Psychosomatic Conditions and the Mind’s Diversion Tactics

This is an excerpt from lecture 12 included in The Calmness in Mind Process, where John Glanvill discusses the sensitive subject of (SSD) and asks if psychosomatic illness might be real and how it might operate, causing chronic fatigue, pain, inflammation, skin conditions, hypochondria, ME, Fibromyalgia and TMS (Tension Myoneural Syndrome).

Conventional medicine is excellent at treating clear structural damage, infections and acute trauma. It is far less successful with the growing list of chronic conditions that lack a neat organic explanation: persistent back and joint pain, migraines, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, tinnitus, unexplained allergies, skin issues, insomnia and the physical symptoms that so often accompany anxiety, OCD and depression.

These symptoms are real. The pain is real. The exhaustion is real. Calling them “all in the mind” is both inaccurate and unhelpful. Yet many of these conditions ease when life pressure drops and intensify when stress, worry or unresolved emotion rises. That pattern is worth examining without ideology.

One coherent model for understanding this is psychosomatic illness — the idea that the unconscious mind can generate genuine physical symptoms as a diversion. Dr John Sarno, Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, observed that unprocessed anger, rage, fear, rejection and repressed emotional material from childhood can be held in the body, hidden from conscious awareness. To keep that material out of awareness, the unconscious, acting through the autonomic nervous system, reduces blood flow to muscles, nerves and tendons. The resulting oxygen deprivation is experienced as real pain, stiffness or other chronic symptoms. He called this process Tension Myoneural Syndrome, or TMS.

In this view the body is not inventing pain to punish the person. It is using a diversion tactic that once served a protective function. The more the conscious mind focuses on the symptom — researching it, fearing it, organising life around it — the more successfully the deeper emotional material stays buried.

In my own case the pattern was clear. At the height of my anxiety and controlling habits, back, hip and joint pain was often debilitating. Family history of arthritis offered an easy explanation. Yet as I learned to worry less, release control, accept more of life as it is, and deliberately discharge stored emotional charge, the pain dropped by roughly ninety percent. What had looked like progressive arthritis in my hands disappeared. The residual structural issues I was born with remained, but they no longer generated the same level of suffering. The symptoms had been amplifying the underlying emotional load, not the other way round.

This does not mean every chronic condition is purely psychosomatic, nor that medical investigation should be abandoned. Structural problems, inflammation and genuine disease still require proper assessment. It does mean that when scans and tests come back inconclusive, or when standard treatments produce only partial relief, it is reasonable to consider the psychosomatic loop — the mind–body diversion system — as a contributing factor.

The unconscious is not malicious. It is simply continuing the job it was given in childhood: keep the person functioning by keeping certain material out of awareness. Physical symptoms are one of its more effective diversion tactics. Recovery, in this framework, involves two parallel movements. First, stop feeding the diversion. Reduce the secondary anxiety about the symptom itself. Second, create conditions in which the underlying emotional material can surface and be processed without the old protective strategies immediately shutting it down.

The practical stance I found useful was simple. Research everything. Keep an open mind. Avoid advice from people still trapped in the same condition. And test every promising idea thoroughly on yourself before discarding it. Online forums full of shared hopelessness rarely help; they often reinforce the sense that nothing can change.

None of this requires you to believe that you are “doing it to yourself” in a conscious or blameworthy sense. It only requires recognising that the nervous system and the unconscious are powerful systems that respond to how we think, feel and direct attention. When those systems are overloaded with unresolved material, they will find ways to signal or to distract through psychosomatic means. Learning to work with that reality, rather than against it, often produces results that pure symptom management does not.

If the idea resonates, the single most useful next step is to listen carefully to Dr Sarno’s book The Divided Mind. It is not gospel. It is one coherent model of psychosomatic illness and TMS that many people have found clarifying. Test it against your own experience. Keep what works. Discard what does not. The body is listening to the stories you tell and the emotions you refuse to feel. Changing the relationship with both is often where the lasting shift begins.