You see, and now we've taken something that Sarno meant to be easy and turned it into something confusing and difficult for people. And worse yet we've given the TMS brain all kinds of lovely excuses. I can see it rubbing its hands together with glee. "Aha! I can keep her distracted in this quagmire forever!"
With all kinds of things to try it feels like the old Sarno 20/20 video with Geraldo Rivera focusing on (traditional) TMS with Sarno, and his brother using all kinds of various contraptions.
(I realise as I've written this, this is more broadly a reply to the earlier PRT discussion than to you personally, so sorry if it feels disjointed lol.)
Yeah, I appreciate this as a problem. It is annoying and it does suck but I would fall on a similar position to Ellen where sometimes, the Sarno approach
doesn't resonate for someone and others' do. It's obviously bad for the over-intellecutalising (
) types to feel they now have to "try everything, learn everything, incorporate everything" to get better and often suffer for just not committing to one approach - but I think it's probably net-positive that there's new routes available sometimes. I think nowadays, Alan is catering more to an audience who would actively reject the "woo-woo" emotionality of the Sarno approach (even if that's the root of their issue, and even if Alan himself would acknowledge that) by offering an alternative, more sciencey-sounding route to recovery from mindbody issues - and being fair, it does work for many! In the same way people are sometimes directed to reviews of Sarno's books to prove this stuff works, you can do the same with Gordon, Schubiner, etc... but I agree that the PRT school is missing that essential emotional factor, and won't work for just as many.
I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm working with a TMS practitioner who's been around a while; she's friends with Sarno's daughter, knew/knows him and other TMS practitioners personally, has been in the game a loooong time, and now contributes to things like the PPD textbook to try get this mindbody stuff into the medical sphere. She is both quite traditional
and very in touch with the modern forks of TMS/PPD/MBS because of her work (whoooo acronyms). I've discussed the merits of PRT with her before. Like people here, she loathes the overintellectualisation of the space, though she understands the impulse of the TMS brain lol. And she largely has the same objection to PRT/Alan Gordon's current approach that many here do - it's not emotional enough!
And that is a problem. He
has traded away the verbiage of unconscious rage, etc. and I don't think he (often) writes about journalling etc. on his posts like Sarno references because it didn't help him when he was suffering, it just became another point of obsession
. I think he's given the subject a less emotional dressing because, in the nicest way possible, he's "sold out" a bit to the conventional medical crowd in focusing so hard on the neuroscience of it... but I think that he's doing it because it lets him reach an audience who would be resistant to the original delivery of the message, even if it'd help them. (We all know people who'd freak out if it was suggested to them that their symptoms were driven by their mind. Those same people are often less resistant to the idea of their pain being a learned habit, a danger signal, etc., whatever wording is used by he/Curable and stuff...) But beneath it, and in his book, he does still preach the exact same idea that this is fuelled by loooong-running emotions that we
don't need to get the bottom of to heal, we just need to become aware of them, which I think is in keeping with the original ideas. I think it's just tailored towards a crowd who'd reject them as they were.
I think if you fall into the trap of trying everything, sticking to nothing, you're always going to flounder and continue to obsess because you're still "fixing" a thing that doesn't need it. (I am here, lol.) But I also do think that basically any one of these approaches can help, it's kinda just about what one you can buy into/believe the most and which frees you from the fear/obsession of TMS OR lets you gain the insight (to borrow Ellen's phrase) required to make that epiphany alone.
