Claire Conger

After I read Dr. Sarno’s The Divided Mind, I thought Wow! I’ll never have to be sick!

Dr. Sarno explains how he’s cured his own migraines and hayfever. (I have been able to stop having migraines, but I’m still working on the hayfever.)

I was having migraines when I felt trapped by my life situation. I cured them by going to university, a ticket to better job and being able to support myself so that I could leave my miserable “marriage.” Now, if I’m starting to get a migraine, I ask myself How am I being trapped? Then I fix it.

This “fixing it” can be tricky. One way is to change your view of your situation. I might have bought into my “marriage” and lived my husband’s way, reinforcing my relationship to my relationship with him. To do that, I would have had to sacrifice my relationship with myself and appeal to some higher power.

Dr. Sarno heals pain, most specifically back pain, and dubbed this disease-of-the-mind TMS for tension myositis syndrome. He believes that most chronic pain, including repetitive stress injury and mind-numbing diseases like fibromyalgia, are caused by unconscious anger.

His theory is that the mind distracts you from your anger by manufacturing pain. This is anger that everyone has but believes it is dangerous to have. Dr. Sarno uses his own example of a malady (I don’t remember what exactly) that recurred when he went on a long trip with his wife. He doesn’t like long trips and didn’t want to go. It occurred to him when they returned home that he was angry at his wife for “making” him go on the trip.

Dr. Sarno concluded that is was better to suffer personal illness than marital discord!

Easy for him to say. His illness was short lived. What about people, more often women, who suffer chronic disease?

This concept, that unconscious anger generates pain and illness, makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. If you’re angry at your caveman clan, say for example you think they’re not giving you your share of food, how can you survive? You want some food, so you dare not complain lest they further cut your rations. You can’t live in the wilds on your own, so you have to continue to get along. To facilitate your survival, your unconscious mind makes you dependent on your clan by bringing you down with a disability in the form of pain or illness. They minister to your illness and you feel closer to them. Your anger becomes unconscious and you think you are grateful.

With great respect to Dr. Sarno, I think you can have the same effect with no anger involved. This book, Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion, enlightens!

I am acquainted with a couple in which the wife has a degenerative condition that causes her to have shaking motor control. I can’t help but wonder if unconsciously she’s generating dependence on her husband—the symptoms are convenient for deepening a husband/wife relationship, as her shaking requires a steady and loving (masculine) hand. He is responding perfectly—when they told me about the illness, he put his arm around her and declared his need for her, his life partner. She expressed her gratitude.

I suspect she, like Dr. Sarno, would rather be ill within that relationship than healthy outside it.

Surely we can have love like that without illness. For many of Dr. Sarno’s patients, just understanding the mind/body connection is sufficient for cure. That might not be so easy for a woman who’s unconscious motivation is to “wed” herself to her husband.