In 2004 I started to make a documentary about Dr John Sarno. My father had been saved from horrible neck and back pain in the early 80's- my brother from RSI in therapy 90's and I ended up in his office in 2004 with crippling lower back/leg pain. Getting the film made was hard To begin with Dr Sarno was quietly doing his work- there wasn't anything active to film. His book "The Divided Mind" was coming out, but when I asked him about book signings he told me the book had come out a couple of months before. He wasn't a great documentary "character"

Thinking about trauma, and how my parents generation was brought up by the “silent generation“; disconnection from their parent’s trauma (ie they buried it) led to the hippie revolution as they struggled to understand the trauma that had been repressed yet still passed to them. At the same time they had no language, or frame of reference with which to understand how trauma gets passed through both genes and behavior. That confusion made them focus on the impact of nurturing and reject the impact of nature in confusing ways.

I am an artist, not a scientist, yet I believe that science can lead to innovation. However, when science gets stuck in a framing that is out of balance; like the idea that our emotions don’t impact our health, artists can’t help challenge these stuck ideas through metaphor. Ever since 1948, with the innovation of the first randomized control trial, science has been increasingly stuck in that framing. Any discussion of the emotions is dismissed as “woo”, because the way people used RCT’s generally ignored emotions because they are messy

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1… - this post by @nfrankresearch is truly amazing to read. Yet not even he has shared it on Twitter. I went to retweet him after finding the article. The studies by @YoniAshar and @mdonnino that support Sarno mentioned here have been out for 2 weeks Yet, this is the first article in a widely read paper that mentions the studies and I’m glad that it centers the story around Sarno’s work. When we finished our film 4 years ago we could not get anything written about him. After doing a long read on back pain -

1. Yesterday I shared a wildly angry review of our film All The Rage in order to talk about how expectation is a form of resistance to what is - and that resistance creates suffering. This reaction is much more about this person’s sense of judgement than it is about our film. 2. It’s very easy to react strongly when someone comes to you in a rage. However, through practice we can learn how to respond rather than react. I think this practice is central to healing from trauma. We all gave trauma, but also hide it from ourselves. Trauma is scary.

I'm not a journalist. I am a filmmaker. For the past 20 years I have focused attention on the work of Dr John Sarno. In that time I have seen a shift in awareness concerning the import of our emotional response/reactions to the world in regards to our physical health. I was looking into these issues as a filmmaker, but also as a patient of Dr Sarno, whose family has a long history with his work. I was not an "impartial observer". I was an observer who had a personal investment in understanding how our emotions affect our health.

Dr Sarno was often dismissed for not doing randomized control trials of his work. Data only has value if we make sense of it. We can also make sense of the data and evidence that exists. rumur.com/if-stress-is-t… When we observe patterns, like the idea that unaddressed trauma from childhood has negative health impacts, we can work to address that trauma to reduce those impacts. If addressing that trauma leads to alleviation of illness we can build our understanding. Dr Sarno did this.

Yesterday we shared this thread that made the point that Dr sarno was working in a trauma informed manner 40 years before the concept was articulated. Since his work was not understood by colleagues it was dismissed as “woo”, or not grounded in science.

https://twitter.com/rumur/status/1407901467944624130

In our film “All The Rage” we also made the connection between the rapid rise in the wealth gap and the rise in chronic pain. Some viewers were angry with this because they felt it made the film political. However, the film also makes it clear that…

4 years ago today my partners and I released a film, "All The Rage", that we had made about Dr John Sarno. It was also a very personal film. Unbeknownst to us he had passed away the previous day. We also had not realized that the day it opened would have been his 94th birthday. The film took nearly 15 years to make because we couldn't find any support for the production, and we also couldn't figure out how to tell the story. Early in his career Dr Sarno became frustrated by the practices he had been taught for treating structural issues and pain.

1/I’m going to do a thread about the connection between Dr Sarno and the films Chinatown and Midnight Run. Further, I’ll make a connection between these stories and the import of cultural context, which shapes, and is shaped by media, as wee as how we interact with that media. 2/The other night we watched the film Chinatown with our 18-year-old daughter. One of her favorite films is Midnight Run. The two films share some similarities. Both feature an ex cop who was pushed out of service for challenging corruption. Both leads can be combative if pushed.

Happy New Year-
Let's start the new year right
The last line of our film about Dr. Sarno (who pioneered a mindbody approach to pain) is, "All of this because of one one simple idea, the fact that the mind and the body are intimately connected. That's it that's the whole story." This concept is central to all mind body related work. The physical and the emotional are not separate. They are inextricably linked. If we understand that this is true, then we can agree that health care needs to address both emotional and physical processes.