My back pain had been worse than ever that year—so bad that it felt like I was spending more time at the chiropractor than anywhere else. Elliot Thomson, a close law school friend, had long believed that my back pain stemmed from psychological and not physical ailments. When I told him how bad it had gotten, he mailed me a copy of John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, which I read cover to cover. Sarno argued that pain of the sort I had been experiencing could stem from a failure to grapple with deep distress that then gets “somatized”—lodged or manifested—in the body as physical pain.
