Is This the Cure for Chronic Pain and Anxiety? (Nicole Sachs, LCSW)

Listen now (61 mins) | "Know this is happening and if you can come into alignment with this is the way the human being functions, you can do the work to lower the reservoir..."

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So the way I met Nicole Sachs was very sweet. She reached out after reading my book On Our Best Behavior because there are some parallels between our work and life obsessions. We've been in conversation since then and I am so thrilled to see how she's evolved her work up to today and into her book: Mind Every Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain & Anxiety. I know this is an overused and big statement, but I really believe this book is going to change many lives as Nicole's work has already helped so many people dealing with chronic pain, anxiety, and simply the daily overwhelm of being human. At the top of our conversation today, Nicole explains how she discovered Dr. John Sarno and eliminated her own debilitating back pain years ago and why she's come to believe that many chronic conditions stem from a dysregulation in the nervous system that leads the brain to send pain signals as a source of protection.

As Nicole puts it, the pain is not in your head, but the solution is not in altering your physical body. Today she breaks down her method, which is honestly very simple, and free, and requires no surgeries. It involves something called JournalSpeak to lower your emotional reservoir, which I think can be incredibly helpful for many of us, whether or not you experience pain or anxiety. I've personally found it to be very enlightening. To be clear, we are certainly not suggesting in this conversation that you don't receive proper medical care or pursue a diagnosis for anything that is bothering you. Please always see your doctor. Okay, that said, let's get to it.

MORE FROM NICOLE SACHS:

Mind Every Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain & Anxiety

Nicole’s Podcast: The Cure for Chronic Pain

Follow NiELISE:

So you met new and worked alongside Dr. John Sarno and I have to say having read his work and I've watched All the Rage and I am constantly trying to push his books on my husband and my mother and other people I love, but reading Mind Your Body was a thrilling experience because as amazing as John Sarno's work is, you're telling of it and your framing of it within a psychotherapeutic model is exactly what people need because I think for some just the awareness that maybe what's happening in their body is located in their mind. Let’s talk about that because that's such an important distinction that you do a really good job with. But then I think there's this, what's next and his advice was go find a therapist and get to the root of your anger and pain, right? But you expand it way past anger and you provide all of these practices that as much as I picked up this book and thought about, oh, I can't wait to make my mother and my husband and my aunt read this, I also was recognizing myself in the pages and podcaster, heal thyself.

Trust me.

NICOLE:

Girl, I feel you.

ELISE:

So can you take us back to you tell your story in the book, but can you set this up for people about how you met Dr. Sarno and then how you came to do this work alongside him?

NICOLE:

I can. It's my favorite. When I first heard of Dr. Sarno, I was a grad student. I was young, I was in my early twenties and I had been diagnosed with a very severe spinal condition called spondylolisthesis, and I was told that it was going to be a dark prognosis that I would not have to have spinal fusion surgery right away, but I had to extremely limit my life in order to keep my back stable enough to stave off that surgery as long as possible because it's a major surgery. And the most important thing that I noted at 19 when I was being told all this stuff is that the surgery did not guarantee pain cessation. And so I was like, oh my goodness, my primary problem is not even being addressed here because I was in excruciating back pain at the time. So I was introduced to the work of Dr.

John Sarno. I understood his work to mean and it was wild, it was a wild assumption, but that we could be really, really angry. This is based on Sarno's work, not know it, but the only thing we could feel as the expression of that anger was back pain. This is the way I originally understood it when I read healing back pain early nineties. And so that made sense to me. It doesn't make sense to everyone and I know and that's why I have worked for 20 years to try to evolve his work. I know it needs proper explaining, but for me it landed in that wow, I can see that. I can see the way we can be bubbling over with rage and the body has no idea where to put it, and it gets channeled into sort of a constriction of the muscle, a spasm.

I always saw us as living in a mind body system as human beings. And one of the things I teach that I think really brings this to light well for people who are kind of like, huh, I don't know if that makes sense to me, is what I'm teaching people. And ultimately what Sarno is teaching people is something they already believe, which is who hasn't had a stressful day and gotten a headache? Who hasn't heard of someone who's about to go on stage and deliver a comedy routine, run to the bathroom and throw up? You don't think that person has the stomach virus. You know that an emotional stimulus has caused a physical reaction. Stress has caused the body to react. So I always knew and believed that there was a mind body connection, but I also understood why it was really hard. It was a difficult bridge for people to build when they have structural findings.

Certainly I have spondylolisthesis in the exact place that my back was hurting. Now when I finally walked through the doors of Dr. Sarno's office and he looked at my films, he was like, let me explain something to you dear. He was the most delightful soul. He was a grumpy old man with a heart of gold. He really looked at me and he said, I know you have this finding and I don't deny that. It's scary looking, but there is no way that any doctor, if you really sat them down and asked them pointed questions, would say that the pains you are having could all possibly be generated from this abnormality down your leg, up your back, sometimes in the upper back, sometimes in the lower moves from left to right. Many people who have any sort of structural pain can associate and can relate to this kind of explanation of the way pain exists in our bodies.

It's very fluid. He said, let me examine you. He gave me a full physical exam and he said, your pain is a result of a description that he used called TMS. People who are in the sarno world know what that means. It stands for tension, my neural syndrome. But what it really is is an umbrella under which all chronic pain resides, things that are constantly being triggered from a dysregulated nervous system that is stuck in fight or flight that can come through as structural pain, back, neck, shoulder, knee, hip can also come through as migraines, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, pelvic pain, long covid, chronic fatigue. And so what happened was I used his work to completely heal myself. So I have the exact same story on film that was God, it was so long ago, over 30 years ago, and I now have absolutely no chronic pain for over two decades and I have an unlimited life.

They told me it would be unlikely I would carry a biological child to term. I have three babies. I exercise till the day they were born. They're twenty two, twenty and 16, almost 17. I was told I couldn't exercise, couldn't travel. I've traveled the world, I can run five miles on the beach. So I live as this walking around example of understanding that the genesis of most chronic conditions, and I'm not talking about a tumor, I'm not talking about an infection. There are carve outs, but most chronic conditions come from a dysregulation in the nervous system that is leading the brain and the nervous system to send pain signals as a source of protection. So we can talk about all of that, but that's how I got into it. I ended up becoming Dr. Sarno's colleague. We lectured together for years at NYU. He referred into my practice and I was in contact with him till the day he died, assuring him that I would carry the torch of his work because it's so important.

ELISE:

What's so beautiful about your legacy and Dr. Sarno's legacy, which is, and we're going to talk about why this is also very difficult for people too, is that he is and you are saving people from unnecessary surgery and interventions and potentially debilitating medical bills and ongoing medical care with no symptom cessation. You are saving people from pursuing pain pills, et cetera. Even though as you mentioned, sometimes those are warranted after surgery, et cetera.

Yes. But there's something really powerful in providing people with a quote cure that requires no adherence to a strict protocol of eating and body management and there is a practice which is free, which involves tending to your emotional pain, which we will of course get into, but there's something really powerful in that. It's also very challenging and when I have mentioned this to friends and people I love, there is this immediate sort of “F you” and response, how dare you say that this pain is in my head and how dare you suggest that it's not so significant and so life impinging that it needs a response that is equally as dramatic. I think that's part of it too. And of course it's easier to take a pill. It's easier in many ways to get a physical material intervention and to be told actually it won't solve that I think is frustrating and you have this great line and you keep emphasizing this throughout the book. “The pain is not in your head, but the solution is not in altering your physical body.” So can you explain this idea of this emotional reservoir or well that becomes over full and how sometimes it's not just anger, it's many emotions.

NICOLE:

So the first thing I'm going to say before I even get into the science or any of the skepticism is for anyone listening for your aunt and your husband and your family, and for every person out there who receives this information with a defensive feeling of not being taken seriously, I want to say this, please be inspired. There is more out there than you might yet know. And beginning there, beginning with, instead of somebody's trying to take something away from you to understand that I am here with completely open heart and open hand saying, if you realized how much power you had to affect your physical and emotional health, you would realize that there is nothing that can stop you. I mean, it's an incredibly powerful place to stand and this is the reason why I've spent so many hours and years podcasting and writing and sharing because I don't want you to just hear my story.

I want you to hear hundreds of other people from every corner of the globe that are living completely free as a result of this. So I always want to say, be inspired, be inspired because this is your life. People have all sorts of spiritual backgrounds. Some people believe we come through a life many, many times. Some people believe it's one and done whatever you believe. This is your life, your one chance to be uniquely you with your love and your heart and your challenges and your family and your personality and your skills, all of those things are yours. This is your life. I have so much passion when it comes to explaining that, but let's talk about the pain is in your head. So unfortunately, anytime someone hears feelings, emotions, trauma, they think you're telling me that I am hysterical, overly sensitive, I'm creating this, I'm making it up.

All those things that can be incredibly insulting. And then of course there's the word psychosomatic that has garnered so much skepticism over the years because it seems to be communicating that same message, right? There's something wrong with you, but it's about you. It's you that is wrong because the symptom, we can't find anything to fix it. So first I want to say I want to debunk all of that. This is not about the pain is in your head. This is literally that the pain is the result of misunderstood brain science. When we start with brain science, when we understand the remarkable and often only partially understood magic of the human brain, we can start to understand why we are a society in chronic pain. So one thing that is helpful for people to understand is that if you are running from a predator and you break your ankle, you can run on that broken ankle without pain until you reach safety, you will not feel it.

You will be able to run the second you get behind a locked door or back in early days in a cave somewhere where you know are safe, your ankle will explode in pain because the reason that we have pain in the human body is to alert us that there's something that needs to be attended to. If you had a broken ankle and you just kept walking around on it, certainly back in the dawn of early woman, you would be eaten by a predator because pretty eventually your ankle would not be functional. So we have the concept of fight or flight. We have the concept of adrenaline and cortisol and all these superpowers that they give us to keep us alive. You need to be able to not feel the pain till it's safe and then you must feel the pain in order to tell you where to look and how to take care of yourself.

Once you understand this, you can then hopefully drain yourself of any defensiveness because we're not talking about the fact that you are creating something. We're talking about the fact that if you cut off your head, you're not going to feel your back pain. The brain and the nervous system are required for every single thing a human being feels. And so once again, adding in that piece that we just talked about, which is no one will deny that emotional stimuli cause physical reactions. You will get a headache from a stressful day. You will break out into hives when you're in a panic. These are things that happen that are physical. The genesis of the reaction is emotional. So hopefully that can just bring people just into a little bit of calm so they can hear what's actually going on. Because once they can hear it, there is this crack in the shell, there is this little bit of light that can come in and say, wait a second, and that's when I invite people to replace their skepticism and their fear with curiosity.

I don't need certainty. I don't need you to say, oh, I get it. I'm doing this work. All I need is for you to get curious because curiosity to me is the most fertile ground for any kind of healing. I wonder, one of the things I love, Elise, is I love when I'm wrong. I love when someone comes up to me and says, oh my goodness, you thought that this was this way? Let me show you. I don't just want to be told, I want to be shown, right? Let me show you with facts. Let me show you with science. Let me show you with something. And as soon as I figure out that I may have gotten something wrong to me it is a celebration. I was like, oh, there are possibilities. There are possibilities that go beyond my finite understanding of something, which to me is like, thank you, right? I want to be better.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, certainly. And I think that sort of going to what you were talking about when you think about your brain trying to protect you, the underlying theory too is that when you have these emotional experiences or traumas or patterning or cultural programming similar to what you and I have, which is this adherence to being good and perfect and unassailable and all of this, there's a certain lack of processing power in terms of attending to your emotional life and you get to this point where everything is overflowing and then the brain in order to protect you from that overwhelming emotional reservoir, I think is what you call it, will create physical pain to divert you from feeling what feels unseeable or what feels insurmountable. And that's a big concept, but interesting as I was reading this book to prepare for interviewing you and I was recognizing in myself and throughout you have all these really compelling stories from people who have cured themselves from myriad things, really wide variety of things, different types of people, NBA basketball player, students, et cetera.

And as I was doing it, I was conscious. I mean I have a hyperventilation disorder, I have a migraine disorder, I have all sorts of things that are not immediately triggered by an emotional experience, and yet I recognize in reading, I'm like, oh, I get it. I'm so full even though I do a fair amount of work on myself, but I don't really go as deep as your directions indicate I need to go. But for anyone who's listening and thinking, oh, I don't have chronic back pain, or I occasionally get sciatica, this is in some ways for all of us.

NICOLE:

Because there's no cure for the human condition and the human condition is what is actually being perceived as dangerous by your nervous system. So the first thing I think it's important that people understand and this is a fact, and if you take it as fact, it will be so much easier for you to go to the next step. Your brain and your nervous system perceive your repressed emotional world and your stored trauma and the things that you cannot control and the things that you can't logically right now without doing any sort of digging make sense of as a threat to your life. So I'll unpack that a bit. So like we said earlier, your brain and your nervous system are tasked in the most basic sense with keeping you alive. If you put your hand on a hot stove and you thought to yourself, is it hot?

Is it too hot? Is it melting my skin? I'm not sure if you were sitting and having that conversation as your hand was melting onto the stove that we would not be a sustainable species. The reason that the nervous system and the brain are a hair trigger is because when there is something flying in your direction, you will jump out of the way before you consciously realize it was flying in your direction. It keeps us alive, gives us cat-like reflexes, and we need them in order to survive. Okay? So unfortunately this is a process that happens across the board, meaning your nervous system and brain. Don't ask your permission or your opinion before they protect you, which is great. We need it. We need to stay alive. So picture this imagined emotional reservoir inside of you, picture like a clear glass science beaker and in it is the stress and overwhelm of daily life.

We all have it being a mom, being a partner, being a dad, being someone in business, being someone with your level of self-consciousness and self-worth and all the things we walk around with as a human being. So that dumps like a cup in there. Every time something happens that feels a little bit overwhelming, and then we have all the stuff from the past and I want people to be consoled. You do not have to unearth and solve every trauma from your past. That's not what this is about. A lot of it is just acknowledging, acknowledging that there are unseen and unheard parts of us that exist through every stage of our growing up, whether it be abuse and neglect, capital T trauma or just the death of a thousand paper cuts of being human bullying and being an energetic mismatch to your family. Maybe everyone was super outgoing and you were shy and you couldn't find your way.

Whatever it is, we all have stuff from childhood that quite frankly, no one has time to deal with. Nobody does. If we had to feel every single thing that happened to us, none of us would be able to function. Repression as a defense mechanism is a defense mechanism for a reason. It protects us, it defends us. We have to repress a certain percentage of the things that happen to us and that we feel. Then there's another part which you really write about beautifully in your book, which is we live in a society. You write through the lens of women, but we want to be good. We want to be well-liked. We want to be seen as contributing members of society of the highest order. We want to be perfect. We want to be not criticized by others. Of course, we criticize ourselves deeply. We have our very, very powerful inner critics that are just constantly blasting us.

And so all of these factors contribute to this emotional reservoir. And here's the thing that you kind of have to take on faith, but as you do this work, you really see how it's operating in your system when that emotional reservoir reaches maximum density, which is why, Elise, you just said, I have a migraine disorder. It's not always logically triggered by something happening in my life. It doesn't matter if it's happening right now. When that emotional reservoir reaches maximum density, what happens is it threatens to spill over and inform your conscious brain. You're walking around brain, your three in the morning brain, your to-do list brain, that you are impossibly and tragically overwhelmed to the point where you cannot handle this and that you are going to shut down the perception of this. Now, it doesn't even mean it's going to happen, but when the brain and the nervous system perceives this bubbling over, it's the same exact moment as when it perceives the hot stove or when it perceives the projectile coming in your direction.

The decision to protect is immediate and is without your conscious decision. So you feel the migraine coming on right. For me, when I have migraines, it's ocular migraines. So I see an aura. So I blink, blink and I'm like, mother, I dunno if I can swear on your podcast, but this is coming and it's so annoying and I get so frustrated. It doesn't mean that something bad just happened, it means I'm up to here. It means the nervous system has decided there's a threat to my life. It doesn't know where it's coming from yet, but as it scans the landscape for the threat and the immediate need to circumvent it, you get a symptom. And what happens when we're sick, when we're sick from pain, when we're sick from stomach, when we're sick from migraines, whatever it is, we pause, we stop, we take care of ourselves, we make our lives more minimalistic so we can function.

We ask for help, we soften our demands on ourself. The inner critic lies down. Well, you can't sit and berate her. She has a migraine, she's in bed. So it is so logical and quite frankly, so lovely when we think of the nervous system as this protective force that simply wants us to be okay. So the way I teach people to understand this is if you know this is happening, and if you can come into alignment with this is the way the human being functions, you can do the work to lower the reservoir. And once the reservoir is no longer bubbling over, and this is the remarkable thing, Elise, that you read about in the book, when you read these insane success stories from people from all walks of life, when the reservoir is diminished, the pain signals simply stop firing. It's not like you have to do anything.

People are always like, Nicole, what do I do? And I said, don't worry about getting rid of your pain. Do the work to lower the reservoir, and you will notice that the pain signals simply stop firing. I'll give one more example that I think is really, really instructive when it comes to having people understand this. I want you to picture that there's a building on fire and the building is attached to an alarm. So when the fire gets to a certain point, the alarm is triggered. So now the alarm goes off. So the fire company is signaled the fire company arrives with their hoses. Now here's what's happening with most people in chronic pain. They take their hoses and they aim them at the alarm. So they are dousing a plastic, spinning red. I picture an alarm on the top of a police car when I have this image in my head.

And so the fire company is there, they're dedicated, they're dousing it. They're dowsing it from all angles, they're dousing it, they're refilling and dousing. Again, the fire rages just maybe 20 feet to the left, but nobody is putting their hoses there because they think that the problem is what they can see and hear. The problem is the alarm. So what I say is when people are chasing the next doctor, the next procedure, the next supplement, the next medication, the next surgery that is dousing the alarm, the pain is the signal that something is wrong, but it is not what is wrong If they could just turn their hoses to the fire and put out the fire, well, what happens to an alarm when the fire goes out, it switches off. The alarm is only there precisely to alert you that there is a fire. And so if when we start to get this, the space of empowerment is so insane, and that's why I love that you write about women because I think one of the things I've heard from women over the years is how disempowering the medical system has been for them being told that they're hysterical, being told that they're making it up, being told that there's nothing I can do to help you.

I can't tell you how many times people come to me, women come to me often with pelvic pain, so diminishing to be with a doctor and to have this person say to you, I'm sorry, you'll just have to learn to live with it. And this makes people suicidal. I mean, this is a very, very big deal. So I want people to be inspired. I want you to know there might be more to your system than yet.

ELISE:

And just to that point, nothing in Nicole's book is suggesting that you don't get proper medical care or that you don't pursue a diagnosis or that that's sometimes the intervention that we need. You don't use JournalSpeak to cure a broken arm.

NICOLE:

Yeah. So I'll say that really quick because no, it's Elise, it's important when I get all impassioned. Thank you for reminding me. I spend a lot of time in the book and by the way, spend a lot of time in myself and with my own family going to doctors. I am not against the Western medical model. I never want someone to have something like a tumor, God forbid, on their spine. And they're journaling. They're trying to journal away their back pain. This is about once you feel that one of several things have happened, one, either you got checked out and you're fine, they can't find anything wrong with you, but you're still in pain or you still have symptoms. The second thing is you get checked out and they say you have a diagnosis, so you have a migraine disorder, but there's nothing really we can do for you.

We can suggest this diet change or we can suggest this supplement or we can give you a migraine rescue pill. But this is just a condition you're going to have forever. So that's another thing. And the other thing is, oh no, no, no, you have this bad thing. You have spondylolisthesis. It is very structurally scary. You're going to need a surgery unless a doctor can tell you that the surgery that's being suggested is going to take away your primary problem, which you probably are in pain, then I really would pause at that point and then see, look into this mind body work. But yes, thank you for saying that. I do believe 100% in getting checked out. I don't believe however, that you need to live in chronic suffering for the rest of your life.

ELISE:

So we're going to get to journal speak, but before we go there, for people, obviously we've been mentioning Dr. Sarno, he was at NYU was a medical doctor and people would laugh at him and yet every other doctor went to him for their back pain.

NICOLE:

Yes, yes.

ELISE:

But he was in some ways not anti the medical establishment, but he was constantly sort of like that surgery is not going to heal your pain. And I will say, and you include this in the book, that the medical quote establishment is starting to pay more attention to what Dr. Sarno was talking about all those decades ago. And I just want to read one part. So you write, “Take bulging discs, a degenerative condition where the intervertebral disc begins to protrude from the spine. Just the name sounds painful and something that would surely be the cause of agonizing back pain. But when researchers at the Mayo Clinic reviewed CT and MRIs of more than 3000 people without back pain, they found that a significant number showed disc bulges in their scans. And the prevalence of those findings increased as people got older. A whopping 30% of people in their twenties showed bulging discs in their films, and that number skyrocketed to 84% for those in their eighties.” And then you reiterate the pain is not in your head, but the solution is not in your body. So I think particularly for back pain, which is obviously where Sarno spent most of his energy, and similarly, my husband has bulging discs and when his back goes out, he's completely contorted. It's real. It's completely real. It's all real.

NICOLE:

It's all real. So let me, you brought up Michael Porter Jr. So I want to talk a little bit about him. This is a really great space to include his story. So Michael Porter Jr. Is a center for the Denver Nuggets, and he's like 26 years old at this point. And when he was in high school, he was the best basketball player in his age group in the world, and he was set to be number one draft pick into the NBA. And he was nearly seven feet tall by the time I think he was 14, 15 years old. So you can imagine that a human body that stretches to nearly seven feet tall in that period of time will have some what Dr. Sarno would call normal abnormalities, right? Disc bulges and whatever it is that constitutes a person. Because I actually don't believe in all my years of experience that bulging disc cause pain at all.

Doesn't mean it doesn't cause symptoms, and it doesn't mean it doesn't cause such spasm that the person is in an L or sideways. I see that all the time I've been there. So it's not that you're not experiencing something physically, it's that it's not coming from the bulging disc. Michael Porter Jr. Was in terrible back pain. He had to drop down to I think 15 in the draft. He was able to be drafted into the NBA, but he had one back surgery in college two while he was in the NBA. And every time he was filmed it was like, oh, we have another disc and it's degenerating further. And they were seeing these findings and they were seeing them more pronounced as he got older. He had his third back surgery the summer before last. He found me and contacted me and said, I am, I think 24 years old.

I don't know if I'll still play in the NBA. I don't know what to do. I cannot keep having surgeries. My pain keeps coming back. He was missing games and games and games every season. So I reached out back out to him, I said, let's do some work together. I did work with him directly. You do not need that. I definitely know that people can do this work. Having read the book, he completely turned around his chronic pain. He did the work. It's now his second season or he hasn't missed a game. He's consistently playing like 36 minutes on the court making between 20 and 30 baskets. It's insane what's happening with him. He's back to playing basketball like he was a teenager. This is not necessarily about what people see on film, and that's why I wanted to put his story in the book and talk about him because I'm looking to invite more men.

I'm looking to invite more athletes. This is so important that people realize that even though it feels so physical, this process of the brain and the nervous system sending these signals into the body, it's not just perceived pain. The signals are sent through the following avenues. Most generally, muscle constriction, spasm, neuropathy, and inflammation. Now it goes beyond that, but those are the main ways. So you are experiencing the spasm and the constriction, your husband being misshapen, it's happening. But the question is, why is it happening? Why is the brain sending this pain signal? Why is your husband, according to his nervous system, perceived as more safe when he's all full of spasm and constriction? Well, I promise you it keeps him from something that is perceived as dangerous, even if it's just his own mind and how he should be succeeding more than he is. It is fascinating to start looking at the human body and being through this lens. It's really important for people to realize it. You're not perceiving your pain, you are in pain. But the question is why.

ELISE:

Yeah, and to my husband's credit, he now recognizes that almost without fail, his back goes out when something happens to me and he recognizes that something will happen to me that threatens our sort of overall safety and security and his back goes out. So he sees the pattern and actually read him some pages from Dr. Sarno's book, not this summer, but the summer before. And I feel like his back has only gone out once.

So there's some part of him that recognizes, and he's an Enneagram nine and he has a lot of trouble accessing his anger. So I think it's just constitutionally, he is dissociated from his anger. So let's talk about doing the work. You mentioned Michael, he did the work. So let's talk about journal speak in the book, you do a really clear explanation of it and come back to it and there's escalating questions and whatnot. But can you give basic frame of starting to do this work?

NICOLE:

Yes. Okay. So there's a few things that I want to say about the work. The first thing I will say is that there are three facets to my overall general theory, and there are like three legs of a stool. So without one of them, it will not stand. So it's not just about the work is all of it. The work is about understanding the brain science. The work is about the mindset. The work is about a self-compassion practice because we cannot be as awful to ourselves as we are. It's like bailing out a boat with a hole in the bottom. So the three facets are believe, do the work in patience and kindness for yourself under the umbrella of believe is everything we've talked about thus far, researching the brain science, reading the book, understanding that there is so much more that you realize about how your brain and your nervous system are seeking to protect you.

Getting yourself in alignment, stopping that defensive thinking so you don't constantly have to argue with yourself. So that's belief. Do the work essentially is I through my own recovery, needed to find a vehicle that would take me into the reservoir and dump it out. I was told by Dr. Sarno when I first met him that journaling is a good way to do it. And I'm going to tell you straight up, the first thing I thought is, are you freaking kidding me? I am in debilitating pain over here. I can't lift my children. You're going to tell me that I should journal. I was just as skeptical and as dismissive as people might be. So I want to start there by saying, I get it. I get you. I am you. I have been you. So he said to journal, and I was like, okay, I get it, but explain.

And he said, if you are having this reservoir that's overflowing, and it is constantly triggering this alarm system to go off and the pain to happen, well of course what we need to do is we need to lower the reservoir. And journaling is a good way. It helps you reflect, it helps you see what's going on with you. So I took his word for it and I went home and I started journaling and it felt like a whole lot of nothing. It felt like a whole lot of play in my tapes. And oh, I remember that time with my dad in sixth grade. I've told the story to a hundred therapists. That's something that people say to me often, which is, I don't really think your work can work for me, Nicole, because I've been in therapy for 20 years. The truth is that until you can consciously connect this excavation of your big emotions, and we'll talk about how I've expanded it beyond rage, until you can consciously connect them, your nervous system and your brain cannot perceive you as safe.

And so that's why the mindset and the understanding the brain science is so important. But then trust me, your therapy has not been wasted. But essentially in this reservoir is are the heavy hitters, shame, grief, despair, rage, terror, the things that we might be able to have a glass of wine with friends and say, oh my God, I'm so bummed out. This has been so crazy. That's what you can say. But what's really happening in your system is I'm in despair. I am so full of shame, I can't breathe. I can never tell anybody X, y, or Z. And even if I could, I could never live with the shame of them knowing I am not just a little freaked out, I'm terrified. I don't think I can handle this. These are the big things that are triggering your brain and your nervous system into this protective mode in the reservoir.

And so essentially, I started doing this journaling and it felt like really nothing and in a moment that I can definitely call a spiritual awakening in my life. A person at the time who had very, very little connection to any spirituality at all. And spirituality is not required for this, but it does help because if you're willing to expand your awareness to all the energies that are affecting you, it can be helpful, but it's not necessary. In that moment though, I did not find myself in a spiritual place. And what happened to me in this journaling session that I think them thinking of is spiritual because oh, it just cracked me open. It cracked me open to understand that there is a path into this and I can find it and I can teach it. And what happened was I was journaling about motherhood at the time.

I had a 2-year-old and a baby, they were 22 months apart. I was really, really overwhelmed and I was writing about, oh, it's really hard and I'm really tired and all the things. And I had this voice, this awareness that came into my being and said, you're lying. And I kind of looked up at the voice and said, I'm not lying. This is true. I do have two babies, and it is tiring. And the awareness was this is not the ugly, dark, dangerous feeling that is triggering you into such bad chronic pain that you can't function. You have to be braver, you have to go deeper. And I just knew it was coming. I often say it's like when you eat something bad and you have to be sick, but you don't want to be. It was rising. And I just let it, and I wrote the first line of journal speak ever penned, which is when I teach journal speak, that is do the work.

And it is not regular journaling by any stretch. And the line I penned was, I hate being a mother. I hate this. I've made a mistake. I'm trapped. I'm ruining not only my own life, but now two others. I can't do it. I am failing and I hate it. And it was the ugliest, dirtiest thing I could think of to say. And it was coming from a place of a screaming vulnerability, a screaming inner child that needed to be heard. And then I started to be brave because that was so awful that I saw those words on paper. I was like, well, let's just freaking do it now. And I just started writing. I started writing about how the loathing I felt for my parents and how they set up this situation in my life where I was so lonely and so disappointed as a child that I was sure if I created my own perfect family, it would rescue me from the pain of my childhood.

I mean, I went there and obviously I am truncating this to a space where people can hear the story. It was quite the process. But the couple things I want to tell you about journal speak, and I by the way teach it in exquisite detail in the book. So you don't need to know how to do it just by hearing the story. First thing is journal speak doesn't stay true. It is a portal. It is a opening through which you can go and then find what needs to be found. It's an X marks the spot where you can dig for your pirate's treasure. So although I said I hate being a mother and I needed to say it because it was something that was lingering in my unconscious that obviously was really triggering so much danger the moment I kind of unleashed on my own parents and then kind of moved into self-loathing and was like, what's wrong with you?

You're so weak. Everybody can be a mother. You can't do this. All the feelings that I had to get out, all the truth I needed to tell, it continued to evolve and evolve and evolve. Almost immediately. I was like, okay, I don't hate my children. What's going on here? Who's talking? Who's speaking? It's such a space of curiosity honestly, and it's such a space of a lovely relationship that you start to build with yourself because you're not bullshitting yourself anymore. And so I moved through it and what I arrived at, quite frankly was a tremendous place of compassion. Compassion for myself, compassion for every young mother who has to deal with the losing of oneself in a sense way that we are when we have to grow other humans. The compassion for my parents, and really truly, they weren't perfect, but they were also adults trying to navigate this landscape of life.

And it's not that everyone comes to compassion. This is a process. The first thing I'll say is that I woke up the next morning and my back pain was 80% gone, never to return. Over the next couple months, I learned journal speak, I taught it to myself, and I went into every dark room and I turned on the light and I was brave and I was bold and I was impolite, and I was politically incorrect in every way. Journal speak is only for you. It is a private practice. You do it and then you destroy it. And so basically I eliminated my pain completely. So I have an incredibly severe structural abnormality according to every doctor who's ever seen it. It has been over 20 years since I felt even a tinge of pain in my back. And I live this limitless life. So that's one thing you need to know.

But almost more importantly, because I say often pain is the biggest littlest part. It brings you into the work, the symptoms that you're experiencing, but you'll get rid of those. I say that lightly because I have lived it and taught it for so many years and witnessed it and just thousands and thousands of people. Once you move through the pain, the life that you can be handed from living without this constant dance of repression and restriction and reaction from your nervous system is unreal. The parent you can be. I mean, my goodness, if I hadn't come to this when my kids were little, I just don't know who I would've been to them. I would have parented them through the lens of my dysfunction of what I needed them to be. And I have this incredible relationship with these three almost adults that I really credit to having done this work and being able to be awake and aware as I move through this journey of bringing people into the world. And so there's that, and there's the fact that I can now live without the panic that I'm going to be launched into any sort of chronic anything because I have this tool that won't fail me.

ELISE:

And it's interesting, just even for people who are listening and feeling the fear come up of what they might say, push to be honest, is exactly what you're talking about. That's the mechanism, that's the process that we all live with every day, which is the repression and suppression of things that we might feel. Doesn't mean that they're persistently or always true, but the fear that if that idea, oh, I hate being a mother were to come up, that it would be life ending. And so the amount of energy that we spend not letting that come up is wild. Do you think that when you think about the explosion of chronic pain in our culture, not that it's new, but it feels like it's becoming more pronounced, more long, tendril, debilitating diseases, what do you credit that to? Is that a function of our world becoming ever more hyperconnected and more insistent cultural programming? And what is that?

NICOLE:

I think that's really, really good hypothesis, because even think about when we were kids, I think we're roughly the same age when we were kids, you didn't know what anybody was doing. You didn't know where anybody was. Your parents couldn't reach you. You know what I mean? There was a simplicity to life. Now, obviously that was even far more complicated than when our parents were kids. I mean, our society is evolving in such a way of constant connection, which I believe have its pros. I do like the fact that I can help people in Asia who I've never met. I like the concept of connection. But all in all, I think it generates a tremendous amount of anxiety. And another thing I want to say about this work is that chronic pain and anxiety, chronic anxiety are interchangeable. And this work also alleviates things like panic disorders, OCD, because chronic anxiety and chronic pain are interchangeable.

I think that the constancy of our stimulation and the way that technology is certainly changing our brains, I'm watching my own be changed against my will, but here we are. And I definitely think it contributes. And I also think in general, we are constantly expecting more of ourselves. Now that you can check email 24 7, 7 days a week, there are no days off. You have to force that. And oftentimes if you do, you're seen as being a subpar employee because isn't everyone on email over the weekend? So it's hard. And that's why I love teaching these tools because when you learn work, this kind of stuff, you can still live your hectic life, but you do not need to be in chronic suffering at all, at all.

ELISE:

When I think about it, just being online and seeing, we're aware of the constant threat of violence happening in various parts of the world that might never come to our doorstep, but again, your brain can't necessarily distinguish. And along with all the diseases that could take us down, all the chemicals that could poison our food, the environmental and this stuff is real. I'm not suggesting that I'm not worried about glyphosate, but I think that in the way that our anxiety about the glyphosate engages our nervous system is a little bit more what we're talking about here. That everything is perceived and felt in that way without a process for letting it go as existential.

NICOLE:

Here's the thing that I want people to understand. It is about journal speak, and it is about doing the work, but it's also about finding the space of radical acceptance. Because if you are constantly fearful of something, then you pretty much cannot keep your nervous system from feeling like your life is in danger. Your perception is your reality. And so when I say radical acceptance, I'm very, very careful to teach that acceptance does not equal agreement. You don't have to be okay with the world wars and with the chemicals and with all the things that might befall you, but there is a level of control after which it's impossible. You can control your actions, you can control what you decide to bring into your home. You can control how much news you watch, whatever it is. But beyond that, to understand the factor that radical acceptance plays and to know that you can draw that line with concrete tools, once again that I teach, it actually does really allow you to live with much less chronic suffering because we can't possibly tolerate all of the input from all of these uncertainties.

ELISE:

Nicole also writes about a medical trial where they were using MINDBODY intervention similar to Dr. Sarno's work and Nicole's work. And she writes, “When Dr. Danino measured the participant's pain levels at the end of the trial, he discovered that those who participated in the Psychophysiological intervention reported significantly less back pain than those in the other groups and measures. Looking at how much their pain bothered them in their daily lives, as well as how much anxiety their pain caused them dropped dramatically too. 26 weeks after the trial, more than half of the people who did the mind-body training, a whopping 63.6% reported being entirely pain-free. That led Danino to conclude that psychophysiologic symptom relief therapy, which is what MINDBODY medicine is all about, is a highly beneficial treatment for patients with nonspecific back pain”. So to that point, and throughout the book and the case studies that are included in the chapters, a lot of patients, a lot of the people who end up coming to Nicole and doing journal speak and finding relief also mentioned that their doctors suggested actually this is potentially stress related.

So I feel like the medical community is coming into alignment and feeling like that this is all part of a system. And so they are referring into the system as well and recognizing that for many patients this might be the solution or at least an important part of any treatment plan. And as mentioned, it is free. It requires no surgery, it requires no prescription, it requires no supplements, et cetera. It is something that you can do by yourself at home with a piece of paper. And I also had to laugh. I mean, she talked a bit about this. You destroy your journal, speak after, it's not, you don't leave it around for people to find you are as brave as possible. But when she first went to see Dr. Sarno decades ago, she had written, she had journaled everything out, written it and brought it to him, and sort of a case file for him to understand everything that had happened to her and all the intervention she'd already tried.

And he looked at it and threw it in the trash, and that makes me laugh. And she laughed too. But the content, I think we live in a culture that wants to higher mind everything that happens to us. And yes, in some ways, that's what Journal Speak is about. And it's also, it's opposite, which is it's not about meaning making. It's not about coming up with the story and synthesizing the story of trauma that you get to carry around. It's recognizing that that's what's living in us, yes, and that we're using a lot of energy to try to repress it, and that these are persistent patterns that we are denying and holding down, but that the story itself doesn't really have teeth once you let it up so you can see it, the teeth comes from holding it down. If you like today's episode, please, please rate and review it and share with a friend.cole on Instagram

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