17 Quotes by John E. Sarno

Most of the structural changes in your spine are natural occurrences.” “The brain doesn’t want to face up to the repressed anger, so it is running away from it.” “By laughing at or ignoring the pain, you are teaching the brain to send new messages to the muscles.” “We’re going to help you take the Sword of Damocles into your hands instead of having it hang over your head.

People often say that they have a very stressful job and that’s why they’re tense. But if they weren’t conscientious about doing a good job, if they weren’t trying to succeed, achieve, and excel, they wouldn’t generate tension. Often such people are highly competitive and determined to get ahead. Typically, they are more critical of themselves than others are of them.

Put another way, painful or otherwise distressing psychosomatic symptoms are designed for self-preservation, not self-flagellation.

After many years of experience it is our impression that not more then 10 to 15 percent of the population would be willing to accept a psychosomatic diagnosis.

Strange as it may seem, people with an unconscious psychological need for symptoms tend to develop a disorder that is well known, like back pain, hay fever, or eczema.

It is appropriate to designate Freud as the grandfather of psychosomatic medicine since his genius introduced us to the world of the unconscious mind, a contribution to medical science of inestimable importance. Psychosomatic processes begin in the unconscious and, though it has yet to be widely appreciated by either physical or psychiatric medicine, unconscious emotions are a potent factor in virtually all physical ills.

Patients often report pain in a new location as the old one gets better. It is as though the brain is unwilling to give up this convenient strategy for diverting attention away from the realm of the emotions.

The work of Dr. Hans Selye is credited with first drawing attention to how stress affects the body; his research and writing were prolific and stand as one of the major accomplishments of medicine in the twentieth century.