I knew going in that I didn't have any major trauma that I was going to find, so I'm a believer in the "many little things throughout our lives" theory. Current stressors are important, but our basic coping mechanisms were laid down very early in life, and I do believe that we all have repressed memories (mostly very typical childhood guilts and embarrassments) going back to our very earliest years.
One turning point for me was recognizing that my lifelong anxiety is probably the result of being the first child of a 30-year old mother who married rather late (for those days!), was an only child raised in English and French boarding schools, never baby-sat in her entire life, and had a miscarriage before I was conceived. By the time I was old enough to really "see" her, she'd had three more kids and never showed a sign of anxiety again until she was in her 90s and facing the end of her life.
Understanding the genesis of my anxiety was very valuable, and it allowed me to forgive myself. That's one thing we all have to do, by the way. Just another wrinkle in the process.
In a related theme, the other significant turning point was realizing that by virtue of my mother having so many kids to take care of, I, being the eldest, ended up being somewhat isolated by the time I was 4 or 5 years old (resentful of losing all the attention?) and by doing this work, I eventually got in touch with myself at that age to discover that I really felt very lonely and awkward during those years - something I had completely forgotten/ignored/repressed, probably because the reality is that I was well-loved and nurtured and really had an excellent childhood with two very loving parents. But that's just intellectualizing. The reality for me at the time is that I felt isolated - aka abandoned - in those early years, and acknowledging that openly to my adult self was somehow another emotionally freeing event in this process.
Now, I discovered Dr. Sarno when I was 60, so in addition to childhood stuff, I believe that there are two main reasons that my symptoms came to a crisis point that year, which was 2011. One is that I was recently divorced, which meant that I no longer had a marriage to distract me from my real emotional issues. So even though I was happy to be single again, my symptoms started getting worse over the two years since the separation, whereas for several decades prior, I had been able to keep them somewhat under control (and only had one or two at a time). But then there's the second reason, which is that I was 60 that year. And age-related rage is known to be one of the big repressed emotions. The moment I read that in The Divided Mind, I said "yeah, baby - there it is".
The practice of Existential Psychotherapy postulates that there are four core issues (we might as well call them emotions) that affect human beings in every action, interaction, or relationship: Freedom, Meaning, Isolation, and Mortality. I hit on the big one (Mortality) just by reading my first Sarno book. The next one (Isolation) came along as I described above - that was while doing the SEP and after listening to one of Alan Gordon's webinars from back then (linked on my Profile page). I've since found plenty of examples in my emotional life around Freedom and Meaning as well. Our freedom is constantly at risk (eg: privacy concerns are, at their heart, fear of losing our freedom. Aging, if you live long enough, almost invariably results in a loss of freedom). The search for and questioning of Meaning is universal. And let's be clear: Mortality and Isolation continue to rear their ugly heads frequently - as they do, I am convinced, for EVERYONE. I advise everyone to look closely at Isolation/Abandonment and how those emotions affect them every single day. They are HUGE in human existence.
There's nothing linear about this, by the way. There is no one way that it unfolds for everyone. Each journey is completely unique, although there are some very basic steps that are the same for almost everyone. But not necessarily even in the same order.
