How I Healed My Chronic Shoulder and Back Pain

For the last 18 months, I’ve been suffering from what I thought was a shoulder/neck/back injury.

It turns out, it was something entirely different.

In early 2020, I injured my shoulder doing my 100 push ups challenge.  Essentially, I just pushed myself too hard in one of my training sessions and spent a week in a lot of pain. I took time off my work to heal and thought it would be over after a couple of weeks of healing.

However, nearly every day since then, I’ve had pain in my shoulder. After about 6 months, it started spreading to my neck and back too.

I stopped doing anything that could aggravate it. Dancing, swimming, rock climbing, lifting things, using my laptop (switched to a desktop), sleeping on my side, even chopping up hard food with a knife.

I saw four different physiotherapists and two doctors. Everyone said it was my posture and work-from-home working conditions.

So I bought a fancy electric sitting/standing desk, and a specially-formulated chair. I had a physiotherapist come to my house to measure my body and create the perfect ergonomic working conditions.

One slightly uncomfortable movement could have me lying on my back in pain for hours, and there were certain activities (sitting, sleeping, and working on my computer) that tended to induce pain.

Fast forward to May 2021. I got an Xray (about 15 different photos) and a shoulder ultrasound, to check if there was anything going on.

Not only did the results come back normal – the physiotherapist told me they were some of the best scans she’d ever seen.

And yet I was in chronic pain that had me lying on the floor in between all of my coaching calls.

Then someone mentioned the words “Dr. Sarno and the mind-body connection.”

I listened to the audiobook version of his book Healing Back Pain, and watched his documentary, All The Rage.

Within days, without doing anything other than consuming knowledge, my pain was reduced to about 20% of what it was before.

Just from learning.

And now I have barely any shoulder, neck or back pain at all.

The book and documentary explain the theory that the mind instructs the brain to create real physical pain in order to distract the person from facing the emotional pain they are truly facing.

At first, I thought “but I’m not in any emotional pain.” Well, yes, that’s the point. Because my brain had been using physical pain to cover up my emotional pain.

It turns out, that at the beginning of 2020 when I injured myself doing push ups, the actual injury healed quickly. What remained, was a conditioned pathway of pain, a convenient place for my brain to target as a distraction from my emotional pain.

When I started doing physiotherapy and my shoulder started feeling better, my back and neck started to cause me incredible pain, for seemingly no reason.

Because the pain wasn’t related to something physical. It was my brain finding places to create pain, in order to avoid dealing with the true emotional pain I was feeling.

“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

Just to be clear, the pain I was experiencing was totally real. It wasn’t “in my head”. The only thing that is different about TMS is that the pain wasn’t being triggered by something physical like an injury, it was being triggered by my mental/emotional experience.

“Chronic physical pain can sometimes be the result of emotional tension. We can feel measurable, quantifiable pain throughout our bodies, he writes, in response not to injury but to emotional distress. And our minds create this pain (often by depriving certain body parts of oxygen) in order to distract ourselves from these “unacceptable” emotions, such as anxiety, anger, and fear. When unaddressed or repressed, he says, these emotions can essentially be churned subconsciously through the body to emerge elsewhere as physical pain. Unaddressed rage, for instance, can become back pain (or neck pain, or pain anywhere). “Unconsciously,” he writes, “we would rather have a physical pain than acknowledge any kind of emotional turmoil.”

One of the clearest examples I have is my friend Emily’s birthday. We all met at a nature reserve, walked around, sat in the cafe, and I had no pain at all the entire day. The moment I got home and turned on my computer, I remembered I had a task to do that was going to be incredibly emotionally uncomfortable to deal with.

BAM. Instant tension headache and back pain.

I had to spend the next hour in bed with a hot water bottle and painkillers. It came on so suddenly, and because I had just read Dr. Sarno’s book, it was abundantly clear what had happened: my brain created physical pain to avoid dealing with the emotional pain.

And it worked.

So you might be wondering, were the unconscious emotions I was repressing?

Anxiety, stress, and grief.

While I won’t go into too much detail, currently (and for the past few years) I have a loved one who is very unwell and is getting progressively sicker. I have also been working non-stop without a vacation or holiday for almost two years (I LOVE my work as a coach and that’s why it never even really realized I wasn’t taking breaks. Plus, as we all know, the pandemic kind of put a stop to vacations). I also had a terrifying experience with an earthquake a few years ago, that gets reignited every time I feel another small quake.

My mind has been holding onto a LOT of emotion, and clearly didn’t feel it was safe for me to process it.

So instead, it induced chronic pain.

That’s TMS.

The beautiful thing about TMS, is that once you diagnose it, it’s a quick path to recovery.

I AM SO GRATEFUL!