4.5 Years of Chronic Pain Resolved in 2 Months

[jhc1013]

100%! Having said that, don't doubt how much of an impact a seemingly random comment can have. I've seen some comments you've made and thought wow if the person really understands that and takes it on board, it could be the difference. It's work in a sense and it can take time but at the same time I don't want you build it up as this monumental/impossible thing - once you're better you'll probably look back at what all the fuss was about!



But it's all TMS - good to recognise this thinking as an issue as that works to split problems - and if you do that then it sends an inference to the brain that well if one is different to the other, then there's a good chance one is structural and the other is TMS (even if you consciously know otherwise) - but it all is!

What I find interesting is that Alan Gordon, now Dan Buglio and others have completely departed from the Sarno idea of TMS and we can all be healed by simply. “getting rid of the fear”. No more talk of repressed emotions like rage, regret, shame or guilt. No more “five year-old in our head” who is screaming and kicking to get his/her way. According to this new era we really don’t need to deal with any of that. Just use “Somatic Tracking” and “look from a distance” at the pain and tell yourself that it’s not harmful and is not dangerous. Voila! Pain Gone. Well…I tried Somatic Tracking, and JournalSpeak - but I still adamantly believe that much of my pain IS caused by my subconscious mind trying to distract me from the rage, guilt, shame and, yes, fear…that is trying to overflow into my consciousness. That’s just my 2 cents. I HAVE been pain-free by doing the Sarno work - then I stopped because I thought I was healed. Silly me. I have to continually work at this. I have a little friend named Parkinson’s Disease on top of the TMS and I constantly have to sort out what is causing what. But Alan Gordon’s glib, humorous book, I Feel Your Pain did little for me. I’m sure he helps hundreds by simply getting them to understand that the pain is not caused by a physical deformity. Of course, for many, that is a huge gift. Just didn’t work for me. YMMV, of course

 

[Mani]

$4,000?? Seriously? Methinks Emily doest think too highly of herself. PhD?

lol you should check the carnage that came after this. Its all in the replies to this post

 

[BloodMoon]

What I find interesting is that Alan Gordon, now Dan Buglio and others have completely departed from the Sarno idea of TMS and we can all be healed by simply. “getting rid of the fear”. No more talk of repressed emotions like rage, regret, shame or guilt. No more “five year-old in our head” who is screaming and kicking to get his/her way. According to this new era we really don’t need to deal with any of that. Just use “Somatic Tracking” and “look from a distance” at the pain and tell yourself that it’s not harmful and is not dangerous. Voila! Pain Gone. Well…I tried Somatic Tracking, and JournalSpeak - but I still adamantly believe that much of my pain IS caused by my subconscious mind trying to distract me from the rage, guilt, shame and, yes, fear…that is trying to overflow into my consciousness. That’s just my 2 cents.

I agree with where you are coming from here. My own view is that I think many of us have it all going on and we're dealing with a "five year old in our head" and a fearful brain seeing danger everywhere and it interpreting normal benign bodily sensations as painful etc... but hardly anyone talks about that possibility (you're either in one camp or the other camp and not both!)... maybe because the thought of that is too daunting for people.

 

[Sita]

$4,000?? Seriously? Methinks Emily doest think too highly of herself. PhD?

But she's a lovely person!!! )

 

[JanAtheCPA]

many of us have it all going on and we're dealing with a "five year old in our head" and a fearful brain seeing danger everywhere

I'm with @BloodMoon here, in that it's all in play. And I almost always recommend the SEP, because it's more emotionally-based. Alan was an awesome practitioner of the unconscious rage model waaay back in the day, but I guess he feels he's reaching more people where they prefer to be, which is the fear model. Which doesn't require the same level of emotional vulnerability or brutal self-honesty.

Somatic tracking is just a version of self-visualization, which I learned about in the 80s from a little book called Creative Visualizations, by Shakti Gawain. It's about harnessing the innate healing power that I believe we all carry. It requires a commitment to belief and faith in that power. It has worked for me in different ways, as there is no one way for the infinite variations in how we experience distress.

@jhc1013, you said you've "tried" JournalSpeak, but I wonder how you are doing so without knowing that Nicole Sachs is 100% based in Sarno. She worked with him before going out on her own, and she always reminds us of his key theory about repressed emotions, while also adapting to the changing neuroscience. She has excellent explanations of how unconscious rage causes our distress, and what you must do to really dive deep to understand the true source of your particular suffering.

I suspect you may still be paddling around in the shallows, while your TMS brain mechanism easily prevents you from heading to the deep end of the pool.

The best way to get the full benefit of Nicole's expertise is probably going to be her second book, Mind Your Body. She has sooo many different programs and offerings going on right now that I've lost track. In the US, you can get the book from a lot of libraries, in all three formats. I bought my Kindle version as soon as it came out in February 2025, but I wanted to see if my city and county libraries had it - - the wait lists were already weeks long, and let's see... well, they still are. Her first book from 2014, The Meaning of Truth, is still available but isn't current on the most recent findings from neuroscience, especially evidence pointing to the stress-disease connection of the inflammatory conditions.

 

[cafe_bustelo]

I'm with @BloodMoon here, in that it's all in play. And I almost always recommend the SEP, because it's more emotionally-based. Alan was an awesome practitioner of the unconscious rage model waaay back in the day, but I guess he feels he's reaching more people where they prefer to be, which is the fear model. Which doesn't require the same level of emotional vulnerability or brutal self-honesty.

Somatic tracking is just a version of self-visualization, which I learned about in the 80s from a little book called Creative Visualizations, by Shakti Gawain. It's just about harnessing innate healing power that I believe we all carry. It requires a commitment to belief and faith in that power. It has worked for me in different ways, as there is no one way for the infinite variations in how we experience distress.

@jhc1013, you said you've "tried" JournalSpeak, but I wonder how you are doing so without knowing that Nicole Sachs is 100% based in Sarno. She worked with him before going out on her own, and she always reminds us of his key theory about repressed emotions, while also adapting to the changing neuroscience. She has excellent explanations of how unconscious rage causes our distress, and what you must do to really dive deep to understand the true source of your particular suffering.

I suspect you may still be paddling around in the shallows, while your TMS brain mechanism easily prevents you from heading to the deep end of the pool.

The best way to get the full benefit of Nicole's expertise is probably going to be her second book, Mind Your Body. She has sooo many different programs and offerings going on right now that I've lost track. In the US, you can get the book from a lot of libraries, in all three formats. I bought my Kindle version as soon as it came out in February 2025, but I wanted to see if my city and county libraries had it - - the wait lists were already weeks long, and let's see... well, they still are. Her first book from 2014, The Meaning of Truth, is still available but isn't current on the most recent findings from neuroscience, especially evidence pointing to the stress-disease connection of the inflammatory conditions.

I was actually about to reply to this thread the other day to say much the same thing about Alan but I stopped because I didn't know if I was talking out of my ass. I only learned of TMS this year but the audio recordings of his on this website which I assume are fairly old at this point show him clearly having the same kind of conversations about repressed rage that I imagine Sarno had with his patients.

It makes a lot of sense that as mindbody medicine becomes more known and accepted that there would be differing opinions and different camps believing one way is best. And I understand a lot of recovered people are naturally biased because they know what unequivocally worked for them.

I think the only way we'll "know" what works best at scale is through more research which requires more funding and so I can see from the perspective of Alan, for instance, that it would be really important to lean hard on what we know from the studies in order to make TMS sound more legit to the medical world so that further research can actually be done. And that seems to be what's in his book—the discrete tools that describe the process of recovery and which are easier to substantiate with evidence—even if that's not all that he would talk about in session with a client. The emotional side is naturally harder to substantiate since it all takes place in the mind, and harder for people to buy into even if it is in my view as well the more important side of the work.

I don't really have a point to make here other than the division here is interesting and the Alan Gordon/PRT approach makes a kind of sense as a bid for broader acceptance of TMS. I'm not sure if I fully agree with it, and I found The Way Out basically useless on its own even though it eventually led me to read Sarno, which was not useless. That said I've read stories of it actually working for people so that's great. Maybe the best we can do is be open to the range of recovery experiences until more studies have been done on various protocols (but even then recovery is so individual that it seems hard). I'm curious about case study research like that one PhD student was doing on here, looking for common themes across different people's recoveries.

 

[feduccini]

It makes a lot of sense that as mindbody medicine becomes more known and accepted that there would be differing opinions and different camps believing one way is best.

What I see from time to time is people who don't like PRT oversimplifying it and claiming it follows an opposite way of what's been proved to work. I personally find this conversation really boring so usually don't take part in it. But you're right, a quick Gordon search on YouTube will show sessions where he clearly tackles the emotional side of pain.

Also, Jan is right about somatic tracking not being their baby. Somatic Experiencing for example has been there since the 70s. It bothers me the way Gordon/Ashar make it look like they created it. Howard Shubiner is very clear about how EAET is based on countless other practices and theories.

The last I'd like to say is that Sarno was a science guy and I guess he'd probably hate to see people defending his theory and closing themselves to new findings.

 

[Thibaut33]

Sorry to just barge in like this. I’ve been new to the world of TMS for a little over a month now.

I’ve read a few books and could easily relate to them.

I’ve watched countless videos, read articles, testimonials, blogs, and forum posts.

When I came across Emily’s post and video, I was immediately very skeptical.

How, with so many symptoms and so many years of suffering, can someone heal so quickly—or at least return to a comfortable life?

Sorry for what I’m about to say, but aren’t some people just taking us for fools or easy targets?

Sarno, Schubiner, Gordon, Buglio… These people have either revolutionized or contributed something to MCS.

And they’ve been doing so for years.

Buglio is very honest when he says it took him years to heal his “simple back pain” through a lot of trial and error.

And here we have Emily, who in just 2.5 months managed to treat an impressive list of symptoms—compared to “simple back pain”—by reading books, looking at articles, blogs, and videos? Without any therapeutic follow-up.

So, basically, by creating her own homemade protocol, she immediately found what worked and improved a whole host of symptoms at lightning speed.

Allow me to seriously doubt that.

$4,000 for coaching? If what’s said here about the price is true, it’s really a scam... Because I imagine this “magical” coaching just rehashes what others have already invented.

It reminds me a bit of a certain Bautista’s YouTube channel, CFS Recovery.

Someone who seems to have some knowledge but seems more interested in making money than in helping patients.

in France, TMS coaches and therapists are rare—very rare—but they haven’t gotten caught up in this money-making machine.

I had my first coaching session last week.

A 90-minute session cost me the equivalent of $85.

I understand that it will take about 5–6 sessions fairly close together to establish the protocol, and then it will be sessions on demand to check in. Much more spaced out.

On top of that, I can freely communicate with him via email if I have doubts or questions I want to explore further.

Admittedly, this represents a significant expense, but it’s still a far cry from the rates I’ve seen elsewhere.

Before TMS, I was in the chronic Lyme community, and I’ve seen my fair share of charlatans like that—people who claim spectacular cures and then become “coaches.”

Allow me to use this expression: if it smells like crap, looks like crap, and feels like crap, then it’s crap...

Sorry for my rough English