Eliminate Pain Forever with Steve Ozanich Part 1

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome. Today's episode of the show today is awesome. I am so excited to share something with you today that I think can profoundly change the course of your life. Now, that might sound dramatic, but that's certainly what it's done for me. And in this episode, I have the honor and the privilege of interviewing a brilliant author and pioneer of sort of spreading mind, body medicine and awareness. Now, he's not a doctor, but he has studied more than most that I know and be introducing him in just a minute. And it's really gonna help you understand how anxiety and patterns of your personality, self judgment, all these things that we kind of work on in this show to create more confidence, free ourselves from social anxiety and self doubt and self criticism that those patterns of self criticism, self doubt, anxiety, they actually can create long standing physical pain in your body, back pain being one of the biggest ones, knee pain, foot pain, neck pain, jaw pain, all kinds of symptoms, every fibromyalgia, just, you know, dozens and dozens of medical conditions are strongly impacted by our mind, our emotions, our personality. This is a fascinating field of study and I get to speak with one of the most brilliant authors and minds on the subject. And I would encourage you to listen with an open mind. And if you experience any sort of pain, discomfort in your body, injury, reoccurring injury, fear of injury, you know, your back tends to be sore. You twisted your back one day three years ago and it popped and it's never been the same since and replaced back with any other part of your body. Here you definitely want to listen to this. And even if you're like, no, no, I'm healthy as a horse, listen to the parts about anxiety and depression and other moods and how those can. It's the same thing. You'll find out whether it's anxiety, depression, back pain, you'll start to see how it's all connected. And I'm going to encourage you, if you did not Listen to last week's episode called How Anxiety Creates Physical Pain. Definitely pause this right now. Go back and listen to that first because I just dive straight in with my guest expert here today. And we don't spend a whole lot of time kind of filling you in on the basics because I already did that last week. I'll teach you in that episode. You'll learn all about how anxiety can create physical pain in the first place. Is that even possible? Is that true? Would doctors agree with that? What's going on? How come I didn't hear that before? Any questions you have, I go in depth into that in that episode. So check that out if you haven't already. And then if you already listened to it, get ready because this interview is awesome and you're going to learn just a ton. So without further ado, let's dive in.

Expert interview.

My guest expert today is Steve Ozanich, who is an author and really the voice of a, of a movement. And the movement is people who free their bodies of pain, chronic pain, disability, injury, things that have kept many people stuck for so long. And he's the author of multiple books. One of his sort of the book he's most well known for that spread really wide is called the Great Pain Deception. Also a newer book, Back Pain, Permanent Healing, Understanding the Myths, Lies and Confusion. He's also wrote a book about Dr. John Sarno's top 10 healing discoveries and has been on his own journey and then turning around and helping people from all over the world with his books and beyond and consulting and other things for, as you said before, almost two decades now. So we have a wealth of knowledge here today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Steve, thank you for the opportunity to try to help some more people.

Yes, and indeed, indeed you will, as you have greatly helped me. And in a previous episode of this show I talked quite a bit about my own journey and how your book the Great Pain Deception really helped me along that path. And so let's orient people, though I definitely encourage everyone to listen to that previous episode, but let's help them orient them to you. So your story is, there's a lot of facets to it. And the Great Pain Deception, you go in more in depth. But what's sort of like the top level view of your story? What was your experience with chronic pain? Why did you get into this stuff in the first place?

Sure, I started having severe pain in my teens and it lasted 30 years. In my back, of course, other pains too, because they're all related and in the 1990s, I hit rock bottom. I couldn't walk anymore. I lost over £50. And I was scheduled for back surgery. And a friend of mine showed me an article written by Dr. Sarno, who you mentioned. And I immediately got his book called Healing Back Pain. And I started reading it and I didn't believe it. I thought he was crazy. You know, I saw my MRIs, I saw the stenosis, I saw the crookedness, I saw all the osteophytes. I saw all the problems right there at the level of pain. And so I thought he was crazy. Then I got worse. And another buddy, another year and a half later, I revisited it with an open mind when I was about to have surgery. And I began to realize that this guy was right, that the pains are not coming from the structure of the body, no matter what the imaging is saying. And I began to do the work and I healed completely. And a bunch of people started asking me for help. And so I started working with them. And as they were healing, they were saying, you should write this down into a book. So I did it called the Great Pain Deception that you mentioned. It took 10 years to write it, and it truly is changing lives around the world in just about every country.

Yeah.

Because of Dr. Sarno, I'm just a messenger of his work. And he was very proud of me being a messenger. And I loved him like a father. He passed away a few months ago, but he changed the world forever. And so I want to continue his work.

Yeah. So important, you know, and because.

The.

Different ways that it can be taught and you just continuing to create works after he's gone just keeps it going. Absolutely. I mentioned Dr. Sarno a lot in the previous episode and would definitely encourage anyone who, as you listen to this and you're intrigued or hopeful, start with the 1, 2 combo, which a lot of people recommend online is his book Healing Back Pain. And then, Steve, your book the Great Pain Deception and not surprised that it took you 10 years for at least. One thing that comes to my mind is when I'm reading through it. And you know, I got a doctorate in clinical psychology, so I studied the psychological forces quite a bit. And as I'm reading your book, I'm like, this is extremely well researched. This is more well researched than most self help books. Honestly, it's probably more well researched than my books. And so. And you know, there's a level of devotion that you must have to put that work in, to put that effort in.

Thank you. I appreciate those kind words. It was Tedious But I wanted to get it right, which is part of the personality that we'll talk about, I'm sure, you know, the perfectionistic personality. But I wanted to do it right. I've had people who have psychology degrees tell me that they didn't learn that much in psychology school, which really surprised me, you know, but, you know, I wanted to do a Psychology 101, a very simple thing to pull this complex work together so people could understand it, because it all means nothing if people can't understand it.

Yeah.

And so it has to be fairly simple. And the book may look daunting, but people tell me they love reading it and they just keep grinding through it. And so, you know, I appreciate the kind words. You know, it's very nice, because that's what I wanted to do. And it's nice to hear that you feel that way about it.

Yeah, well. And so let's really, really dig in. And, you know, in the previous episode, I talk a lot about sort of this.

This whole.

Introduce this whole idea that pain can, you know, not be coming from a structural problem. Because for a lot of people, that's sort of the fundamental step that they must take to really even be open to that. So I'm assuming that people have listened to that kind of. Because I'd rather spend a lot of our time in the magical process of healing and not so much in the process of sort of convincing people. And your newer book, Back Pain Permanent Healing, does a really good job of kind of helping people take that first big step and full of evidence and stories and just really hammers that home, I think, in a very clear way.

Thanks. That book was intended to kind of fill in the gaps of what I've seen since then, things that I didn't say. But it's basically a long argument on why Dr. Sarno is right, why the medical industry is wrong, and why most people don't want to heal. And it gets very complex into the psychology, you know, about displacement and reaction formation, things like that, but people don't nearly need to know all that. I just wanted to make it an argument on what I'm seeing here and what the TMS physicians are seeing and the TMS counselors and psychologists, and I'm assuming, of course, you talked about tms, and maybe they. They understand a little bit about that. But it was Dr. Sarno's great discovery, the Tension Mind Neural Syndrome that we now call the Mind Body Syndrome, because it. It's more than just pain. It's basically almost everything within our Health is caused through the mind and through the emotions, which is primarily based on the personality type that we call a type T person for attention builder.

Yeah, yeah. So let's kind of uncover those pieces now. So someone has got pain. They've read through Sarno's book or your book and identify with. Like, okay, wait a minute. Maybe my pain is not caused by structural problem. You know, maybe my foot pain, back pain, ankle pain, neck pain, whatever is, is emotional. Okay, all right, I'm with you. I'm open to that. Now what? Because I've actually talked to a few people and convinced them not by like, you know, super powered logic or reciting studies, actually, just by telling my own story. And then that, you know, they became very open. So then my curiosity is like, great, now that they're kind of leaning in, how do we kind of usher them through? So you mentioned the personality. Let's talk about what is the personality that tends to be associated with pain? And then what do we do? Do we change that? Can't change that. Let's dig into that whole topic.

Right. Dr. Sarno identified this in his office in his patients with chronic pain and other chronic symptoms as well. They tended to be, you know, warriors, a little bit anxious, good people. He introduced that term, goodest, and all the way towards perfectionism. At some point, they usually wanted to make people happy. They didn't want to quit until they got it right. They pushed and pushed and pushed themselves hard. And like he said this was, it's good for society to have someone like that, and they're good workers. But the deeper psyche absolutely despises it because it's really pretending at some point. The superego itself is designed to lie to the world, and the ego despises having to pretend. And so when we believe one way and act another, it causes great conflict. And almost all of this suffering comes from psychological conflict, acting one way and feeling another way. And of course, his fourth book was called the Divided Mind for that reason. You know, it's not only divided between conscious and unconscious, but it's divided between how you're acting and how you really feel. And so it's amazing. You know, I didn't believe it at first, but now I teach to work around the world, and I've been working with people for a long, long time, and they pretty much tend to get better, but they have to see a side of themselves that they have blocked that they don't understand. Of course, the personality that we're talking about, it doesn't just suddenly begin in Adulthood. It begins to form in childhood, in the first six or seven years of life. The programmable state of mind. There's no personality yet the child listens to everything that it sees, it hears and is told, and it believes that it downloads it like a hard drive. And so then a personality begins to form at a certain age. And now a defense shield goes up, and the child basically becomes whatever the people that are taking care of it wants to be. Because the biggest fear of all of us as children is being abandoned. That's the greatest fear. No one there for us, suddenly with nothing. And so we will adapt to become whatever those people who are taking care of us want us to be, which Freud called a superego and Jung called a Persona. Whatever it is, it's a false self. And then we get into adulthood, and these people are in relationships they don't really want, and job, careers that they hate. And of course, this personality of niceness and goodness is also so that people won't leave them and reject them. If I'm perfect, if I'm good, if I'm nice, if I'm kind, then they won't reject me. Because if you get rejected, you're back being alone again and isolated. And so this personality develops so that people will stay with it because there's so much fear there. But the problem is any type of perceived abandonment or loss or anything like that causes great rage inside this personality type. I had a guy walk up to me in a restaurant, and he was limping, holding his back and his hip. And he said, that guy over there told me that you wrote a book on back pain. And I said, yes, I did. I said, when's your divorce? And he just looked at me, stunned, with an open mouth. He said, my wife and I haven't told anybody, anybody at all. There's no way you could possibly know that. I said, well, that's just a guess. Through experience, it's either somebody is sick in the family, or you're going to get your master's or your doctorate or some project at work or a divorce. Something is changing in the life dramatically. It causes great internal rage because of the fear of separation. And that's basically the overview of what's happening. But it gets more detailed, of course.

Sure. No, I love it. You know, you had several options to choose from there. And you nailed marriage, divorce as the. As the one. In that case with that guy.

Yeah, I got lucky.

But, you know, but it highlights the knowledge of that there's really these. These instigating factors that are Life factors, although we've been trained to look for physiological factors. And I can't tell you how many times I talk with people about this, and they're like, yeah, but I had a pop. I heard this, I did that. You know, and you talk a lot about the Tiger woods story and sort of him referencing these, and it's so common in our culture. But what I hear you saying, and I really want to highlight this for people, is that it actually we kind of create this false self, this Persona, this way that we should be in order to keep love. But it's not authentic. It's not who we really are. So what do we do with that? Do we find out who? Let's say someone is like, yeah, I don't like my job, or I am being really nice and stuffing a lot and okay, I got pain. What would someone suggest that someone start doing?

It is of course, the old Buddhist tenement. It's tenet. It's not about doing. It's about being. One of the problems with the pain epidemics, and specifically whether it's hands, feet, knees, shoulders, necks, migraines, it doesn't matter, is that we're doing things to try to heal it, like surgery and physical therapy and injections and acupuncture and stretching and stabbing and cutting and medicating. That's what your brain hopes you'll do. That's exactly what your brain hopes. It's not a physical body problem. It's an emotional process. In almost every case, there's rare cases where it could be structural. Of course, the brain wants to divert these powerful emotions away. Every time you do something to heal, your brain's like, ah, right, good. That's what I want him to do. Because it's still diverting the problem to the body, which is not the problem, of course. And so the doing of things is really caused the epidemics. The healing mechanism is all about awareness and recognition. Dr. Sarno referred to it as knowledge therapy in all of his books. He began to see his patients healing as he told them that there was nothing wrong with their body, that this was their unconscious mind diverting the process to their body. And some of them healed right there. And I've seen it working with people, too. They got better while I was Skyping with them. Months and months and years of pain, it would disappear because of awareness. As consciousness expands, the darkness is destroyed and light enters the picture. That's it. There are things in your life you can do, of course, I'm talking as far as healing. Yeah, you don't want to. You don't want to do anything to try to heal the body because every time you do that, you tell your deeper psyche, something's wrong with me.

Yeah, we know. Something really interesting I found on this journey in the, you know, previous episode. I talk a lot about my own journey with this is that there's the, there's the exploring of maybe some of these underlying feelings as part of the process. There's also something about, you know, when Sarno would tell someone or you would tell someone, like, hey, this is not due to structural, like there's nothing wrong with you physically. There's something about that transmission of certainty that I've found to be extremely powerful. And I see in my own self as my journey has progressed that I'll have phases where I am, when I am in total certainty. And there's no doubt and there's no pain and then there's this. Sometimes something happens and there'll be this little creepy crawly process where there'll be a little bit of pain and a little bit of doubt. Oh, no. You know, and then that, the sort of reclaiming that sense of, no, there's nothing wrong with me is the tipping point.

Yeah. And that's my job basically. I'm not a doctor or a psychologist. I'm a TMS expert. I boost their confidence because really the healing process, if you want to look at it as a process, it's really an awareness, but a realization that nothing's wrong and that this other thing's causing it. If you want to look at it as a process, it's about erasing doubt. And that's it. Because usually when people contact me and they'll say, I have my MRIs here, my doctor said it's, it's always L4, L5s. One in almost 99% of the people, everyone has these herniations and the brain seems to find it and use it, which was really a Nobel Prize winning observation on his part, is that the brain will use the changes in the body. It'll use the arthritis, it'll use the narrowing, it'll use the crookedness to firmly convince you that something's wrong. But we know that everybody heals who realizes that that's not the cause. And so it's not coming from them. The brain is just simply attacking those changes in the body, erasing doubt. That it's not structural, that it is a thought emotional process is really the process that comes in many different levels. Some people don't understand TMS well, and I had to do the fundamental things. Other people understand that it's really about spirit and light and love and hope and faith. And then we talk at that level. So these things can go any which way. But you're right. Doubt. And you know, you know better than I do that it's not just about tms or healing every phase of life. Doubt is the problem. You know, it's the devil. You know, they say doubt is the devil, that, no, you can't do it. But this is learned behavior, you understand? I'll ask people sometimes, you know, they're in suffering. Do you feel like you deserve to be healed? And they'll start crying. That answers my question. They don't because they were beaten down. Dr. Sarno often said sometimes the parents will use subtle abuse. He saw it in a lot of his patients, to get more out of their child. They love their children, of course, but they want more out of them. They want them to have a better life than they had. So they will subtly abuse them by saying things like, you got an A. Why didn't you get an A? You got a second place trophy. Maybe you'll get a first place one someday. Little things like that, trying to get more out of the children, make the child feel less than whole and not good enough. That's where perfectionism develops. I'm not good enough. I did it. It's 100% perfect. But I better do a little bit more because they have it ingrained. This tape machine playing in the back of their mind, it's not good enough. It's not good enough. It's not good enough. And so most of the people that I deal with, you know, they were, they were adopted, which is actually abandoned by the parents, truly abandoned. Or were abused mentally or had shame parenting in their lives, or they suddenly abused them like Dr. Sarno said, or there was a lot of fighting or temper in the family or alcoholism or something. Most of the people. Now there's a small handful of people who had great parents who they get, they can go, and they can go lean on and they're very lovey with warmth, you know. But like Dr. Sandra said, there's still complex factors there that lead them into this fear and this personality type. But most of the time there, there's a problem with the parents somehow that there, there wasn't a connection made. It's that simple. This loving, deep connection.

Yeah, absolutely. There's. There's so much, so much there. And so let's say someone is listening right now and they're nodding their head they're like, yeah, okay, I am. I do often feel not good enough. I'm driving myself. I do have a lot of kind of perfection in me. So the awareness of that, is that sufficient? How do they kind of use that awareness to diminish pain?

Yeah, I mean, in many cases it's enough, but in extreme cases, you know, need help, of course. But there are tools that we can use. I wouldn't call them cure alls or panaceas, but some people journal and it makes them feel really great because they can finally lay it out on paper. It didn't do much for me, but I've actually seen it help people. So I, I tell them to try it. It's really about changing how we react to life. That's the thing. I had an architect contact me saying that your book took my back pain away. Lifetime of back pain. I was suffering so bad. I said, what was it that I said? I'm always curious. He said, you said in the one chapter, perfectionists go around angry all day long but don't even know it. He said, when I read that line, a tear formed in my eye and it rolled down my face and it splattered on the page of your book. And he said, at that point I began to unthaw as a human being. And I like to use him as an example because that is exactly how you want to look at this. We're going through the life like robots, not feeling joy and happiness when we're repressing these things. I'm talking when you've got chronic symptoms, you know, you're blocking something there, you're blocking something in your life that needs, that needs a light shed on it is really the best way to look at that. Sometimes journaling is a way of light shedding on it. Sometimes a therapist, other times just deep reflection. And that's basically how I did it. I got more physical. Dr. Sarno said, when you've got this crippling pain and it's just from these natural changes in the body body that the most important thing you have to do is become more physical. And that's the scariest part there because I was. I couldn't even touch my kneecaps. My pain was so bad I couldn't even touch my kneecaps. And so I decided to start renewing my life and go get physical. Golfing and running again and wow. It was painful at first, but it eventually went away just like he said it would. It was all those doctors and hundreds of thousands of dollars probably to count the Insurance money were all wrong. They were all wrong. There was nothing wrong with the knees, ankles. Even though my ankle joint is ossified, there's no more joint left at all. The doctor looked at it. He was freaked out because I've rolled it playing sports seven times, and it's just one ball of ossified lump of arthritis. That pain left, too. It's just an amazing process. I don't know exactly what you went over, of course, whether you told the people that it's a diversion to the physical body away from the emotional. But I had a guy contact me saying, you know, I had knee pain so bad. I mean, I could see it on the mri. The doctor told me it was a bad knee. You know, it was bone on bone, which. That phrase even makes me cringe. There's osteoarthritis. There was meniscus tear. You know, he said, I just didn't believe you. I read Cyno's book. It didn't work. I read your book. It didn't work. And then he said, I broke my ankle and the knee pain disappeared immediately. And that's what's going on. The brain rivets itself to the sensation of pain in certain people, and it magnifies it like a magnet, and it will use that as, like an obsessive thing. You know, the emotions and the thoughts that are too powerful and too threatening are not hiding behind the symptom. They're hiding behind your obsession on the body. Yeah, it's a very. It's a very obsessed. It's right. A very obsessive personality type, you know, leaning towards ocd, like, tendencies, although they wouldn't be diagnosed in all cases with it. But they. They worry, you know, and they need to obsess. And so the term TMS, the term TMSSing is equivalent to obsessing and alcoholism and drug addiction and workaholism. Anything that you do obsessively to divert your brain away is equivalent to the pain in every. In every facet.

Yeah, you know, it's really fascinating as I found. So as I was been cutting down bit by bit on this medication that I'd been on for, you know, 12 years because of. Ostensibly because of a problem with my autoimmune, you know, issue and really making some of these fundamental shifts in belief and perception and then tapering off less and less and less and less to the point where I'm taking, like, you know, minimally, even impactful doses. And then I'm just doing everything even stronger, using my body like crazy. And what I noticed is I would start to have this obsessive urge. So I'm also really into nutrition and whole foods, plant based diet, that sort of stuff. But I noticed this sort of insatiable obsessive urge for information about that stuff that coincided with me getting off the medication, where it'd be like every free minute, where it might normally be silence I wanted to fill by listening to information about that. And I was like, you know, I'm interested in it. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But I could see it. And I was like, wait a minute. This is TMSing, as you said. This is getting away. Anything that gets us away from presence and from feeling.

Exactly. You opened up the heart of it all, really, right there. You know, it reminds me of a book someone mentioned the other day. I can't remember the guy's name. The title was something like Learn to sit still or something like that. And the guy healed himself of like everything when he learned, you know, to stop this anxiousness. And that begins with the intellect, like you said, the thinking process. Now this is from Carl Jung's brilliant body of work. He was, I think, the most brilliant psychiatrist of all time. But he incorporated everything into his work, like the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhism and all these things in different cultures. And he said thinking and feeling are polar opposite functions. You can't do them at the same time. And so if you are thinking, he said, you are no longer feeling. And when I read that, that was like a light bulb moment for me. Wow. Yes. My mind raced like a hamster on a wheel all the time. It's doing so to prevent the feeling function. He said, if your thinking is your superior function, you use it like a weapon to block all your feelings. And it's like, wow, that really opened up my life. It really, really was a brilliant observation. But I mean, I looked at the Bhagavad Gita and it says right there, all knowledge will dissolve into love anyway. And so I think one of the big problems in our whole society is information. We live in the information era right now. We're constantly pounding information to the left side of the brain. Bam, bam, bam. The more you know, the more you know, the more you survive. But after a while, it's really crippling us terribly. You know, it would be better just to begin to let go of more things. I let go of more things in my life, let go of more attachments, began to rest in the moment, more see the joy and more things in my life and my pains disappeared.

That brings us the end of the time we have for today. This interview, as you can tell, is just getting. We're just starting to get cooking here. So it continues on. This is a long one. So I broke it up into two different episodes and just for the sake of the material and the continuity and how important it is, we've removed all the ads from this episode and the next one just because I really want people to just be impacted by this and just how much it's transformed my life. I really want to share it. So before we end though, today, we gotta end with something that we always end with. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step is to go get one of these books that we're talking about or download the audio. I listened to all of Sarno's stuff on audio. Get Sarno's audio. Steve's books, at least the newer one, Back Pain Permanent Healing, is audio format as well. You can get the Kindle. Get something. Dig into this because we have between this week and next, you have some time start. Like if you're in any case, in any level, intrigued or curious or even skeptical, but drawn. Check it out, check it out, see what's there for you. Because, man, I gotta tell you, it's pretty amazing to be free of so much pain. So enjoy checking out one of those books. There'll be more in next week's episode with this continuation of this interview with Steve Ozanich and we go even deeper into shifting personality of perfectionism, how to really be in the moment, how to get away from obsessing and distracting and anxiety and all this stuff. So stay tuned for that and until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let.

Them know and send them a link.

To shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com. Sa.