The mechanism is this: tough feelings are gasoline. They catch fire in the machine, they get hot, and they can explode. If you surface them, they evaporate.

That’s my metaphor to summarize a book, Mind Your Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain and Anxiety by Nicole J. Sachs, LCSW. I did not go looking for this book. It was on display at the Buffalo and Erie County Central Library. That library is a gem, and if you haven’t gone, go. This book grabbed my attention because someone in my life was dealing with chronic pain.

This book is 304 pages. I will summarize it in the following 2 paragraphs.

Pain that doesn’t respond to medical treatment could be the result of inflammation and nervous system dysregulation. This happens because the body’s fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response being stuck in “threat” mode and unable to completely release the sense of being in danger. It’s there because there are unsurfaced and unprocessed feelings from difficult experiences. If you surface the feelings, you release them, and they will no longer tell your nervous system you are in trouble. Otherwise, you will experience pain as an attempt to process those feelings some other way.

A strategy to process these feelings are a journaling technique she calls “JournalSpeak”. For this to work, you must believe it will. You start by making three columns: childhood struggles, current struggles, and your personality. Then, every day, you spend 20 minutes writing on one of those topics or anything else distressing. You can type into a computer or handwrite. Then, this is key, you destroy it. You then spend ten minutes doing a self-compassion meditating to bring your body back to a state of calm. Do this for 28 days and see if your pain experiences improve. Then continue for… maybe forever? By the way, please listen to her podcast.

Three hundred and four pages, folks.

I did not like this book at all. I resent this book a bit, actually. Nicole Sachs is going to live in the same part of my brain where Henry David Thoreau does, where they have pretty decent ideas but the presentation bothers me so much.

First, the book reads like it exists to legitimate a podcast, or maybe start a cult. I could see our current cultural currencies of legitimacy being constructed through it. If you want to be an influencer, you need to have an audience. Now that she’s written a book, she can go on other people’s podcasts and be the author. An author is an expert. Undoubtedly the podcast’s audience was used to convince the publisher to take a risk on her. Stories shared on her podcast end each chapter to bolster the legitimacy of her ideas, but also serve like a literary peer pressure. Look! All these other people followed me. You should too.

I experienced the tone of the book as very “I am the way, the truth, and the light” where the author establishes that she understands the suffering person’s problems, she’s been there herself, she’s gone to the now-deceased originator of the techniques she’s modified. Follow her! She will save you. Like the way a charismatic leader tries to establish their genealogy and expertise. I do not trust saviors. I perceive influencers as being more invested in acquiring the benefits of drawing attention to themselves than being helpful to others, so I am distrustful of their motives.

This book is also extremely repetitive. It reminded me a bit of This Naked Mind with the constant repetition, though that book (which I read after I quit drinking) is honest about the reason it’s so damn repetitive: it’s trying to rewire your thinking. I did not experience Mind Your Body‘s repetition as anything other than trying its hardest to fill 304 pages with concepts that would otherwise fill a pamphlet.

With that said…

Sure, I’ll give it a shot.

I have been a life long journaler. There are notebooks filled me telling myself stories about my life. There are things I want to remember, and things I am trying to figure out. But. There’s a flaw. I recognized it reading Melissa Febos’ book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. I LOVED that book, and her most recent work The Dry Season was absolutely phenomenal. (Maybe one of these days I’ll write about them, lest Field Notes turn into a grudge blog of “Books Chris Hated.”) Ms. Febos notes that in order for a story to be compelling, it has to be completely true as you understand it. It can’t be the version of a story you are telling yourself to cope with it. It can’t be a version framed to make your participation seem more honorable. It has to be real. (Ms. Febos has done a lot of therapy. She’s also a 12 step person; I’m happy for her though it’s not for me.)

For all the ways that felt convicting, it was my own diary that I realized I was censoring, lest the kids or Will (people who have never opened it) come across it. Less dramatically than Terry Tempest Williams’ mom, who left her daughter empty journals, I was not writing about some of my more stigmatizing struggles to protect my reputation with a future reader.

I’ve been working with months of writer’s block and it became clear to me: it’s because I am censoring my thoughts and feelings from my self. I am not processing them. Writer’s block is about fear: fear of what will show up. Fear of the reception. Fear that you’re not good enough.

So I figured, for the sake of my creativity (and the constant aches that this almost forty year-old body has been gifting me), I would give this a shot. As a Unitarian Universalist, I am certainly practiced in open-mindedly listening to all sorts of ideas without fully subscribing to the entirety of what the messenger says.

So for most days this past month, I woke up at my usual 5:00AM, pull out one of the kids’ used composition notes, set my Focus Friend app for 20 minutes, and wrote. The bean would finish knitting, and I would rip out the page and promptly deposit it into the paper shredder. I would set Focus Friend for ten minutes, and try to meditate. I am a terrible meditator. I ultimately grabbed one of my chalices and stared at the flame of a tealight for ten minutes instead.

I cannot tell you what I wrote about, because I had often already forgotten about it by the time the smoke was done wisping from a blown-out candle.

So how’d it go? Well, my emotions certainly became more accessible, which ended up being a mixed bag. (My husband would sometimes ask, “How’s feeling your feelings going?” to which I would consistently respond, “Terrible.”) My body aches less. I’m more able to string sentences together, sometimes even into stories. My diary continues to be poor blackmail material. The most annoying part about this book is that the technique appears to work. Part of me didn’t want it to work. I wanted the charismatic leader to be wrong.

I continue to be the math girl in the mental health field. This means I’m surrounded by Actual Experts, people licensed by the State of New York with one of the advanced degrees in mental health therapeutic strategies. I was telling my coworker, a licensed social worker, about this book. I told her how I had hated it, how I had tried it anyway, and my grudge about how it worked. And then she filled me in.

Turns out journaling is a standard therapeutic technique.

She told me that if I had been her client, because I am a writing-type person, she would recommend journaling. But if she was working with someone who wasn’t a words person, she’d recommend art or some other making something to release the feelings. She explained that I experienced this ritual as working, because it’s supposed to.

On the bright side? I felt less like a vulnerable mark who was pulled into someone’s scam. On the downside? This repackaging of something basic, taking credit for it, and establishing oneself as a helper influencer feels like I am watching something less great.

If the author’s stories and those of other people are true, she has, in fact, helped a lot of people improve their quality of life. That’s admirable. Maybe being picky about how that happened doesn’t actually make the world a better place.

I am not confident that you need to read the book to glean its most useful lesson from it, especially if you read this essay. If you want to read something that is quite clearly a product of 2020s media/influencer landscape, I would recommend this. If you want to see if you agree or disagree with me, check it out. I am grateful that it helped me. Ms. Sachs has helped me make my world a better place, though it also demonstrated a way that ideas, even the good ones, get perpetuated in a media environment that’s a sea of gray.