Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Couldn’t Process

Let me tell you something that took me years — and a lot of unnecessary suffering — to understand.

When I was 28 years old, I had serious spinal fusion surgery. Six months after the procedure, the original problem was resolved. But the pain didn’t go away.

I went back to my doctor, had multiple MRIs, saw physical therapists, occupational therapists, and eventually a psychiatrist — and nobody could explain it. Multiple specialists, zero answers. And to make matters worse, they all suggested the pain was “in my head.” What I didn’t know then was that that maddening suggestion would eventually turn out to be true.

I sought world-renowned rehabilitation services at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where I was assigned both a physician and a master’s-level physical therapist. The experts, however, found no physical explanation. Worse, the rehabilitation itself didn’t just fail to help — it made things worse. At the peak of our shared frustration, the team concluded that my pain was psychological in origin — that nothing physically real was driving it. Depression set in, not just because of the pain, but because no one could explain it. And despite pointing to my mental health as the culprit, the only treatment they offered was a referral to a psychiatrist.

Then someone handed me a book by Dr. John Sarno called Mind Over Back Pain, and everything changed. The back pain was real; I wasn’t imagining anything. The evidence was right there in my chronically inflamed and spasming muscles. But the cause had nothing to do with my spine. It was coming from unresolved, dissociated trauma that had been pushed out of my conscious awareness and was now expressing itself through my weakest physical link: my lower back. This explanation was a profound relief. I wasn’t going crazy, and I wasn’t the “mental case” I had so harshly begun calling myself.

Once I made that connection and began working through that trauma in therapy, the psychogenic back pain disappeared. Completely. And it never came back. I share this story not just because it’s mine, but because it belongs to 60 million other people in the United States alone.

What Are Neuroplastic Symptoms — And Why Have You Never Heard of Them?

I recently sat down with Dr. Dave Clark, a board-certified physician in internal medicine and gastroenterology, who has spent 40 years and over 7,000 patients studying and treating this phenomenon. Dr. Clark calls these conditions neuroplastic symptoms — a deliberately hopeful term. “Neuro” refers to the brain and the nervous system. “Plastic” means the capacity for change. In other words, this can get better. Your brain is trying to tell you something, but it doesn’t know how to say it any other way. He also gently corrected my use of “psychosomatic,” a term that has accumulated enough negative connotations to no longer be taken seriously in the medical and mental health fields. “Neuroplastic” is the more accurate and empowering replacement.

These symptoms are not imaginary. They are 100% real, often severe, and in some cases completely debilitating. The list is staggering: chronic back and neck pain, migraines, fibromyalgia, IBS, chronic fatigue, bladder spasms, pelvic pain, tinnitus, dizziness, complex regional pain syndrome, POTS, and more — often occurring simultaneously. A national survey found that the average person with neuroplastic symptoms experiences three different symptoms at the same time.

The Numbers That Should Stop You in Your Tracks

Dr. Clark shared a statistic that deserves a moment of silence: 88% of chronic spine pain is brain-generated, not structural. Nearly nine out of ten people presenting with neck or low back pain had no structural explanation — no nerve damage, intact reflexes, full muscle strength. Just pain. Surgery, injections, and nerve ablations don’t work on these patients. You cannot operate on a psychological wound. Additionally, 40% of all primary care visits involve neuroplastic symptoms — and most are going undiagnosed and untreated. Think about that the next time someone you love is told, “We can’t find anything wrong.”

The SLDD Connection: Why This Hits Home for My Community

Here is where this becomes deeply personal, especially for those of you who follow my work on Self-Love Deficit Disorder (SLDD) and the self-love recovery treatment I developed for it. Together, these ideas shape how we understand codependency and narcissistic relationship abuse.

Dr. Clark confirmed something I have long suspected: the more adversity and trauma a person experiences during childhood’s critical developmental years, the more vulnerable they are to neuroplastic symptoms — and the less likely physical interventions like back surgery are to work.

People with SLDD consistently experience attachment trauma, the result of growing up with narcissistic or emotionally unavailable caregivers. As children, they were unconsciously tasked with managing the emotional chaos of their households, particularly the unpredictable moods and demands of a narcissistic parent. This meant constantly scanning for danger, walking on eggshells, and suppressing their own needs and feelings just to survive.

All of this chronically and invisibly activates the sympathetic nervous system — the body’s built-in stress response system — in ways the child is completely unaware of. As Dr. Clark described it, it’s like being a fish in water: you don’t realize you’re surrounded by it because it has always simply been your world.

That unrelenting sympathetic activation doesn’t disappear when you become an adult. It gets carried forward — often without your awareness — and it continues to fire in response to present-day situations that unconsciously echo your past.

The trauma you couldn’t process as a child doesn’t vanish. The brain, in its extraordinary evolutionary wisdom, removes it from conscious awareness so you don’t have to experience it directly. It gets stored in the limbic system, in the amygdala, where it lives not as a memory but as a physiological state — one that can be triggered without warning and expressed through the body.

As I explained to Dr. Clark, this is PTSD wearing a physical disguise. When the brain cannot process overwhelming emotion through conscious awareness, it finds another outlet: the body.

For me, the core wound was the feeling of being trapped, of having no way out. That emotional experience, rooted deep in my childhood, had never been fully processed or released. So, my body did what my mind could not — it expressed that pain through my weakest physical link: my lower back, the very site of my spinal fusion. The moment I truly understood that connection and made a conscious commitment to never allow myself to feel trapped in my adult relationships again, the pain lifted. At the time, it felt like a miracle — something that defied logic yet felt absolutely right. For others, the journey is far more complex and lengthier. But the underlying principle remains the same: the body will carry what the mind cannot hold.

“You Do Not Have A Mental Illness — You Are Carrying Too Much”

What I most admire about Dr. Clark is his refusal to pathologize his patients — and his ability to help them stop pathologizing themselves. When people suffer for years without a diagnosis, they inevitably internalize the message that something is fundamentally wrong with them. That belief feeds a closed loop that only deepens the suffering.

Dr. Clark describes his patients as Olympic weightlifters asked to carry 50 pounds more than the world record for their weight class. Anyone would break down under that load. And when it does, the lifter doesn’t just lose the ability to compete — they lose the sense that they were ever capable at all. The goal of treatment is to correct exactly that misunderstanding. The suffering was never caused by weakness. It was caused by the sheer weight of what they had been carrying. Once they set it down, they finally see how strong they have been all along.

I see the same pattern in clients recovering from narcissistic relationships. They believe their pain results from some personal flaw, so they try harder to be better, more patient, more understanding — while drifting further from the actual source of their suffering. Eventually, they discovered that the narcissist worked so hard to hide: they were never weak. But here lies the painful paradox: the very strength that kept them surviving also kept them tolerating. And tolerating without understanding does not lead to relief. It simply prolongs the captivity in a quieter form.

The Tragic Cost of Getting This Wrong

Dr. Clark estimates that over a million people have died in the past 20 to 30 years as a direct or indirect result of misdiagnosed neuroplastic symptoms. Treated with opioids as the primary solution, patients developed tolerance, requiring higher doses — a predictable cycle that creates dependency. When federal regulators pressured physicians to curtail prescriptions, dependent patients were cut off. Many turned to street alternatives, and with fentanyl now contaminating the drug supply, what began as a misdiagnosed pain condition ended in a completely preventable death. This is not a failure of character. It is a failure of diagnosis.

There Is Hope

Dr. Clark shared the story of a patient who, after 22 fruitless healthcare visits in seven months, walked into the Columbia River one night with bricks in her bathrobe pockets. She stopped. She turned around. Her appointment was kept. And she got better. At one of his annual conferences, 100 people raised their hands when asked if they had needed over ten years to find appropriate care. That would never happen with cancer or heart disease. It is a systemic failure — and far too many people in my community are living inside it right now.

The Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms offers a free 12-question self-assessment at symptomatic.me. Treatment begins by bringing unconscious stress into conscious awareness, supported by trauma-informed therapy to integrate what the body has been carrying. The Boulder Back Pain Study found neuroplastic therapy reduced pain by 75% in four weeks among patients who had suffered for an average of a decade — far outperforming spinal injections and standard care. This has been replicated at leading research centers across North America. Healing is possible. Even after years. Even after decades.

A Final Word

If you have been told nothing is wrong, and you know something is — trust yourself. Your pain is real. Your body is not lying to you. It is simply telling you, in the only language it has left, that something unresolved needs your attention. That attention, in the right hands, can change everything.

To learn more about Dr. Dave Clark, visit symptomatic.me or email [email protected]. Next annual conference: mid-October 2026, Dallas, Texas. To learn more about SLDD and Ross Rosenberg’s Self-Love Recovery Treatment Program, visit self-love-recovery.com.

Previously Published HERE

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