Thanks, Becca!
I was just typing it up as I got this message. I'm so happy I've joined up here. Here's the thrust of it:
While I only recently became a member of the wiki (my reasons for absence being both boring and uncompelling), I have had a presence on the TMShelp forum for the past few years.
I was founded in a maelstrom of TMS, born into a family with a renowned physician father who was qualified to both love me and diagnose me, and occasionally he did both. His addictions and anger led to a chronic projection that felled both my mother and me in his presence: I was told by him from a young age that I was
always angry, unlearning what my feelings meant or were into an oeuvre of one problematic human setting.
As a result of his tautology, never able to reason my way from beneath his slate of influence or damaging, circular rhetoric -- or even the vitiating accusations that came from both the rapidity of his tongue as well as his puncturing glare -- everything he came to tell me about me was unfalsifiable, and not capable of renouncing his presence, became my truth, and I was rendered false 24 hours a day. I became obese by eight, was a chronic bed-wetter and vented violently by throwing chairs, stabbing furniture and terrorizing my sister eight years my senior. I hit puberty at 11, and my weight and power -- socialized into a physique from my home life -- became commodities in middle and high school, and by 18, despite tearing two ACLs (including one in a football game the day my mother moved out of my father's house) and having a full labrum and rotator cuff reconstruction on my left shoulder, I was bench pressing over 500 pounds and was probably one of the strongest high school students in the state.
This story/person would be cleaner if I didn't love my father back. In spite of his deviant traits, he attended to me with intervals of tenderness and overachievement, confusing me about my place within him, yet knowing him to be a fractured yet sincere ally. This was often expressed in the form of him referring me to therapist colleagues, and by the end of college I had been to over a dozen.
And by the end of college, from a combination of family circumstances and existential decay emergent from my choice to go to graduate school to study screenwriting (as opposed to following through with medical school), my properly classic symptoms of TMS, IE those convolved within the fatal designations of the pain syndromes (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, myofascial pain ), started in my wrists in February and had spread through every sarcomere of my body by August of 2008; even pumping my own gas was excruciating. By 24 my life was over, and $30,000 of secretive and untenable visits across the spectrum of healing craftsmen -- including the indoctrination into something resembling a healing cult -- had me more concerned at the end with not stopping treatment and less so with getting better: if I wasn't going to get better, as long as I had a credit card at least I didn't have to stop trying.
"You won't get better as long as you don't accept that it's all between your ears," said my father for the last time, now diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer and unwilling to hear another lick of my pain journey, which he's sure is all in my head, because I'm all in my head.
It was only by discovering my father's words outside of him, in those of Dr. Sarno's, that my father's message could click within my fibers, to undo the body's rigor even if for a second with the mellifluous sound of his love for me finally passing the polygraph. He got to see me graduate and out of pain and into movement three months before he passed away.
And it was through stories I came to see my body and it's climate, both my own past narrative and that differential tall tale we can choose to tell, which can enlighten us into health by the moment. I no longer live in California, but back in Florida, where I can tell the healthiest story to myself, after formally studying it for two years.
I've written for Dr. Schubiner, which I'll link here, discussing how story impacts our health and our relationship with the doctor.
I'll also leave one of my several first chapters from A DISEASE IN THREE ACTS, which I hope can function as not one more self-help book, but as a story powerful enough to slip beneath the reactive sentiments of those inured by self-help -- books which say not just what Dr. Sarno and others say, but the diametric opposite.
The book will be a gateway drug to the cohort of established psychosomatic writers and stewards, with a narrative rather than informational engine that I hope can stand on its own as a literary text, with the unique variable being that the catharsis will be the message behind books such as THE DIVIDED MIND, HEALING BACK PAIN and UNLEARN YOUR PAIN, arrived upon vicariously by readers hopefully invested in the development of my relationship with my doctor father, as opposed to subjecting themselves to one more contentious data sprawl. I think that if the story is powerful enough, the "knowledge penicillin" will be an ancillary digestion, and will leave previously incredulous readers open to the stress-pain model even if they hadn't sought it out.
"A hyper-masculine, powerlifting young man, diagnosed with and incapacitated by fibromyalgia, must find a way to connect to his doctor father before he passes away, after he has cleaved their relationship beyond knit by declaring that the pain "is all in his head."
There are a lot of contentious headings there that don't naturally associate on the page.
Maybe if people read about a family member who's a doctor, then the implicit trust that should come with that designation can finally make people accept that "It's All In Your Head" may not be a diagnosis of dismissal, but of an urgent and poorly-articulated love.
We represent the self-selected few who could make the connection to the depth require to bring back hope. My book will make those who are repulsed by it not feel talked at, but regaled, incepted and therefore open to the idea that their chronic pain may be both caused affected by their psychologies.
I'm here to help in any ways I can, and I think my book has the power to outreach others with shared persuasions if only because I am lucky enough to have had my cobble of variables be self-evident after going through pain hell.
-- Jared
Here's Story: The Irreducible Diagnostic Criterion
http://www.unlearnyourpain.com/blog/mbs-blog-33-the-heros-journey-guest-blog-by-jared-egol/#!
Here's a taste of the book, one of several Chapter Ones:
Chapter 1
My father went to medical school to become a doctor, while my medical degree came from film school. I did my coursework while applying for disability at twenty-four, and in a crack of eleventh-hour nepotism was awarded my first internship beneath him, when he died semi-upright on the watch of his intake Hospice nurse, and I could observe his clutch of pain swirl down into a vague bewilderment, which graduated me. 
