Thanks, Forest, for merging these threads.
The Great Pain Deception by Steve Ozanich gets the full five stars from me! As Steve mentioned the importance of posting reviews on Amazon, I will do that at some point, though it will be difficult to keep it brief! I read it on my Kindle at the end of last year, after reading his second book, Back Pain: Permanent Healing.
Well, if I had to restrict my comments on the GPD to one sentence, it would be that (in my view) this is the most comprehensive, informative, helpful and illuminating book on the subject of mindbody disorders I have read. (And goodness knows, I've read a lot!). I highly recommend reading it if you've read Dr Sarno's ‘Healing Back Pain’, which is a good introduction to TMS, and want to gain a better understanding of how you've managed to become a TMSer, or still have some doubt about whether your pain is in fact due to TMS (It is, by the way!).
I must say, reading it is a bit of an undertaking - though I was gripped enough by it to keep reading into the early hours on a number of occasions

Steve has done all the research for the reader, basically, and there are so many great quotations and references that it's actually a useful resource from which you can go off piste (as it were!) and further explore works by the other writers mentioned. I’ve now bought a number of books and CDs/MP3s which I’m finding very helpful in my healing, as a result of Steve saying he had used them.
The book had me in tears at times, but also many more times in fits of giggles due to Steve's subtle and very quirky sense of humour

And, as I discovered in the book, laughter is a potent natural remedy for TMS pain. There are way too many points in the book that really resonated with me to be able to list them here, but, amongst them were: Early separation anxiety (particularly the significance of 26 months); cognitive dissonance; and personality types (The Type T/INFP types particularly. I can say with confidence I'm far more of a 'whole T' than an 'A whole'

You'll just have to read the book to find out what I'm on about!).
Rather than waffle on here endlessly about my ‘journey’ so far (which started a year ago reading a mini book on back pain by Dr Don Colbert), I’ll update my story on my profile page later. I’ll end this by saying that I consider Steve (via this book) and Georgie Oldfield in the UK (with whom I had an initial assessment) to be primarily responsible for my changed mindset and the improvement I’ve experienced in my health so far. Thank you, Steve!
And, Honey Badger, I had to find the definition of 'meme', as I'd never heard of it either. Steve actually devotes a whole chapter, called 'What did you meme by that?' to memes. I'm sure you've read it by now
