Squash
New Member
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.
It's been two and a half weeks since I read the book, and I'm happy to report my success so far:
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.
It's been two and a half weeks since I read the book, and 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.
