Squash

I've had chronic muscle pain, mostly in my arms and legs, since 2005 when I was 25 years old. After ruling out a ton of other stuff, I was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia and started on an experimental treatment that I was very hopeful about. I've been on it for years, but it still hasn't seemed to do anything.

The pain got so bad that I quit my job in 2008. I went back to school and changed careers to something that would be more compatible with living in pain. Fortunately, I enjoy my new job more; I'm now a software engineer and I build iPhone apps.

I stumbled upon Dr. Sarno's books by accident on Amazon.com. After looking into it a bit, I got really excited and ordered "The Divided Mind" which I devoured over two days. I feel that for the first time in 9 years, I have a solution to heal all this pain.

I now know that a particularly stressful experience in 2005 caused the onset of my pain, and I've conditioned myself to keep the pain alive with my perfectionism.

I'm happy to report my success so far:

• Emotionally, I've been much better. I'm happier, more present, and my wife reports that I'm much nicer to have around.
• Right after I read the book, I had a particularly stressful experience and I got the worst headache I've had in years. It made me feel extremely nauseous and it hurt to even keep my eyes open, so I stopped working and laid down in bed. After a few minutes, I told myself, "this pain is being caused by my unconscious mind." I felt a wave of relief come over me, and the headache immediately vanished. I was able to get up and go about the day normally without a migraine. Every once in a while, I could feel the headache try to resurface, but it was never very strong and it kept going away again.
• A pain in my lower back that I've been experiencing for a few months is now gone most of the time.
• My muscle pain in my arms and legs has improved slightly. Even though that pain isn't a lot better yet, I've been weaning myself off of pain pills because I figure that I don't really need them anymore. I've gone down from three a day to just one without causing myself more difficulty or an increase in pain.

My family and I (I have a wife and 4 kids ages 1-11) are really excited to see what else happens!