samthefish
Newcomer
I have written a short ebook putting my sympoms on trial - super effective! They lost, reality won!!!
I'm a software developer, and was thinking of making a site where you could enter your Judge (mine is God, maybe your is Judge Wopner), Defense (Screwtape), symptoms, etc - and see how they do on trial!!
I can't upload the file, if you like it let me know.
THE PEOPLE
V.
FEAR
A SHORT STORY TO SALVATION
REALITY
The People v. Fear
A Short Story to Salvation
A Trial in Three Acts
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." — Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preface
I am a computer scientist. I have spent my life with systems that
either work or they do not, and with the particular humility
that comes from being told, every single day, by a machine,
exactly where my reasoning was wrong. It makes a person hard
to convince. Show a man enough proofs and he stops believing
anything on the strength of how nice it would be if it were true.
I do not take things on faith. I take them on evidence, on logic,
and on whether the explanation actually predicts what happens
next.
So when I tell you that the pain in my body — thirty years
of it — turned out not to come from my body, understand that
I did not arrive there by wanting to. I arrived dragged,
backward, arguing the whole way. This book is built for that
reader, because I am that reader. It makes its case the way I
needed the case made to me: reality first. It will show you
the evidence before it asks you to feel a single thing. If a step
does not follow, throw it out. I would.
2
A second confession, because logic requires honest premises
— and this one I have to make carefully, because I am about to
disagree with the very man whose work underpins this book.
Dr. John Sarno made a bold and hopeful claim across his
career: that the understanding itself is the cure — that once you
truly grasp the cause, the knowledge does the healing. On that
one point, my own case is a counterexample. I understood the
theory completely — read it, believed it, could have lectured on
it — and I did not fully heal.
But notice the asymmetry, because it matters more than my
exception does. Sarno looked for his pattern across tens of
thousands of cases. I have one — my own. A single
counterexample does not refute a pattern drawn from
thousands; humanity is messy, and one data point is the
weakest evidence there is. So when in doubt, trust Sarno, not
me. For most readers, the understanding may well be most of
the cure, exactly as he said. But if you are the kind of reader
who gets it and still hurts — as I did — then you need to know
there can be work left after the understanding, and this book is
honest about what it was. That is not a hole in the argument. It
is the most important data point in it.
I have set it down as a trial, because that is how a logical
mind weighs a charge: evidence, witnesses, cross-examination,
and a verdict that follows from them or is thrown out. The
accused is not your body — your body, I will show you, has
been sitting in the dock wrongly accused for years. The real
defendant is fear, and behind it an older accomplice. The
People — of your own right mind — versus Fear. It is a short
book on purpose; the truth here is not large, only hard to look
at.
3
I built it, in fact, the way I was trained to build software.
Code efficiently: a good program is structured and lean, no
dead weight — so this one runs in three acts of three scenes,
and not a word past what the proof requires. Test every
assertion: in code you never trust a claim until it survives the
test written to break it; in a courtroom that test is called
cross-examination. Nothing in here is asserted that is not first
put on the stand and questioned — and anything that cannot
survive cross-examination does not belong in the program, or
in this book.
Court is in session.
ACT I — LISTEN
1.1 — The Court Convenes
4
The Judge — his name is Sound; over the door behind him,
one word: REALITY
I am fifty-eight years old and flat on my back, looking at a
ceiling I have looked at ten thousand mornings, and tonight the
5
ceiling is not a ceiling. It opens. It goes up and up into a dark
the color of a starless sky, and the dark is full of people who
have come to decide something about me.
That is how the dream begins. It always begins the same
way. I lie still in the bed I have grown old in, and the room
turns into a court.
It is a high room, all dark wood and cold stone, the smell of
dust and floor wax and old paper. There is a bench at the front,
and on the bench sits the Judge. His name is Sound — and you
understand, the moment you are in the room, that it means
every kind of sound at once: whole, and true, and sound of
mind, and a depth you could drop a stone into and never hear
it land. Carved across the front of his bench, in the old
language, three words — Mens sana, corpus sanum, spiritus sanus, a
sound mind, a sound body, a sound spirit — and over the door
behind him, where another court would carve the scales, one
word only: REALITY. The Judge does not raise his voice. He
does not have to. When he is displeased the whole room goes
ten degrees colder, and you find you have stopped breathing
without deciding to. I cannot hold his eyes. No one can. They
are the one thing in the room with a bottom you cannot see.
I spent my working life with logic and machines — I built
systems, I found the one broken thing in a hundred thousand
lines, I was the one they called when something had to work
and could not be allowed to fail. I am not a man who has spent
much time in rooms like this, and I stand off to the side the way
I always have, hands empty, waiting to be told where to go.
And in the box where the accused is meant to stand — this
is the part I can never get used to — there is no man.
6
There is a body.
My body. Bent the way it has bent for thirty years, one
shoulder lower than the other, a hand pressed to the small of
the back the way you'd press a wound to keep it from opening.
It stands in the dock and does not look at me, and the whole
court looks at it the way a family looks at the thing in the room
that has been killing them slowly, by inches, for longer than
anyone can remember.
"The accused," says the Judge, and his voice goes straight
through the wood of the place into the wood of me, "stands
charged with the theft of thirty years. With the robbing of a
man's nights. The souring of the love at the center of his life.
The slow grinding-down of a decent and ordinary life." His
eyes come off the bench and find me where I stand at the side.
"Does the man it was used against understand the charge?"
I do. God help me, I have understood it longer than I have
understood anything.
"Then we will begin," says the Judge. "And we will begin the
way this court always begins. With the truth, and not with the
comfort. Sit. And listen."
So I sit. And — for the first time in thirty years, it seems to
me — I listen.
1.2 — The Evidence Heard
7
The young Prosecutor — the youngest soul in the room, and
the only one who read the regulations
I had expected the prosecutor to be a hard man. The kind
they put on television, all teeth and certainty. Instead a young
8
one stands up, the youngest soul in the room, the crease still
sharp in his sleeve, outranked by every grey head at every table.
The defense counsel — a courteous grey figure folded into a
too-fine collar, who has not yet said a word but smiles at
everything — leans to a colleague and murmurs something,
and there is a soft laugh, and the young man's ears go red.
But he stands up anyway. And the strange thing, the thing I
notice before I understand it, is that he does not look at my
body the way a prosecutor should look at the accused. He looks
at it the way you look at someone you are afraid you are about
to wrong. I have the oddest feeling I have seen his face before
— in a mirror, a long time ago, before I learned to keep it
down.
"I am not here to convict this body," he says. "I am here to
find out whether the case against it is true. There is a
difference, and the difference is the whole of why we are here."
He calls his first witness. They bring in a man with a flat box
of films, the grey ghost-pictures they take of your insides, the
ones a doctor once held up to a light and pointed at and used a
word that I carried for the rest of my life like a stone in the
shoe.
"You have read this man's pictures," says the young
prosecutor.
"I have read ten thousand like them."
"And his are bad."
"His are ordinary." The witness says it plainly, without
cruelty. "There is wear in them. There is the wear that comes
to every back that has carried a life. I will tell this court
9
something it will not want to believe." He turns, not to the
bench, but out, toward me, toward the dark past the back of the
room where I have the strange feeling there are others listening.
"I can lay these same pictures — these same shadows, this same
wear, the words that frightened this man for thirty years —
beside the pictures of people who feel nothing at all. Who carry,
who lift, who sleep like children. The shadow is not the pain.
The shadow has never once been the pain. We told a
frightened man that a photograph was a sentence, and he
served it."
The room is very quiet.
"Then the structure," says the prosecutor, "cannot account
for the suffering."
"It cannot. I have looked. It is, on the evidence before this
court, a sound body."
"Noted," says the Judge, "and entered above the record,
where it will stay." It is the only warmth I will feel from the
bench for a long time, and it is not aimed at me; it is aimed at
the truth, which the Judge treats as the only living thing in the
room. "The body is sound. The prosecution may proceed to the
question that leaves us."
1.3 — A Body Wrongly Accused
10
The accused — in the dock where a man should stand, only a
body, bent thirty years
I want to tell you what it is to sit in a dream and hear, out
loud, in a voice you cannot argue with, that the thing you
11
blamed for thirty years did not do it.
It is not relief. Relief comes later, or it does not come at all.
What it is, first, is terror. Because if the body did not do this —
if the body has stood in that dock innocent every night of my
life while I cursed it — then the thing that did do it has been
loose in the room the whole time. Sitting somewhere behind
me. Wearing my coat. Using my voice.
And it means something worse, something a logical man
cannot un-see once he has seen it: for thirty years I prosecuted
the wrong defendant. I hated my back, my spine, my own
failing frame; I spent a fortune and the better part of a love and
most of a life fighting the one party in this room that had never
done anything but carry me. The guilty one was never in the
dock at all. The guilty one, I would learn, had been sitting at
the defense table the whole time — helping me aim.
The young prosecutor feels it too. I watch him feel it. He
stands in the middle of that cleared, terrible space where the
accused used to be, and he asks the only question left to ask.
"If not the body," he says, "then who?"
And from the back of the court — from the dark where I
had felt the others listening — something stirs. Not the grey
counsel at his table; he only folds his hands tighter, like a man
who knows his clients are about to be named and means to
defend every one of them. Something further back. Something
that has been in this room from the beginning, that was in this
room before I was born, that taught me my first word and most
of the ones since.
The Judge does not flinch. The Judge has been waiting for
this longer than I have been alive.
12
"Then we will call them," he says. "One at a time. Up the
chain, to the one who hired the rest." His bottomless eyes find
me one more time before the lights go down on the first act of
my own trial. "Stay where you are. You have spent thirty years
not looking at this. Tonight you are going to look."
ACT II — THINK
2.1 — The Perfectionist
13
The Perfectionist — the Goody Two-Shoes
The first one they call comes up the aisle like he owns the
building.
14
He is dressed better than anyone in the room: scrubbed,
prim, the buckled shoes of the goody-two-shoes who was always
held up to the other children as the example. He carries a
clipboard. He has the face of every foreman, every teacher,
every father who was never once satisfied. Not cruel, you
understand. Worse than cruel. Disappointed. He looks at my
body in the dock and clicks his tongue, the way you do at a job
done at ninety percent.
"State your work," says the prosecutor.
"I keep the standard," the Perfectionist says, and he says it
proudly. "Everything right. The job done well, the family
provided for, no one let down, nothing left undone. I made this
man who he was. Ask anyone. Dependable. The one you could
count on." He turns the clipboard toward the room and I see it
is covered, top to bottom, edge to edge, in a single word,
written ten thousand times in a tight hard hand. More. More.
More.
"And when the standard is not met?"
"The standard is never met." He says this as though it were
obvious, as though it were the weather. "It can't be. That's the
use of it. There is always a thing done at ninety percent. There
is always the better man who would have done it at a hundred."
He shrugs. "So there is always something to feel about that."
"Something," says the young prosecutor quietly. "Say the
word."
The Perfectionist will not say the word. So the prosecutor
says it for him.
15
"Anger." He lets it sit in the cold air. "Every day, a hundred
small times a day, you handed this man a verdict of not good
enough, and every verdict struck a spark, and the sparks were
anger. Ordinary, lawful, human anger at a standard no living
person could ever meet."
"I never told him to be angry," the Perfectionist says, and for
the first time he looks uneasy. "That would be — that's not — a
good man isn't angry. I taught him better than that. I taught
him to be good."
"Yes," says the prosecutor. "You did. So there were two laws
here, not one. Be perfect, and be good. Be flawless at every task,
and never once be anything but kind and quiet and selfless. No
living soul can keep either, and you handed him both, and
called his failing to keep them his character." He nods, almost
gently. "The good little boy who must never be bad, and the
perfect man who can never be enough: the same prison, two
names. Hold that thought. The court will want it later."
The grey counsel rises, smooth as oil. "My lords, surely we
are not putting diligence on trial. The man worked hard. He
provided. He was good. If conscientiousness is a crime, half the
graveyards are full of felons who only ever tried their best —"
"It is not a crime to set a high standard," says the Judge, and
the room lowers itself to meet his quiet. "It becomes one when
the standard is impossible and the failure is punished in secret.
The witness has named what the failure produced. The court
will hear where it went."
2.2 — The Buried Evidence
16
The Rage — the Werewolf chained in the cellar
They call the anger next, and the anger does not come.
The young prosecutor waits. We all wait. And then he
understands, the way you understand a thing you have known a
17
long time without letting yourself know it, and he stops looking
at the door and starts looking at the floor.
"It does not come," he says, "because it was never let out.
Bring up what's under the building."
And they open a hatch in the floor of the court — I did not
know it was there, I have stood over it my whole life — and out
of it comes a smell like a cellar that has been shut thirty years,
and a sound like water shifting somewhere deep under the
house, and the room fills with the thing I spent my life
pretending I did not have.
Rage. Not a tantrum. Not a temper. A reservoir of it, dark
and still and enormous, the accumulated anger of thirty years
with nowhere lawful to go. And down in the dark of it
something with a beast's shape turns over and shows its back:
the wolf the good man kept chained in the cellar his whole life,
fed nothing, named nothing, let out never. Not evil. Only
starved, and strong, and mine. Every spark the Perfectionist
ever struck. Every time I swallowed it and smiled. Every don't
make a fuss, every others first, every a good man doesn't feel
this, all of it poured down the hatch and held, and held, and
held, until the holding was the largest thing in me.
"There is your root," the prosecutor says, and his voice is not
steady now. "This is the oldest thing in the case, and the
deepest, and the man who studied this longer than any of us —
a doctor, tens of thousands of patients, a whole career — said
so plainly: the real culprit is the rage we are not allowed to feel.
I will not stand here and pretend I am cleverer than that. This
is the root. Sarno was right."
18
"Then why," says the Judge, "is this man not healed by the
naming of it?"
And there it is. The question I have carried into this dream a
thousand times. Because I did learn the doctor's name. I read
the book. I believed it, all the way down, the way you believe
your own hand. And I did not get well.
"Because the Rage is not the thief," the prosecutor says
slowly, working it out in front of us, the way you only can when
you are fully there and not running ahead. "The Rage smashed
the window. The Rage stood lookout. But the Rage did not
climb in and take thirty years. Something used it. Something
heard all that pressure building down there in the dark and
made a decision." He lifts his head. "There is another one. Call
the one who turned the rage into a weapon."
2.3 — Caught in the Act
And then — right there, in the courtroom, while the whole
bench is watching — my body in the dock cries out and folds,
both hands to the small of the back, the old familiar bolt of it,
the pain I have known longer than I have known almost any
face in my life.
The grey counsel is on his feet at once. "There! You see!
Real pain, my lords — real, the man is not pretending, look at
him — surely this proves —"
"It proves nothing yet," says the young prosecutor, and he
does the bravest thing I have ever seen a man do. He does not
panic. He watches. He stays, completely, in the second that is
happening. "When did it come?"
19
The witness — a quiet woman who has been taking notes
the whole trial — looks up. "The instant we said call the one
who turned the rage into a weapon. Not before. The feeling
rose first. The pain came a half-second behind it, to cover it. I
timed it. It tracks the fear, my lords. It does not track the
wound. There is no wound. We have established that. It tracks
the fear."
"Caught in the act," the prosecutor says softly.
"And there is more." The woman turns a page. "I went back
through this man's whole record, because a thing that does this
once has done it before. He had it as a boy: a stomach,
headaches, the doctor could find nothing. He drank, for a
while, to throw water on it. But fear is made of oil, my lords.
The water only scattered the fire and spread it, and the flames
dropped while he was drunk and sprang up everywhere once
he dried out. He put the drink down by main strength, and the
pain came up to take its place. And here is the thing I cannot
get past." She looks, for the first time, straight at me. "Once,
years ago, this man had a panic, a true terror out of nowhere,
and in the grip of it the pain vanished. Completely. For the
length of the attack he was a man without a back. Two of them
cannot hold the stage at once. Do you understand what that
means? They are not many illnesses. They are one thing,
changing its coat. Pain, stomach, drink, dread: one author,
many disguises."
And that, not the films, not the clever talk, was the thing that
finally turned me. I am a man who trusts a test that can fail.
Two symptoms will not share a stage is a prediction; you can go
looking for the day they overlap, and if you ever find it, the
whole theory falls. I looked. I never found it. A prediction that
20
holds every time you try to break it is the closest thing to proof
this world hands out. I had hunted a wound for thirty years.
There had never been a wound. There had only ever been one
liar, and thirty coats.
"Enter all of it above the record," says the Judge, and the
cold in the room is absolute now, "where it will stay. — A
warning to the court, and to anyone listening past the back of
this room." His eyes go out into the dark. "This is not a license
to ignore your body or your mind. A man with a true disease
needs a doctor. A man drowning in drink or in despair, a man
seized by a mind running too fast or sunk too low, needs help
and must go and get it. We rule on the cases that come to us
cleared — disease ruled out, danger ruled out. Only then is this
court in session. Do not mistake the verdict for a reason to
gamble." He turns back. "Now. The prosecution has its single
author. Name him."
The young prosecutor turns toward the defense table —
toward the courteous grey figure who has defended every client
all afternoon, who has smiled at everything, who has not once, I
realize, been called as anything but counsel.
"He has been in the room the whole time," the prosecutor
says. "He has been running the defense. My lords — the one
who turned the rage into a weapon, the one who stole the thirty
years, is the lawyer himself. I call the counsel to the stand. I call
Fear."
ACT III — VOICE
3.1 — Fear Under Cross
21
Fear — the simpering coward under the lawyer
He does not want to go. Of course he does not. As long as
the trial runs he is employed; a verdict is the one thing he
cannot survive. But the Judge looks at him, and the room goes
22
cold, and there is nowhere in a court of Reality for Fear to hide.
He takes the stand and he is, even now, magnificent.
Reasonable. Warm. The most plausible voice you ever heard.
"This is all," he says gently, "a terrible misunderstanding. I
only ever protected him. Every alarm I ever rang, I rang for his
own good. Was I to stay silent while his body — forgive me,
while that sensation — might have meant something dreadful?
I am not a criminal, my lords. I am a guardian. I meant only
"
—
"Say it," says the prosecutor.
"— only the best," says Fear. "Good intentions. My whole
life, good intentions."
"You defended the Perfectionist this afternoon. You
defended the Rage. You have a kind word for every accused in
this room." The prosecutor takes a single step closer. "Why
would the same lawyer defend all of them?"
"Professional courtesy," says Fear, and smiles.
"Or because they all work for you." The young man does
not raise his voice; he has learned, somewhere in this trial,
where the real power in the room keeps its volume. "Here is
what you did. You could not have done it alone — you are not
the root, and I will not flatter you that you are. The Rage
smashed the window. The Rage stood lookout. But you,
Counsel — you climbed in. You took a man's true and lawful
anger, the anger he was forbidden to feel, and you whispered
that it was dangerous, that a good man who felt such a thing
was a monster, that it must never, ever be let into the light. And
then you offered him the only way out you sell. You buried it.
23
And to keep it buried, to keep his eyes down and away from it,
you reached into his body and you turned on the pain. Not to
harm him. To distract him. The pain was never the crime. The
pain was the cover-up."
"You cannot prove —"
"And when he saw through it," the prosecutor goes on, and
now there is iron in him, "when he read the doctor's book and
learned your trick with the back and stopped being afraid of the
pain — you did not surrender. You are too good a craftsman
for that. You simply changed the cover. If I can't reach him through
the body, you thought, I'll reach him through the mind. No pain this
time. He'll never see what hit him. You gave him, in medical terms,
mania. Racing thoughts, delusions of grandeur, doing a dozen
things at once. A very unusual and desperate TMS symptom."
The room has stopped breathing. And Fear — Fear who has
a silken word for every sin — opens his mouth to explain, and
meets the eyes of the Judge, in whose court no lie has ever once
held, and finds that for the first time in thirty years he has
nothing to say.
He cannot handle the truth. That, in the end, is the whole of
him. He is the one thing in creation that cannot bear to be
looked at plainly, because being looked at plainly is the one
thing that kills him.
And the silk runs out of him all at once. The courteous grey
lawyer is gone, and what kneels in his place — wringing its
hands, simpering, pleading to a floor it cannot lift its eyes from
— is the thing that was always under the good suit: a small,
cowering creature, on its knees. That is Fear's true shape. He
wore the lawyer because he could not bear for anyone, least of
24
all me, to see the coward.
"The witness," says the Judge, "may step down. He has
confessed in the only language he speaks." The grey figure
seems smaller, going back to his table. "There remains one
voice this court has not heard."
3.2 — Adam Finds His Voice
For a moment I do not understand. And then I understand,
and I would give anything to be anywhere else.
"The man may speak," says the Judge. "Not to the prisoner.
You will not argue with him — Reality does not owe a voice an
answer, and you will only feed what you mean to starve. Not to
his counsel. To me. To the court. To yourself."
I have been silent the whole trial, the way I was silent the
whole of my life. Others first, myself never. The quiet one. The
dependable one. The one who carried it and did not complain,
and called the not-complaining a virtue, and let it become the
mortar they built the wall out of. I do not have the words. I
never let myself keep any.
So I find a few. They come out badly, in the wrong order,
the way a thing comes out when it has been held under thirty
years.
I say: I was angry. It broke in the worst year of my life — I
was twenty-seven, my father just buried, the rest of my life
bearing down on me and the love at the heart of it already
turning hard — and the anger of all of it had nowhere a good
man could put it. I have been angry ever since, and I was not
allowed to be, and so I drowned it, and the drowning of it cost
me everything the pain was blamed for. I say it to the dark,
25
where the rage came up out of the hatch, and I do not curse it
now, because I understand at last that it was never the villain; it
was a true thing in me that I would not let live, and it only ever
wanted what every buried thing wants, which is air.
I say: I am not angry at the man who first frightened me, or
the doctor with the picture, or my own younger self for being
afraid. They meant it kindly. That is the part that took me
thirty years to bear — that almost no one in this story meant
me any harm at all.
The Judge speaks then, and for the only time all night his
voice is not cold but unbearably gentle — the way you speak to
a child who has hurt himself reaching for a thing he was
warned away from. "And the one you have not forgiven," he
says. "You are only ever told your own story, you know. Never
hers. Name her — and then hear the part you were never
given."
So I say the hardest name. The person I had built my life
around. Who would not come close the way I wanted; who
turned in early to bed on the one night I had built perfect —
the lobster, the wine, the candles I had lit one at a time — and
left me sitting in all that careful light feeling I had been weighed
and found wanting. I had made that evening into a case for
everything I believed I had earned and was owed, and she had
risen from the table and gone to sleep, and I had filed it with
the rest: thirty years of small evidence that I gave and gave and
was never loved back in the coin I was paying in.
And the Judge only waits, and in the waiting I am told at last
the part of the story that was never mine to see — that she
carried a wound from long before me, a thing too heavy ever to
26
set on the table between us, and that the distance I read as a
verdict on me was only her standing as near the fire as she
could bear. She was not withholding what I deserved. She was
surviving something I was never shown. I had judged her by
my story because it was the only one I had been handed, and it
was never the whole of it, and it was never even the truth.
So I do two things at once, and they turn out to be one
thing. I forgive her — and I am sorry. Sorry for the thirty years
I kept a ledger against a woman who was quietly bleeding the
whole time; sorry that I begged to be ministered to and never
once asked what she was carrying. The remorse is real, and it
does not crush me. It sets the thing down, and frees the arm
that had held it so long it had forgotten it was holding anything
at all.
And I say one more thing, the only thing I have ever said for
myself in fifty-eight years, and I say it to no one and to the
whole room: I am here. Right now. In this second. Not back
there in the picture, not ahead in the fear of what the picture
meant. Here. And the strange thing, the thing no one ever told
me, is that the moment I am fully here, there is no room left in
the second for the voice at all.
3.3 — The Verdict & The Way Out
The Judge does not deliberate. Reality is in no hurry, and it
never needs to think; it only needs you to stop talking long
enough to hear it.
"The body is acquitted," he says. "It was sound from the
first; it was a witness dressed as the accused, and this court
regrets the thirty years it stood wrongly in that dock. And let
the record show the man was never on trial here either: he was
27
lied to by an expert, and you do not convict the deceived for
believing the lie. The Perfectionist is bound over; he may keep
a standard but he may no longer punish in secret. The Rage is
released — not punished, released — to be felt, and named,
and given its voice, which is the only thing it ever required and
the whole of its cure. And Fear—
"
He pauses, and the cold lifts, just slightly, the way it does the
once or twice a trial when he allows himself to be gentle.
"Fear is convicted. But hear the sentence, because it is not
what you expect, and it is the only sentence that has ever
worked. You will not fight him. You cannot win a shouting
match with a voice; the shouting is the food he eats. You will
not argue, you will not reason, you will not throw water on him
— he is made of oil and the water only spreads him. You will
do the one thing he cannot survive. You will turn toward him,
and look, and say nothing, and stay. You will let the alarm ring
and you will not get up to answer it. Starve the voice; feed the
silence. That is the way out, and it is a poor weapon and a
perfect one, and it asks of you only that you be here, where I
am, where reality is, where he has never once been able to
follow. And do not take even this on faith: it has been put to the
proof — against false cures, and against doing nothing at all —
and it outlasted them both."
Somewhere far up in the dark a door seems to open and a
light to come on, very small, very steady.
"One last word," says the Judge, "from the doctor, who has
earned it." And the old man with the films — Sarno, I know
somehow, though no one says it — leans forward and says the
kindest hard thing anyone has said to me in the whole of my
28
life.
"Everyone," he says, "deserves a little bit of pain. Stop trying
to be perfectly well. The need to be flawless and finished and
never to ache again — that is only the first one back in another
coat. You will climb up into the clear air now and then, and
you will see the whole of it laid out, and you will think you can
live up there. You cannot. There is no air on the summit. You
come back down and you eat your supper and you balance
your accounts and you carry the heavy thing without dropping
it, and that — not the mountaintop — is where a life is lived. A
little pain is the toll for being a person. Pay it, and stop
checking the wound."
The truth knocks at the door. For thirty years I said go away,
I'm looking for the truth, and it went away. Tonight I let it in.
The ceiling becomes a ceiling again. I am fifty-eight years
old and flat on my back in the bed I have grown old in, and the
room is just a room, quiet, and gray with the first of the
morning, and mine. My back aches a little. I let it. I do not get
up to answer it.
I am here.
— end —
Afterword — A Note from the Author,
Mid-Fight
I should tell you where this book came from, because it is the
argument made flesh.
29
I had fear on the run. I had seen through the pain —
stopped fearing it, stopped feeding it — and the body went
quiet for the first time in thirty years. That is exactly when it
happened. Cornered, its oldest weapon taken away, fear tried
something desperate and rare: it tried to distract me with
mania. No pain this time — just a mind suddenly running at
five times its speed, certain it could build everything at once. If
you think about it, it is a compliment; you only get the
desperate move once the ordinary ones have stopped working.
But I had the one tool the desperate move cannot beat:
presence. Standing in the present long enough to watch the
thing operate, I could see what it had done — name it, time it,
catch it in the act, exactly as the investigator does in these
pages. And then I did what the Judge prescribes: I did not fight
it head-on; I used its own weapon against it. The manic energy
it sent to scatter me into a dozen half-finished things, I aimed at
one. You are holding the result.
Writing it was itself the medicine. It calmed the mania to
pour it into a single channel — and there was an urgency I
understand only now: I had to get this out quick, at the top of
the mountain, before I climbed back down to take a shower
and balance my checking account. You cannot live on the
summit. (That mountain is Robert Pirsig's, from Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance — a book I read a dozen times trying to
understand, and which, after all these years, I think I finally do.)
But if you are paying attention, you can leave something built
up there on your way down.
And it is not only the mind. On that same mountaintop I
tested a thirty-year-old rule — a well-meaning therapist had
once told me to hold my shoulders back, and I had obeyed,
30
flinching at every reach, for three decades. I dropped it for one
breath: neutral shoulders; no shoulder rules exist. A five
became a two on the spot, and a half within days. There is a
worked example of exactly how in the pages that follow. The
method is the method, whether the symptom hides in the body
or the mind.
The rest I regulate the way you regulate any voice that runs
too hot — not with force, with attention, on a schedule. Every
three hours I stop, wherever I am, and write down three
numbers. Presence with a stopwatch.
My three-hour check (steal it):
• Symptoms (pain, etc.), 1–10. Right now: a 1.
• Mania — how many different creative things am I trying to
do at once? 5 high · 3 medium-high · 2 normal · 1 or 0
ideal.
• Drinking — drinks so far today? 0 = good job.
Three numbers, eight times a day. It sounds like nothing. It
is the difference between holding the reins and being dragged.
And here is the quiet victory: now, if I wake up tomorrow back
in the clouds, I will not be afraid — I have a strategy.
I am not cured, and I am not pretending to be — and I am
not doing it alone. I see a therapist tomorrow, and I am
reaching out to a well-known TMS physician for a virtual visit,
for advice on how to keep fear on the run. If your own mind is
racing like this, or sinking, please do the same: this is not "just
fear" to outsmart by yourself. Get a real doctor. I have.
This is one man, mid-fight, showing his work. The book is
the evidence — because by every ordinary law it should not
31
exist, and here it is, in your hands.
— A.M.
Appendix & Workbook — Working the Verdict
The story is the argument. This is the work. The computer
scientist's instinct holds here too: don't just accept the
conclusion — run it against your own life and see if it returns
true.
First, the safety gate (non-negotiable)
This book is about pain and symptoms that remain after disease
has been ruled out. Before you apply a word of it:
• See a physician and rule out structural disease and
dangerous conditions. This court only sits on cleared
cases.
• Red flags need a doctor now, not a verdict: fever with the
pain, unexplained weight loss, loss of bladder or bowel
control, progressive weakness or numbness, pain following
major trauma, relentless night pain, a first severe headache
or one that is "the worst of your life."
• If you are drinking to cope, sunk in depression, or your
mind is racing out of control, that is not "just fear" — it is a
reason to get help today. In the US, call or text 988
(Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
• Alcohol withdrawal can be fatal. Do not quit heavy
drinking abruptly without medical guidance.
The case in brief (the logic, on one page)
32
1. Structure ≠ pain. The "damage" on scans is common in
people with no pain at all; the picture is not the sentence.
2. The symptom tracks emotion, not tissue. It rises and falls
with feeling, not with the state of the body.
3. One author, many disguises. Pain, anxiety, the stomach,
the drink, the low moods and the high — they substitute for
one another (when one seizes the stage, another recedes). Not
many illnesses; one mechanism.
4. The mechanism: perfectionism and pressure real,
lawful rage you are not allowed to feel fear of that rage buries
it the brain manufactures a symptom to keep your attention
off it. Rage is the root; fear is the executor. The pain is
the cover-up, not the crime.
5. Therefore the cure is not aimed at the body. It is aimed at
the two criminals: give the rage a voice; starve the fear with
presence.
If a step does not follow for you, test it against your own
history before you accept it.
The work, part one — Voice the Rage (the root)
The rage is not a flaw; it is a true thing you were forbidden to
feel. It only ever wanted air. Give it some — on paper, where it
can harm no one.
• Set a timer (10–20 minutes). Write by hand if you can. No
editing, no audience, no keeping it. Then throw it away.
• Prompts: What am I angry about that a "good person" isn't
supposed to be angry about? Who do I resent and have
never told? What pressure am I carrying that I never
33
agreed to? What did I swallow this week and call it being
the bigger man?
• The aim is not catharsis-as-performance; it is letting the
buried thing be named and felt. (See Nicole Sachs's
"JournalSpeak" for a fuller method.)
The work, part two — Starve the Fear (the executor)
You cannot win an argument with a voice; the arguing is the
food it eats. You defeat it by no longer answering.
• When a symptom or the anxious voice rises, do not fix it
and do not fight it. Turn toward it with plain curiosity.
Note it: a sensation, not damage. I am safe. Let the alarm
ring without getting up to answer it.
• Be here. Bring your full attention into the present second —
what you see, hear, feel, right now. The voice lives in the
past and the future; it cannot follow you into the present,
and in the present there is no room left for it. This is the
holy silence — presence, not noise.
• Don't demand the summit. You will have clear, free
moments and you will come back down to ordinary aches
and ordinary days. That descent is not failure; it is a life.
A worked example — put a body-rule on the stand
Here is the whole method on one of my own symptoms, small
enough to see clearly.
Thirty years ago a well-meaning bodywork therapist told me
to hold my shoulders back. So I did — for thirty years —
pulling them back against their nature, and flinching every time
I reached for something, because reaching rolled my shoulders
forward and "broke the rule." That flinch was the fear, and one
34
clear morning I finally caught it in the act: the small bolt of
dread at the simple act of reaching for a cup.
How was I deceived for thirty years? The honest answer is
the one the prosecutor wrings out of the defendant in this story
— for all that time, I could not handle the truth: that I had built
my days around a rule I had never once put to the test.
So I tested it. I had assumed, on an expert's say-so, that
held-back shoulders hurt less than neutral ones, and in three
decades I had never checked. I took a breath and said it plainly,
to no one: Neutral shoulders. Relax into nothing. No shoulder
rules exist. I let them fall where a body lets them fall. The pain
dropped from a 5 to a 2 on the spot. Today it is a half.
That is the protocol entire. Find a rule you hold your body
to out of fear — a posture, a "never bend that way," a brace
you have carried so long it feels like care. Put it on the stand.
Catch the flinch that guards it. Drop the rule for one breath.
Measure before and after, and let reality, not the rule, return
the verdict. Most of these rules were handed to you by people
who meant well and were wrong; you do not owe them another
thirty years.
(The one exception, and it matters: a rule from a current
doctor for a diagnosed condition stays until that doctor lifts it.
We test the fear-rules — not your treatment.)
Honesty (the data points that matter)
• Understanding may not be the whole cure. Here this book
parts, on one point only, from Dr. Sarno — who held that
the knowledge itself heals. Across tens of thousands of cases
he found that often true; trust his pattern over one man's
35
exception. But the author is an honest counterexample: he
understood completely and did not fully heal. For some of
us the work continues past insight — repetition, voicing,
presence. If understanding alone frees you, wonderful. If it
doesn't, you are not doing it wrong, and you are not alone.
• Relapse is normal. A symptom returning is not failure; it is
the old reflex, met now with the new response.
• Everyone deserves a little bit of pain. Chasing a perfectly
pain-free life is the very perfectionism that started this. Aim
for freedom, not flawlessness.
• This is one path, walked by one man — and an atypical
one. It is offered as evidence, not as a promise.
• How you'd know this isn't your story. A real claim can be
wrong, so here is the test: if your pain never rises and falls
with what you feel; if presence does nothing and only a
structural fix ever touches it; if a doctor finds a disease that
explains it — then this is not your mechanism, and chasing
it would only delay the care you need. The safety gate
above is not a formality. It is how you keep this honest.
The evidence & further reading
(Citations verified 2026-06-07; confirm current printings/links
before press.)
• John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain (1991), The Mindbody
Prescription (1998), The Divided Mind (2006) — the
repressed-emotion model and the "symptom imperative."
• Howard Schubiner (with Michael Betzold), Unlearn Your
Pain — neuroplastic pain; a workbook approach.
• Alan Gordon (with Alon Ziv), The Way Out (2021) — the
fear–pain cycle, somatic tracking, Pain Reprocessing
36
Therapy.
• Ashar, Gordon, Wager, et al., the Pain Reprocessing
Therapy randomized trial, JAMA Psychiatry (2022;
published online 2021) — controlled evidence that a
mind-brain explanation of the pain, not structural damage,
drives recovery. (The formal mediator of lasting relief was
reattributing the pain to mind/brain rather than the body:
Ashar et al., JAMA Network Open, 2023.)
• Brinjikji et al., AJNR (2015) — systematic review showing
"abnormal" spinal imaging is common in people with no
pain at all.
• David Hanscom, Back in Control (2016) — threat physiology
and chronic pain.
• Nicole Sachs, Mind Your Body (2025) and her
"JournalSpeak" method.
• On presence: Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (1997); and,
on the reality that sits beneath every argument, Robert
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
Resources
• Your physician — first, always.
• US crisis line: 988 (call or text).
• Mind-body / TMS communities and programs (the PPD
Association, Curable, and others) — verify current links
before print.
This appendix is a tool, not a treatment. It does not replace
the care of a qualified professional.
37
I'm a software developer, and was thinking of making a site where you could enter your Judge (mine is God, maybe your is Judge Wopner), Defense (Screwtape), symptoms, etc - and see how they do on trial!!
I can't upload the file, if you like it let me know.
THE PEOPLE
V.
FEAR
A SHORT STORY TO SALVATION
REALITY
The People v. Fear
A Short Story to Salvation
A Trial in Three Acts
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." — Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preface
I am a computer scientist. I have spent my life with systems that
either work or they do not, and with the particular humility
that comes from being told, every single day, by a machine,
exactly where my reasoning was wrong. It makes a person hard
to convince. Show a man enough proofs and he stops believing
anything on the strength of how nice it would be if it were true.
I do not take things on faith. I take them on evidence, on logic,
and on whether the explanation actually predicts what happens
next.
So when I tell you that the pain in my body — thirty years
of it — turned out not to come from my body, understand that
I did not arrive there by wanting to. I arrived dragged,
backward, arguing the whole way. This book is built for that
reader, because I am that reader. It makes its case the way I
needed the case made to me: reality first. It will show you
the evidence before it asks you to feel a single thing. If a step
does not follow, throw it out. I would.
2
A second confession, because logic requires honest premises
— and this one I have to make carefully, because I am about to
disagree with the very man whose work underpins this book.
Dr. John Sarno made a bold and hopeful claim across his
career: that the understanding itself is the cure — that once you
truly grasp the cause, the knowledge does the healing. On that
one point, my own case is a counterexample. I understood the
theory completely — read it, believed it, could have lectured on
it — and I did not fully heal.
But notice the asymmetry, because it matters more than my
exception does. Sarno looked for his pattern across tens of
thousands of cases. I have one — my own. A single
counterexample does not refute a pattern drawn from
thousands; humanity is messy, and one data point is the
weakest evidence there is. So when in doubt, trust Sarno, not
me. For most readers, the understanding may well be most of
the cure, exactly as he said. But if you are the kind of reader
who gets it and still hurts — as I did — then you need to know
there can be work left after the understanding, and this book is
honest about what it was. That is not a hole in the argument. It
is the most important data point in it.
I have set it down as a trial, because that is how a logical
mind weighs a charge: evidence, witnesses, cross-examination,
and a verdict that follows from them or is thrown out. The
accused is not your body — your body, I will show you, has
been sitting in the dock wrongly accused for years. The real
defendant is fear, and behind it an older accomplice. The
People — of your own right mind — versus Fear. It is a short
book on purpose; the truth here is not large, only hard to look
at.
3
I built it, in fact, the way I was trained to build software.
Code efficiently: a good program is structured and lean, no
dead weight — so this one runs in three acts of three scenes,
and not a word past what the proof requires. Test every
assertion: in code you never trust a claim until it survives the
test written to break it; in a courtroom that test is called
cross-examination. Nothing in here is asserted that is not first
put on the stand and questioned — and anything that cannot
survive cross-examination does not belong in the program, or
in this book.
Court is in session.
ACT I — LISTEN
1.1 — The Court Convenes
4
The Judge — his name is Sound; over the door behind him,
one word: REALITY
I am fifty-eight years old and flat on my back, looking at a
ceiling I have looked at ten thousand mornings, and tonight the
5
ceiling is not a ceiling. It opens. It goes up and up into a dark
the color of a starless sky, and the dark is full of people who
have come to decide something about me.
That is how the dream begins. It always begins the same
way. I lie still in the bed I have grown old in, and the room
turns into a court.
It is a high room, all dark wood and cold stone, the smell of
dust and floor wax and old paper. There is a bench at the front,
and on the bench sits the Judge. His name is Sound — and you
understand, the moment you are in the room, that it means
every kind of sound at once: whole, and true, and sound of
mind, and a depth you could drop a stone into and never hear
it land. Carved across the front of his bench, in the old
language, three words — Mens sana, corpus sanum, spiritus sanus, a
sound mind, a sound body, a sound spirit — and over the door
behind him, where another court would carve the scales, one
word only: REALITY. The Judge does not raise his voice. He
does not have to. When he is displeased the whole room goes
ten degrees colder, and you find you have stopped breathing
without deciding to. I cannot hold his eyes. No one can. They
are the one thing in the room with a bottom you cannot see.
I spent my working life with logic and machines — I built
systems, I found the one broken thing in a hundred thousand
lines, I was the one they called when something had to work
and could not be allowed to fail. I am not a man who has spent
much time in rooms like this, and I stand off to the side the way
I always have, hands empty, waiting to be told where to go.
And in the box where the accused is meant to stand — this
is the part I can never get used to — there is no man.
6
There is a body.
My body. Bent the way it has bent for thirty years, one
shoulder lower than the other, a hand pressed to the small of
the back the way you'd press a wound to keep it from opening.
It stands in the dock and does not look at me, and the whole
court looks at it the way a family looks at the thing in the room
that has been killing them slowly, by inches, for longer than
anyone can remember.
"The accused," says the Judge, and his voice goes straight
through the wood of the place into the wood of me, "stands
charged with the theft of thirty years. With the robbing of a
man's nights. The souring of the love at the center of his life.
The slow grinding-down of a decent and ordinary life." His
eyes come off the bench and find me where I stand at the side.
"Does the man it was used against understand the charge?"
I do. God help me, I have understood it longer than I have
understood anything.
"Then we will begin," says the Judge. "And we will begin the
way this court always begins. With the truth, and not with the
comfort. Sit. And listen."
So I sit. And — for the first time in thirty years, it seems to
me — I listen.
1.2 — The Evidence Heard
7
The young Prosecutor — the youngest soul in the room, and
the only one who read the regulations
I had expected the prosecutor to be a hard man. The kind
they put on television, all teeth and certainty. Instead a young
8
one stands up, the youngest soul in the room, the crease still
sharp in his sleeve, outranked by every grey head at every table.
The defense counsel — a courteous grey figure folded into a
too-fine collar, who has not yet said a word but smiles at
everything — leans to a colleague and murmurs something,
and there is a soft laugh, and the young man's ears go red.
But he stands up anyway. And the strange thing, the thing I
notice before I understand it, is that he does not look at my
body the way a prosecutor should look at the accused. He looks
at it the way you look at someone you are afraid you are about
to wrong. I have the oddest feeling I have seen his face before
— in a mirror, a long time ago, before I learned to keep it
down.
"I am not here to convict this body," he says. "I am here to
find out whether the case against it is true. There is a
difference, and the difference is the whole of why we are here."
He calls his first witness. They bring in a man with a flat box
of films, the grey ghost-pictures they take of your insides, the
ones a doctor once held up to a light and pointed at and used a
word that I carried for the rest of my life like a stone in the
shoe.
"You have read this man's pictures," says the young
prosecutor.
"I have read ten thousand like them."
"And his are bad."
"His are ordinary." The witness says it plainly, without
cruelty. "There is wear in them. There is the wear that comes
to every back that has carried a life. I will tell this court
9
something it will not want to believe." He turns, not to the
bench, but out, toward me, toward the dark past the back of the
room where I have the strange feeling there are others listening.
"I can lay these same pictures — these same shadows, this same
wear, the words that frightened this man for thirty years —
beside the pictures of people who feel nothing at all. Who carry,
who lift, who sleep like children. The shadow is not the pain.
The shadow has never once been the pain. We told a
frightened man that a photograph was a sentence, and he
served it."
The room is very quiet.
"Then the structure," says the prosecutor, "cannot account
for the suffering."
"It cannot. I have looked. It is, on the evidence before this
court, a sound body."
"Noted," says the Judge, "and entered above the record,
where it will stay." It is the only warmth I will feel from the
bench for a long time, and it is not aimed at me; it is aimed at
the truth, which the Judge treats as the only living thing in the
room. "The body is sound. The prosecution may proceed to the
question that leaves us."
1.3 — A Body Wrongly Accused
10
The accused — in the dock where a man should stand, only a
body, bent thirty years
I want to tell you what it is to sit in a dream and hear, out
loud, in a voice you cannot argue with, that the thing you
11
blamed for thirty years did not do it.
It is not relief. Relief comes later, or it does not come at all.
What it is, first, is terror. Because if the body did not do this —
if the body has stood in that dock innocent every night of my
life while I cursed it — then the thing that did do it has been
loose in the room the whole time. Sitting somewhere behind
me. Wearing my coat. Using my voice.
And it means something worse, something a logical man
cannot un-see once he has seen it: for thirty years I prosecuted
the wrong defendant. I hated my back, my spine, my own
failing frame; I spent a fortune and the better part of a love and
most of a life fighting the one party in this room that had never
done anything but carry me. The guilty one was never in the
dock at all. The guilty one, I would learn, had been sitting at
the defense table the whole time — helping me aim.
The young prosecutor feels it too. I watch him feel it. He
stands in the middle of that cleared, terrible space where the
accused used to be, and he asks the only question left to ask.
"If not the body," he says, "then who?"
And from the back of the court — from the dark where I
had felt the others listening — something stirs. Not the grey
counsel at his table; he only folds his hands tighter, like a man
who knows his clients are about to be named and means to
defend every one of them. Something further back. Something
that has been in this room from the beginning, that was in this
room before I was born, that taught me my first word and most
of the ones since.
The Judge does not flinch. The Judge has been waiting for
this longer than I have been alive.
12
"Then we will call them," he says. "One at a time. Up the
chain, to the one who hired the rest." His bottomless eyes find
me one more time before the lights go down on the first act of
my own trial. "Stay where you are. You have spent thirty years
not looking at this. Tonight you are going to look."
ACT II — THINK
2.1 — The Perfectionist
13
The Perfectionist — the Goody Two-Shoes
The first one they call comes up the aisle like he owns the
building.
14
He is dressed better than anyone in the room: scrubbed,
prim, the buckled shoes of the goody-two-shoes who was always
held up to the other children as the example. He carries a
clipboard. He has the face of every foreman, every teacher,
every father who was never once satisfied. Not cruel, you
understand. Worse than cruel. Disappointed. He looks at my
body in the dock and clicks his tongue, the way you do at a job
done at ninety percent.
"State your work," says the prosecutor.
"I keep the standard," the Perfectionist says, and he says it
proudly. "Everything right. The job done well, the family
provided for, no one let down, nothing left undone. I made this
man who he was. Ask anyone. Dependable. The one you could
count on." He turns the clipboard toward the room and I see it
is covered, top to bottom, edge to edge, in a single word,
written ten thousand times in a tight hard hand. More. More.
More.
"And when the standard is not met?"
"The standard is never met." He says this as though it were
obvious, as though it were the weather. "It can't be. That's the
use of it. There is always a thing done at ninety percent. There
is always the better man who would have done it at a hundred."
He shrugs. "So there is always something to feel about that."
"Something," says the young prosecutor quietly. "Say the
word."
The Perfectionist will not say the word. So the prosecutor
says it for him.
15
"Anger." He lets it sit in the cold air. "Every day, a hundred
small times a day, you handed this man a verdict of not good
enough, and every verdict struck a spark, and the sparks were
anger. Ordinary, lawful, human anger at a standard no living
person could ever meet."
"I never told him to be angry," the Perfectionist says, and for
the first time he looks uneasy. "That would be — that's not — a
good man isn't angry. I taught him better than that. I taught
him to be good."
"Yes," says the prosecutor. "You did. So there were two laws
here, not one. Be perfect, and be good. Be flawless at every task,
and never once be anything but kind and quiet and selfless. No
living soul can keep either, and you handed him both, and
called his failing to keep them his character." He nods, almost
gently. "The good little boy who must never be bad, and the
perfect man who can never be enough: the same prison, two
names. Hold that thought. The court will want it later."
The grey counsel rises, smooth as oil. "My lords, surely we
are not putting diligence on trial. The man worked hard. He
provided. He was good. If conscientiousness is a crime, half the
graveyards are full of felons who only ever tried their best —"
"It is not a crime to set a high standard," says the Judge, and
the room lowers itself to meet his quiet. "It becomes one when
the standard is impossible and the failure is punished in secret.
The witness has named what the failure produced. The court
will hear where it went."
2.2 — The Buried Evidence
16
The Rage — the Werewolf chained in the cellar
They call the anger next, and the anger does not come.
The young prosecutor waits. We all wait. And then he
understands, the way you understand a thing you have known a
17
long time without letting yourself know it, and he stops looking
at the door and starts looking at the floor.
"It does not come," he says, "because it was never let out.
Bring up what's under the building."
And they open a hatch in the floor of the court — I did not
know it was there, I have stood over it my whole life — and out
of it comes a smell like a cellar that has been shut thirty years,
and a sound like water shifting somewhere deep under the
house, and the room fills with the thing I spent my life
pretending I did not have.
Rage. Not a tantrum. Not a temper. A reservoir of it, dark
and still and enormous, the accumulated anger of thirty years
with nowhere lawful to go. And down in the dark of it
something with a beast's shape turns over and shows its back:
the wolf the good man kept chained in the cellar his whole life,
fed nothing, named nothing, let out never. Not evil. Only
starved, and strong, and mine. Every spark the Perfectionist
ever struck. Every time I swallowed it and smiled. Every don't
make a fuss, every others first, every a good man doesn't feel
this, all of it poured down the hatch and held, and held, and
held, until the holding was the largest thing in me.
"There is your root," the prosecutor says, and his voice is not
steady now. "This is the oldest thing in the case, and the
deepest, and the man who studied this longer than any of us —
a doctor, tens of thousands of patients, a whole career — said
so plainly: the real culprit is the rage we are not allowed to feel.
I will not stand here and pretend I am cleverer than that. This
is the root. Sarno was right."
18
"Then why," says the Judge, "is this man not healed by the
naming of it?"
And there it is. The question I have carried into this dream a
thousand times. Because I did learn the doctor's name. I read
the book. I believed it, all the way down, the way you believe
your own hand. And I did not get well.
"Because the Rage is not the thief," the prosecutor says
slowly, working it out in front of us, the way you only can when
you are fully there and not running ahead. "The Rage smashed
the window. The Rage stood lookout. But the Rage did not
climb in and take thirty years. Something used it. Something
heard all that pressure building down there in the dark and
made a decision." He lifts his head. "There is another one. Call
the one who turned the rage into a weapon."
2.3 — Caught in the Act
And then — right there, in the courtroom, while the whole
bench is watching — my body in the dock cries out and folds,
both hands to the small of the back, the old familiar bolt of it,
the pain I have known longer than I have known almost any
face in my life.
The grey counsel is on his feet at once. "There! You see!
Real pain, my lords — real, the man is not pretending, look at
him — surely this proves —"
"It proves nothing yet," says the young prosecutor, and he
does the bravest thing I have ever seen a man do. He does not
panic. He watches. He stays, completely, in the second that is
happening. "When did it come?"
19
The witness — a quiet woman who has been taking notes
the whole trial — looks up. "The instant we said call the one
who turned the rage into a weapon. Not before. The feeling
rose first. The pain came a half-second behind it, to cover it. I
timed it. It tracks the fear, my lords. It does not track the
wound. There is no wound. We have established that. It tracks
the fear."
"Caught in the act," the prosecutor says softly.
"And there is more." The woman turns a page. "I went back
through this man's whole record, because a thing that does this
once has done it before. He had it as a boy: a stomach,
headaches, the doctor could find nothing. He drank, for a
while, to throw water on it. But fear is made of oil, my lords.
The water only scattered the fire and spread it, and the flames
dropped while he was drunk and sprang up everywhere once
he dried out. He put the drink down by main strength, and the
pain came up to take its place. And here is the thing I cannot
get past." She looks, for the first time, straight at me. "Once,
years ago, this man had a panic, a true terror out of nowhere,
and in the grip of it the pain vanished. Completely. For the
length of the attack he was a man without a back. Two of them
cannot hold the stage at once. Do you understand what that
means? They are not many illnesses. They are one thing,
changing its coat. Pain, stomach, drink, dread: one author,
many disguises."
And that, not the films, not the clever talk, was the thing that
finally turned me. I am a man who trusts a test that can fail.
Two symptoms will not share a stage is a prediction; you can go
looking for the day they overlap, and if you ever find it, the
whole theory falls. I looked. I never found it. A prediction that
20
holds every time you try to break it is the closest thing to proof
this world hands out. I had hunted a wound for thirty years.
There had never been a wound. There had only ever been one
liar, and thirty coats.
"Enter all of it above the record," says the Judge, and the
cold in the room is absolute now, "where it will stay. — A
warning to the court, and to anyone listening past the back of
this room." His eyes go out into the dark. "This is not a license
to ignore your body or your mind. A man with a true disease
needs a doctor. A man drowning in drink or in despair, a man
seized by a mind running too fast or sunk too low, needs help
and must go and get it. We rule on the cases that come to us
cleared — disease ruled out, danger ruled out. Only then is this
court in session. Do not mistake the verdict for a reason to
gamble." He turns back. "Now. The prosecution has its single
author. Name him."
The young prosecutor turns toward the defense table —
toward the courteous grey figure who has defended every client
all afternoon, who has smiled at everything, who has not once, I
realize, been called as anything but counsel.
"He has been in the room the whole time," the prosecutor
says. "He has been running the defense. My lords — the one
who turned the rage into a weapon, the one who stole the thirty
years, is the lawyer himself. I call the counsel to the stand. I call
Fear."
ACT III — VOICE
3.1 — Fear Under Cross
21
Fear — the simpering coward under the lawyer
He does not want to go. Of course he does not. As long as
the trial runs he is employed; a verdict is the one thing he
cannot survive. But the Judge looks at him, and the room goes
22
cold, and there is nowhere in a court of Reality for Fear to hide.
He takes the stand and he is, even now, magnificent.
Reasonable. Warm. The most plausible voice you ever heard.
"This is all," he says gently, "a terrible misunderstanding. I
only ever protected him. Every alarm I ever rang, I rang for his
own good. Was I to stay silent while his body — forgive me,
while that sensation — might have meant something dreadful?
I am not a criminal, my lords. I am a guardian. I meant only
"
—
"Say it," says the prosecutor.
"— only the best," says Fear. "Good intentions. My whole
life, good intentions."
"You defended the Perfectionist this afternoon. You
defended the Rage. You have a kind word for every accused in
this room." The prosecutor takes a single step closer. "Why
would the same lawyer defend all of them?"
"Professional courtesy," says Fear, and smiles.
"Or because they all work for you." The young man does
not raise his voice; he has learned, somewhere in this trial,
where the real power in the room keeps its volume. "Here is
what you did. You could not have done it alone — you are not
the root, and I will not flatter you that you are. The Rage
smashed the window. The Rage stood lookout. But you,
Counsel — you climbed in. You took a man's true and lawful
anger, the anger he was forbidden to feel, and you whispered
that it was dangerous, that a good man who felt such a thing
was a monster, that it must never, ever be let into the light. And
then you offered him the only way out you sell. You buried it.
23
And to keep it buried, to keep his eyes down and away from it,
you reached into his body and you turned on the pain. Not to
harm him. To distract him. The pain was never the crime. The
pain was the cover-up."
"You cannot prove —"
"And when he saw through it," the prosecutor goes on, and
now there is iron in him, "when he read the doctor's book and
learned your trick with the back and stopped being afraid of the
pain — you did not surrender. You are too good a craftsman
for that. You simply changed the cover. If I can't reach him through
the body, you thought, I'll reach him through the mind. No pain this
time. He'll never see what hit him. You gave him, in medical terms,
mania. Racing thoughts, delusions of grandeur, doing a dozen
things at once. A very unusual and desperate TMS symptom."
The room has stopped breathing. And Fear — Fear who has
a silken word for every sin — opens his mouth to explain, and
meets the eyes of the Judge, in whose court no lie has ever once
held, and finds that for the first time in thirty years he has
nothing to say.
He cannot handle the truth. That, in the end, is the whole of
him. He is the one thing in creation that cannot bear to be
looked at plainly, because being looked at plainly is the one
thing that kills him.
And the silk runs out of him all at once. The courteous grey
lawyer is gone, and what kneels in his place — wringing its
hands, simpering, pleading to a floor it cannot lift its eyes from
— is the thing that was always under the good suit: a small,
cowering creature, on its knees. That is Fear's true shape. He
wore the lawyer because he could not bear for anyone, least of
24
all me, to see the coward.
"The witness," says the Judge, "may step down. He has
confessed in the only language he speaks." The grey figure
seems smaller, going back to his table. "There remains one
voice this court has not heard."
3.2 — Adam Finds His Voice
For a moment I do not understand. And then I understand,
and I would give anything to be anywhere else.
"The man may speak," says the Judge. "Not to the prisoner.
You will not argue with him — Reality does not owe a voice an
answer, and you will only feed what you mean to starve. Not to
his counsel. To me. To the court. To yourself."
I have been silent the whole trial, the way I was silent the
whole of my life. Others first, myself never. The quiet one. The
dependable one. The one who carried it and did not complain,
and called the not-complaining a virtue, and let it become the
mortar they built the wall out of. I do not have the words. I
never let myself keep any.
So I find a few. They come out badly, in the wrong order,
the way a thing comes out when it has been held under thirty
years.
I say: I was angry. It broke in the worst year of my life — I
was twenty-seven, my father just buried, the rest of my life
bearing down on me and the love at the heart of it already
turning hard — and the anger of all of it had nowhere a good
man could put it. I have been angry ever since, and I was not
allowed to be, and so I drowned it, and the drowning of it cost
me everything the pain was blamed for. I say it to the dark,
25
where the rage came up out of the hatch, and I do not curse it
now, because I understand at last that it was never the villain; it
was a true thing in me that I would not let live, and it only ever
wanted what every buried thing wants, which is air.
I say: I am not angry at the man who first frightened me, or
the doctor with the picture, or my own younger self for being
afraid. They meant it kindly. That is the part that took me
thirty years to bear — that almost no one in this story meant
me any harm at all.
The Judge speaks then, and for the only time all night his
voice is not cold but unbearably gentle — the way you speak to
a child who has hurt himself reaching for a thing he was
warned away from. "And the one you have not forgiven," he
says. "You are only ever told your own story, you know. Never
hers. Name her — and then hear the part you were never
given."
So I say the hardest name. The person I had built my life
around. Who would not come close the way I wanted; who
turned in early to bed on the one night I had built perfect —
the lobster, the wine, the candles I had lit one at a time — and
left me sitting in all that careful light feeling I had been weighed
and found wanting. I had made that evening into a case for
everything I believed I had earned and was owed, and she had
risen from the table and gone to sleep, and I had filed it with
the rest: thirty years of small evidence that I gave and gave and
was never loved back in the coin I was paying in.
And the Judge only waits, and in the waiting I am told at last
the part of the story that was never mine to see — that she
carried a wound from long before me, a thing too heavy ever to
26
set on the table between us, and that the distance I read as a
verdict on me was only her standing as near the fire as she
could bear. She was not withholding what I deserved. She was
surviving something I was never shown. I had judged her by
my story because it was the only one I had been handed, and it
was never the whole of it, and it was never even the truth.
So I do two things at once, and they turn out to be one
thing. I forgive her — and I am sorry. Sorry for the thirty years
I kept a ledger against a woman who was quietly bleeding the
whole time; sorry that I begged to be ministered to and never
once asked what she was carrying. The remorse is real, and it
does not crush me. It sets the thing down, and frees the arm
that had held it so long it had forgotten it was holding anything
at all.
And I say one more thing, the only thing I have ever said for
myself in fifty-eight years, and I say it to no one and to the
whole room: I am here. Right now. In this second. Not back
there in the picture, not ahead in the fear of what the picture
meant. Here. And the strange thing, the thing no one ever told
me, is that the moment I am fully here, there is no room left in
the second for the voice at all.
3.3 — The Verdict & The Way Out
The Judge does not deliberate. Reality is in no hurry, and it
never needs to think; it only needs you to stop talking long
enough to hear it.
"The body is acquitted," he says. "It was sound from the
first; it was a witness dressed as the accused, and this court
regrets the thirty years it stood wrongly in that dock. And let
the record show the man was never on trial here either: he was
27
lied to by an expert, and you do not convict the deceived for
believing the lie. The Perfectionist is bound over; he may keep
a standard but he may no longer punish in secret. The Rage is
released — not punished, released — to be felt, and named,
and given its voice, which is the only thing it ever required and
the whole of its cure. And Fear—
"
He pauses, and the cold lifts, just slightly, the way it does the
once or twice a trial when he allows himself to be gentle.
"Fear is convicted. But hear the sentence, because it is not
what you expect, and it is the only sentence that has ever
worked. You will not fight him. You cannot win a shouting
match with a voice; the shouting is the food he eats. You will
not argue, you will not reason, you will not throw water on him
— he is made of oil and the water only spreads him. You will
do the one thing he cannot survive. You will turn toward him,
and look, and say nothing, and stay. You will let the alarm ring
and you will not get up to answer it. Starve the voice; feed the
silence. That is the way out, and it is a poor weapon and a
perfect one, and it asks of you only that you be here, where I
am, where reality is, where he has never once been able to
follow. And do not take even this on faith: it has been put to the
proof — against false cures, and against doing nothing at all —
and it outlasted them both."
Somewhere far up in the dark a door seems to open and a
light to come on, very small, very steady.
"One last word," says the Judge, "from the doctor, who has
earned it." And the old man with the films — Sarno, I know
somehow, though no one says it — leans forward and says the
kindest hard thing anyone has said to me in the whole of my
28
life.
"Everyone," he says, "deserves a little bit of pain. Stop trying
to be perfectly well. The need to be flawless and finished and
never to ache again — that is only the first one back in another
coat. You will climb up into the clear air now and then, and
you will see the whole of it laid out, and you will think you can
live up there. You cannot. There is no air on the summit. You
come back down and you eat your supper and you balance
your accounts and you carry the heavy thing without dropping
it, and that — not the mountaintop — is where a life is lived. A
little pain is the toll for being a person. Pay it, and stop
checking the wound."
The truth knocks at the door. For thirty years I said go away,
I'm looking for the truth, and it went away. Tonight I let it in.
The ceiling becomes a ceiling again. I am fifty-eight years
old and flat on my back in the bed I have grown old in, and the
room is just a room, quiet, and gray with the first of the
morning, and mine. My back aches a little. I let it. I do not get
up to answer it.
I am here.
— end —
Afterword — A Note from the Author,
Mid-Fight
I should tell you where this book came from, because it is the
argument made flesh.
29
I had fear on the run. I had seen through the pain —
stopped fearing it, stopped feeding it — and the body went
quiet for the first time in thirty years. That is exactly when it
happened. Cornered, its oldest weapon taken away, fear tried
something desperate and rare: it tried to distract me with
mania. No pain this time — just a mind suddenly running at
five times its speed, certain it could build everything at once. If
you think about it, it is a compliment; you only get the
desperate move once the ordinary ones have stopped working.
But I had the one tool the desperate move cannot beat:
presence. Standing in the present long enough to watch the
thing operate, I could see what it had done — name it, time it,
catch it in the act, exactly as the investigator does in these
pages. And then I did what the Judge prescribes: I did not fight
it head-on; I used its own weapon against it. The manic energy
it sent to scatter me into a dozen half-finished things, I aimed at
one. You are holding the result.
Writing it was itself the medicine. It calmed the mania to
pour it into a single channel — and there was an urgency I
understand only now: I had to get this out quick, at the top of
the mountain, before I climbed back down to take a shower
and balance my checking account. You cannot live on the
summit. (That mountain is Robert Pirsig's, from Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance — a book I read a dozen times trying to
understand, and which, after all these years, I think I finally do.)
But if you are paying attention, you can leave something built
up there on your way down.
And it is not only the mind. On that same mountaintop I
tested a thirty-year-old rule — a well-meaning therapist had
once told me to hold my shoulders back, and I had obeyed,
30
flinching at every reach, for three decades. I dropped it for one
breath: neutral shoulders; no shoulder rules exist. A five
became a two on the spot, and a half within days. There is a
worked example of exactly how in the pages that follow. The
method is the method, whether the symptom hides in the body
or the mind.
The rest I regulate the way you regulate any voice that runs
too hot — not with force, with attention, on a schedule. Every
three hours I stop, wherever I am, and write down three
numbers. Presence with a stopwatch.
My three-hour check (steal it):
• Symptoms (pain, etc.), 1–10. Right now: a 1.
• Mania — how many different creative things am I trying to
do at once? 5 high · 3 medium-high · 2 normal · 1 or 0
ideal.
• Drinking — drinks so far today? 0 = good job.
Three numbers, eight times a day. It sounds like nothing. It
is the difference between holding the reins and being dragged.
And here is the quiet victory: now, if I wake up tomorrow back
in the clouds, I will not be afraid — I have a strategy.
I am not cured, and I am not pretending to be — and I am
not doing it alone. I see a therapist tomorrow, and I am
reaching out to a well-known TMS physician for a virtual visit,
for advice on how to keep fear on the run. If your own mind is
racing like this, or sinking, please do the same: this is not "just
fear" to outsmart by yourself. Get a real doctor. I have.
This is one man, mid-fight, showing his work. The book is
the evidence — because by every ordinary law it should not
31
exist, and here it is, in your hands.
— A.M.
Appendix & Workbook — Working the Verdict
The story is the argument. This is the work. The computer
scientist's instinct holds here too: don't just accept the
conclusion — run it against your own life and see if it returns
true.
First, the safety gate (non-negotiable)
This book is about pain and symptoms that remain after disease
has been ruled out. Before you apply a word of it:
• See a physician and rule out structural disease and
dangerous conditions. This court only sits on cleared
cases.
• Red flags need a doctor now, not a verdict: fever with the
pain, unexplained weight loss, loss of bladder or bowel
control, progressive weakness or numbness, pain following
major trauma, relentless night pain, a first severe headache
or one that is "the worst of your life."
• If you are drinking to cope, sunk in depression, or your
mind is racing out of control, that is not "just fear" — it is a
reason to get help today. In the US, call or text 988
(Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
• Alcohol withdrawal can be fatal. Do not quit heavy
drinking abruptly without medical guidance.
The case in brief (the logic, on one page)
32
1. Structure ≠ pain. The "damage" on scans is common in
people with no pain at all; the picture is not the sentence.
2. The symptom tracks emotion, not tissue. It rises and falls
with feeling, not with the state of the body.
3. One author, many disguises. Pain, anxiety, the stomach,
the drink, the low moods and the high — they substitute for
one another (when one seizes the stage, another recedes). Not
many illnesses; one mechanism.
4. The mechanism: perfectionism and pressure real,
lawful rage you are not allowed to feel fear of that rage buries
it the brain manufactures a symptom to keep your attention
off it. Rage is the root; fear is the executor. The pain is
the cover-up, not the crime.
5. Therefore the cure is not aimed at the body. It is aimed at
the two criminals: give the rage a voice; starve the fear with
presence.
If a step does not follow for you, test it against your own
history before you accept it.
The work, part one — Voice the Rage (the root)
The rage is not a flaw; it is a true thing you were forbidden to
feel. It only ever wanted air. Give it some — on paper, where it
can harm no one.
• Set a timer (10–20 minutes). Write by hand if you can. No
editing, no audience, no keeping it. Then throw it away.
• Prompts: What am I angry about that a "good person" isn't
supposed to be angry about? Who do I resent and have
never told? What pressure am I carrying that I never
33
agreed to? What did I swallow this week and call it being
the bigger man?
• The aim is not catharsis-as-performance; it is letting the
buried thing be named and felt. (See Nicole Sachs's
"JournalSpeak" for a fuller method.)
The work, part two — Starve the Fear (the executor)
You cannot win an argument with a voice; the arguing is the
food it eats. You defeat it by no longer answering.
• When a symptom or the anxious voice rises, do not fix it
and do not fight it. Turn toward it with plain curiosity.
Note it: a sensation, not damage. I am safe. Let the alarm
ring without getting up to answer it.
• Be here. Bring your full attention into the present second —
what you see, hear, feel, right now. The voice lives in the
past and the future; it cannot follow you into the present,
and in the present there is no room left for it. This is the
holy silence — presence, not noise.
• Don't demand the summit. You will have clear, free
moments and you will come back down to ordinary aches
and ordinary days. That descent is not failure; it is a life.
A worked example — put a body-rule on the stand
Here is the whole method on one of my own symptoms, small
enough to see clearly.
Thirty years ago a well-meaning bodywork therapist told me
to hold my shoulders back. So I did — for thirty years —
pulling them back against their nature, and flinching every time
I reached for something, because reaching rolled my shoulders
forward and "broke the rule." That flinch was the fear, and one
34
clear morning I finally caught it in the act: the small bolt of
dread at the simple act of reaching for a cup.
How was I deceived for thirty years? The honest answer is
the one the prosecutor wrings out of the defendant in this story
— for all that time, I could not handle the truth: that I had built
my days around a rule I had never once put to the test.
So I tested it. I had assumed, on an expert's say-so, that
held-back shoulders hurt less than neutral ones, and in three
decades I had never checked. I took a breath and said it plainly,
to no one: Neutral shoulders. Relax into nothing. No shoulder
rules exist. I let them fall where a body lets them fall. The pain
dropped from a 5 to a 2 on the spot. Today it is a half.
That is the protocol entire. Find a rule you hold your body
to out of fear — a posture, a "never bend that way," a brace
you have carried so long it feels like care. Put it on the stand.
Catch the flinch that guards it. Drop the rule for one breath.
Measure before and after, and let reality, not the rule, return
the verdict. Most of these rules were handed to you by people
who meant well and were wrong; you do not owe them another
thirty years.
(The one exception, and it matters: a rule from a current
doctor for a diagnosed condition stays until that doctor lifts it.
We test the fear-rules — not your treatment.)
Honesty (the data points that matter)
• Understanding may not be the whole cure. Here this book
parts, on one point only, from Dr. Sarno — who held that
the knowledge itself heals. Across tens of thousands of cases
he found that often true; trust his pattern over one man's
35
exception. But the author is an honest counterexample: he
understood completely and did not fully heal. For some of
us the work continues past insight — repetition, voicing,
presence. If understanding alone frees you, wonderful. If it
doesn't, you are not doing it wrong, and you are not alone.
• Relapse is normal. A symptom returning is not failure; it is
the old reflex, met now with the new response.
• Everyone deserves a little bit of pain. Chasing a perfectly
pain-free life is the very perfectionism that started this. Aim
for freedom, not flawlessness.
• This is one path, walked by one man — and an atypical
one. It is offered as evidence, not as a promise.
• How you'd know this isn't your story. A real claim can be
wrong, so here is the test: if your pain never rises and falls
with what you feel; if presence does nothing and only a
structural fix ever touches it; if a doctor finds a disease that
explains it — then this is not your mechanism, and chasing
it would only delay the care you need. The safety gate
above is not a formality. It is how you keep this honest.
The evidence & further reading
(Citations verified 2026-06-07; confirm current printings/links
before press.)
• John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain (1991), The Mindbody
Prescription (1998), The Divided Mind (2006) — the
repressed-emotion model and the "symptom imperative."
• Howard Schubiner (with Michael Betzold), Unlearn Your
Pain — neuroplastic pain; a workbook approach.
• Alan Gordon (with Alon Ziv), The Way Out (2021) — the
fear–pain cycle, somatic tracking, Pain Reprocessing
36
Therapy.
• Ashar, Gordon, Wager, et al., the Pain Reprocessing
Therapy randomized trial, JAMA Psychiatry (2022;
published online 2021) — controlled evidence that a
mind-brain explanation of the pain, not structural damage,
drives recovery. (The formal mediator of lasting relief was
reattributing the pain to mind/brain rather than the body:
Ashar et al., JAMA Network Open, 2023.)
• Brinjikji et al., AJNR (2015) — systematic review showing
"abnormal" spinal imaging is common in people with no
pain at all.
• David Hanscom, Back in Control (2016) — threat physiology
and chronic pain.
• Nicole Sachs, Mind Your Body (2025) and her
"JournalSpeak" method.
• On presence: Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (1997); and,
on the reality that sits beneath every argument, Robert
Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
Resources
• Your physician — first, always.
• US crisis line: 988 (call or text).
• Mind-body / TMS communities and programs (the PPD
Association, Curable, and others) — verify current links
before print.
This appendix is a tool, not a treatment. It does not replace
the care of a qualified professional.
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