Day 1: Chronic neck pain

My pain history has been a long one, so I'll try to make it short. About eight years ago, I began to get severe pain in my lower back. I couldn't even sit for a car ride without severe pain. I remember trying to pull myself up by that handle above the window to decompress my spine, and I remember a few instances where I cried in a parking lot because of the pain. I began to go to physical therapy where I first learned about the importance of building muscle and movement in the body. I had just begun a job where I would be required to sit and work on a computer for 40 hours a week, so I assumed my ergonomic setup and lack of use of my muscles was the cause of the pain.

After physical therapy, my lower back pain went away! And then my neck started hurting right after. I went back to physical therapy, feeling kind of silly. It sounded weird that the pain would move to my neck. I was told that since I "fixed" the structure of my lower back, it must have put something off in alignment in my upper back. So I did physical therapy again for my upper back/neck, but this time the pain never went away.

I've dealt with it daily for eight years. I still go to work. I still get out of bed and force myself to function, but I haven't had a single day where I've been completely pain free. It's miserable and exhausting. I try to live my life the way that I want, which involves me sitting and watching TV, going to the movies, or playing a board game while gritting my teeth through the pain. I'm exhausted by the end of the day and almost each night I have to soothe it away with a bath and heating pad.

I've spent money going to doctors, physical therapists, massage sessions, yoga, the gym, TENS machines, KT tape, posture braces, myofascial balls, foam rollers, neck decompressors, and more I'm probably forgetting. I've learned about inflammation diets that could heal pain when I more recently started getting stomach issues; the doctor couldn't find anything wrong other than acid building up in my stomach, so I was prescribed medication.

I learned about chronic pain about halfway into my pain journey, which put me in a weird place. I had been blaming my body (bad genes, bad posture) and my desk job (bad posture, bad ergonomics) but now if it was all in my head...was the problem me? and my environmental stress? I started going to therapy, and I'm still going to therapy. I'm two years into it and it's helped me learn that I do have a lot of repressed emotions that I still struggle with expressing. When I checked Sarno out, I really was just looking for some confirmation that I was on the right path of changing my life through therapy, even if it wasn't comfortable, because it might heal my back pain. Instead, I found a new way of thinking, a simpler way of thinking, that could heal my pain.

I feel hopeful. I feel that this could work. It clicks with me, and I do seem to have the personality type mentioned often in his audiobook. But I'm incredibly aware of how many times I've been in this seat of hpoe, feeling confident that I finally figured it all out and a pain-free life is just around the corner. A part of me is still very cautious, but the desperation is winning out and I'll give it my all in this program.