long as you get better.

 

Hi Diana. Personally, i do not like the advise from Dr. Hanscom to keep anger out of your mind completely too much. What I do not like about it is the absolutism of it. I think it is nearly impossible to eliminate all anger from our life . We can work to minimize the anger and develop a mindset of calmness and forgiveness, but eliminating anger completely seems to me unrealistic in most cases as life is unfolding. Setting too high goals of eliminating anger completely can cause unnecessary fear, frustration and self-blaming when we do not achieve the goal. And by the way in the cases where anger still comes up, Sarno's awareness of anger comes into play.

 

I’ve read much of Dr. Hanscom’s work, and found he only offered the idea of eliminating anger for a certain set of people who lived in their anger. Those who are using it as an excuse in life: the bitter folks, those who wallow in resentments and blame others constantly for everything gone wrong in their lives. He encountered these folks regularly in his practice and felt he had fallen into this trap.
In the movie Love Heals, he encouraged his client, Dana to balance her need for and to show love and acceptance with a journey to finding the source of her own inner of rage (which she was not in touch with at all). I found he is willing to meet people where they are.
One thing with books, is that they are only defining what the author writes to the point of publishing. Sarno himself learned a lot from the colleagues he originally trained, and changed many of his views (but not his premise), post publication.. it’s just that those ideas were not published.

 

This is my problem with the neural pathways explanation: Neural pathways are part of the brain which is part of the body. It's an effect, not the cause. TMS is not a disorder of the brain/body, it is a disorder of the mind (thinking and emotions). It's psychological, not physiological. It's a physiological manifestation of the psychological.

I understand why there has been a movement toward emphasizing the physiological. It can be measured and studied in research, whereas the mind, the psychological, cannot. This means more acceptance among the medical profession, who hate discussions of psychological phenomena because it can't be measured in a lab. But I maintain that we must change our mind to change our body.

 

The anger has to go somewhere, even a temporary release like a small vocanaol explosion. Ideally it could be released without hurting others hurting the relationships (that is the one of the biggest concern for the goodists I guess). The recognition itself may not feel adequate, it needs to be expressed in some way to get rid of the symptoms. But how to express that anger without a lot of aftermess is a big question.

 

Diana-M, What a good post! I too have mulled over and tried the 3 approaches and here is what I have found. I have known about TMS and Dr. Sarno since 1999 when I saw the John Stossel story on 20/20. Based on that, we bought Healing Back Pain and within a few weeks my husband recovered from severe (and I mean severe!) sciatica. When things cropped up for me, like shoulders, elbows, etc, I was successful with Mindbody Prescription, which became our go to book. However, I too developed really strong symptoms like you and many others, 3 years ago. I have bounced back and forth between the 3 methods. I get the best results by sticking to Sarno. In hindsight, I think we underestimate the profound and long lasting stress that the pandemic had. Most of us had not experienced anything like that. Big stress, big symptoms!

The Claire Weeks approach is helpful in promoting the idea that the nervous system heals, which I think we all are doing. Why 3 years ago and not before?
I have read about something called Delayed Stress. During a crisis you have no symptoms so you can get thru it. Once you are relatively safe, symptoms set in to slow you down so that your nervous system can reset/recharge. Makes sense.

I am not have much luck with somatic tracking but I know for some it works really well.
What I like about Sarno's method is that it uses action not observing and it is what I am used to. Also both my husband and I talk or yell at our subconscious to knock it off and we find that often works. Both Sarno and Dr. Brady advocate this approach. So that's my two cents worth. So glad we found Dr. Sarno. I think someday he will be awarded Nobel prize for medicine posthumously! He has done a great service to mankind!

 

Jan, thank you so much for this clarification! I’m going to bookmark this! This, along with what @Cactusflower said really helps the big picture snap into place for me.

 

Eileen,
I’m so thankful for your post! It makes me feel like I’m not going crazy lol. I agree I think it’s truly possible that we got slammed even more after the pandemic than during. And I love your positive thought that we are in fact healing right now. It’s just going to take some time for our nervous systems to recover. I think for a lot of people the pandemic created a perfect storm. There was of course, the worldwide problem we all faced of not knowing what was going on with the pandemic, And then, if you had any personal problems going on or life passages at the time, it only contributed to the rage load.

Just like you, I keep bouncing around between the three methods and sometimes I’m afraid that I’m screwing myself up by doing that, but I can’t help it. It’s like I’m experimenting and I want to see what works the best. Probably all of it adds up.

I wonder why our brains respond to being yelled at —why it makes them stop the symptoms? Pretty interesting!

 

Posted this in one of my personal threads but brought it here as well because I've been deep diving Sarno.

Badly dwelling on the syrinx today. I have never seen a single positive outcome in all the research I have done. I'm struggling thinking it's TMS today knowing this cyst is in my spine no matter what the neurosurgeon said about being safe to run and lift if I'm hurting.

Bad day.

ETA I just got done reading The Mindbody Prescription. I'm feeling even more doubt because Sarno says you have to tell yourself you have a healthy back and think psychologically. I can never fully do that because while I have the normal abnormalities, I also have a true abnormality.

 

@Rusty Red
It might help you to contact a TMS doctor like David Hanscom. There is a price, he's not cheap but he was a spine surgeon and now in the world of TMS...this may really help you.

 

I found a thread by Dr. Hanscom. Maybe it can help some. It mentions a patient with a large synovial cyst. She ended up getting off medication, started lifting again, and is pain free.

https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/optimizing-avoiding-spine-surgery.8516/ (Dr. Hanscom's Blog - Optimizing (Avoiding) Spine Surgery)