A few years ago, I was dealing with chronic pain that just wouldn’t go away.
So I did what you'd expect — I tried to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
That sent me down a path I didn’t expect.
🍽 The Main Course — My Brain Kept Me in Pain
It started with a snowboarding accident that left me with persistent, debilitating back and hip pain.
It made perfect sense. I’d fallen hard. Something was clearly wrong.
Scans showed disc issues, labral tears, degenerative changes. At one point a doctor told me I had “the spine of an 85-year-old.”
If you’ve ever heard something like that, you know how it lands.
The advice was predictable: stop doing extreme things. Stick to easy walking. Protect the joint.
In other words, start shrinking your life around the injury.
Not long after the snowboarding accident, a friend had suggested I read Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno. Mind-body connections? I wasn’t interested.
I had a snowboarding accident. My body was injured. I was firmly in find the physical cause mode.
Three years later, still stuck and in pain, I read it.
And, it landed.
Not that my pain was imaginary...but my body’s protective system had stayed switched on longer than it needed to.
And as I learned in his book, a big part of that system — from the beginning — is built-up, unexpressed emotions. Stress, frustration, things we’re carrying but not really giving ourselves space to feel or process.
That part felt… uncomfortably relevant.
Turned out that to overcome it, there was work involved.
I got the workbook and actually did the exercises — writing honestly about emotions I had repressed...anger, frustration, sadness.
It felt a little strange. But it mattered.
As I let some of that pressure out, and stopped bracing for pain every time I moved, things began to loosen in a way they hadn’t before.
And I see a similar pattern play out in other areas — like digestion.
When people feel bloated, uncomfortable, or reactive to food, the instinct is the same:
Find the culprit.
Was it the gluten?
The garlic?
The dairy?
The histamine?
The explanations multiply quickly.
Just this week I got two back-to-back emails about digestion issues — one pointing to gut microbes and histamine, the next pointing to something else entirely.
Both could be true.
But what stood out to me is how quickly we’re pulled toward complex, physical explanations — and how rarely we start with the nervous system.
Because like my back, it’s not the first place we think to look.
So we keep searching. Trying to find the right food. The right culprit. The right fix.
And sometimes, that search keeps the system activated, because we’re skipping a piece that actually helps things settle.
To be clear, real medical conditions exist and matter.
But a lot of everyday digestive symptoms live in that gray area where the gut and nervous system are constantly interacting.
And when eating becomes something we stress over, monitor, analyze, and worry about all the time…that system can get a little overactive.
Bodies often settle down when the environment around them settles down.
And from there, it becomes a lot easier to see what, if anything, actually needs attention.
Which brings us back to my back.
Five years after being told I had the spine of an 85-year-old, and should probably avoid anything “extreme”, I ran my first marathon.
😮💨 Flavor Boost: Release Mode
If things build up…
it makes sense they might settle when something gets expressed.
Kind of like when I turn the Instant Pot to release mode and it lets out that long psssssshhhhhhh…
…and somehow it makes me sigh a little too.
Try this:
Write a few honest sentences you wouldn’t normally say out loud.
No softening. No spin. No “but it’s fine.”
Set a 2-minute timer.
Write. Close it. Move on.
☀️ Sweet Moment(s):
This week we've had a surprise warm spell.
Each day, I stepped out in the sun for a bit.
It felt like a small gift...much appreciated.
Until next time - more dogs, less dogma. Always.
Carol
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