{"id":2850,"date":"2015-01-03T16:44:32","date_gmt":"2015-01-03T16:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/how2reachyourpotential.org\/?p=2850"},"modified":"2015-09-07T16:39:56","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T16:39:56","slug":"mind-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/how2reachyourpotential.org\/?p=2850","title":{"rendered":"TMS-All the Rage"},"content":{"rendered":"

All the Rage by Dr. John Sarno\u00a0KICKSTART OUR NEXT FILM \u00a0—<\/p>\n

WATCH THE TRAILER<\/a><\/p>\n

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http:\/\/rumur.com\/blog\/<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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\u200bP\u200bOWER RESISTS CHANGE<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Posted at 21:28h\u00a0in\u00a0News<\/a> by Michael Galinsky<\/a>\u00a02 Comments<\/a><\/div>\n
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Oftentimes when power structures are challenged, there is a direct and disproportionate response. Two cops were murdered by a crazy man in Brooklyn yesterday, and the head of the police union,\u00a0Patrick Lynch<\/a>, put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the mayor because he had dared to recognize that the people protesting had legitimate concerns. Other\u00a0former elected officials\u00a0<\/a>and police officers piled on as well. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar eviscerated this response with a\u00a0spot on and scathing editorial in Time Magazine.<\/a><\/p>\n

In a Dec. 21, 2014 article about the shooting, the Los Angeles Times referred to the New York City protests as \u201canti-police marches,\u201d which is grossly inaccurate and illustrates the problem of perception the protestors are battling. The marches are meant to raise awareness of double standards, lack of adequate police candidate screening, and insufficient training that have resulted in unnecessary killings. Police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is. Trying to remove sexually abusive priests is not an attack on Catholicism, nor is removing ineffective teachers an attack on education. Bad apples, bad training, and bad officials who blindly protect them, are the enemy. And any institution worth saving should want to eliminate them, too.<\/p>\n

As filmmakers we deal with this issue on some level in almost all of our projects.\u00a0Who Took Johnny<\/a>\u00a0hits it head-on in relation to child sexual abuse. In the film, Paul Sparrow who produced theshow \u201cAmerica\u2019s Most Wanted\u201d, points out that big institutions like the Catholic Church and the Police will often protect bad actors in order to protect the reputation of their institution. \u201cWho Took Johnny\u201d details this reality in ways that are infuriating and difficult to watch.<\/p>\n

On the surface, there doesn\u2019t seem to be as direct of a connection between our new film about mind body medicine and chronic pain issues,\u00a0All The Rage, and the protests against theinstitutionalized racism of the police. However, the response to a recent article about the film on\u00a0Huffington Post<\/a>\u00a0makes it clear that the resistance to the ideas in the film is very strong. Those who have suffered from pain issues and have been told by doctors that they have a structural problem like a herniated disc often get quite irate when someone suggests that emotional factors may bethe cause rather than the disc. Doctors who treat from this perspective can also get very angry.<\/p>\n

Last month, as we ran our\u00a0kickstarter campaign<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0All The Rage, I spent a lot of time trying to get blogs and other media outlets to share our trailer, or other clips from the film. For the most part, I was unable to even get a response from people. I\u2019ve had some success getting blogs to share photos for\u00a0kickstarter<\/a>\u00a0book projects. In fact, during that month, a big website\u00a0shared 82 of my photos<\/a>\u00a0from another project without even contacting me for permission. It went wildly viral, and got shared nearly 200 thousand times. We tried to get the same site to cover the project we needed attention for, but they blew us off. Frankly, we were taken a little by surprise by the intense resistance we faced.\u00a0 I understand that there is a bias towards only covering a project when it is in distribution, but we kept up our efforts, and after Huffington Post asked to write something about the photos, we got a contact in their healthy living section. Finally, with a few days left in our campaign, we heard back from them and arranged an interview.<\/p>\n

I had a very long and robust conversation with the writer, and in the end she condensed our hour long discussion down to a few quotes. The article itself was reasonable, though I did have some problems with how my quotes were used. After a long period of discussion, one tends to not re-explain everything they\u2019ve said, so the quotes that were used from near the end of theconversation sound more flip than if one had heard the whole conversation. I asked the writer to insert two words to clarify what I meant.<\/p>\n

It would be great if you could insert \u201cis related to\u201d at xxx in the phrase \u201cWhat he is pointing out is that the vast majority of chronic pain symptoms are xxx the repression of one\u2019s emotions.\u201d As it is now it suggests it is imagined<\/p>\n

I think I had made it clear in the wide-ranging discussion that the situation isn\u2019t black or white. Though the article states that \u201cThis interview has been edited and condensed for clarity\u201d, they refused to change the quote for the sake of clarity. However, this was a minor issue. The real problem was when they changed the headline to a more sensational one: \u201cThis Doctor Believes Your Back Pain Is All In Your Head\u201d.\u00a0 Again, I sent a note asking that this be changed because I thought it did a great disservice to his work.<\/p>\n

Thanks again for taking the time to write the article, and to get it done before our kickstarter ended. It\u2019s certainly gotten a lot of discussion going.<\/p>\n

I understand that you won\u2019t change quotes- However I do hope that you can change the title though as it does a disservice to the ideas of Dr. Sarno and the people who have been helped by them. To say that he \u201cthinks it\u2019s all in your head\u201d is a misnomer that he has had to battle for decades. Instead he is saying that the repression of one\u2019s emotions is a primary causative factor in back and neck pain- rather than the structural ones being put forth by many other people. By using the phrase \u201call in one\u2019s head\u201d those who are in pain feel dismissed and made fun of, and they react as one might expect.<\/p>\n

The whole point of the film is to examine how the process works, and we want to do that with empathy and compassion. The pain is real, not imagined. I know this as I have dealt with it. However, it does have to do with the mind body connection and most of the medical system does not recognize this, which is extremely problematic.<\/p>\n

The writer responded to let me know that she was not responsible for the headline but that she would ask the editor to consider to look into it. It never got changed. The comments section became a battleground rather than a discussion. I\u2019ve spent a long time trying to figure out how to push forward the discussion about the mind body connection, so it\u2019s a bit frustrating that the first press for the film went so badly. However, it was a good reminder that people are very passionate about this issue. Ironically, I had written about\u00a0how important it is to be even handed\u00a0<\/a>just a few days before this article appeared. The first paragraph of that piece read,<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the Rage\u201d is not meant to be an attack on medicine, though those who are deeply embedded, and invested, in current practice might feel that it is. Instead, it\u2019s an attempt to re-illuminatethe connection between our minds and bodies that is too often stuck in the blind spot of the current medical system. The mechanistic model that holds sway at the moment, in which pathogens and \u201cchemical imbalances\u201d are largely tackled through pharmaceutical interventions, has created some astounding advances that have saved untold people from both death and suffering. However, the same structures that have led to these successes have made it difficult to see, or deal with, the complex emotional realities that are often at the core of our disease. People who are aligned with the rigid structures of the scientific method often dismiss the work of Dr. Sarno, because they feel that they need to see data that proves he is correct about his contention that the repression of our emotions is a causative factor in pain syndromes. However, the kind of complex psycho physical processes that lead to health problems are difficult to measure, so they often go unstudied. While it\u2019s simple to see that our emotions affect our health, it\u2019s not easy to figure out what to do about that.<\/p>\n

In my conversation with Huffington Post I believe I expressed similar sentiments. I\u2019ll be much more careful with each word that I use going forward. However, there is some good news to come out of the article. Those people who understand the mind body perspective, and were cured by paying attention to it, responded to the vitriol in the comments section with patience and good humor. Further, one woman who had suffered from severe leg pain for 8 years found almost immediate relief as\u00a0she read the article<\/a>. If the post helped even one person end nearly a decade of constant debilitating pain, it was a good thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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