Trying Softer: Conversation with Ken Zych and Dr. John Stracks
Video: Watch the full session here →https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqBzh86cnNE
Dr. Stracks: Hello and welcome. I'm Dr. John Stracks, a physician who focuses on the reduction and elimination of physical symptoms using mind-body medicine methods. I'm here today with Ken Zeich, a retired information technology leader. I first met Ken in 2010, when he came to see me while I was working at Northwestern and took one of my mind-body medicine classes. I'm excited for him to share his story of healing with you today.
Just a quick note before we start: if you'd like to learn more about working with me or any of our staff, please visit our website at CormendiHealth.com.
Ken, thanks so much for being here.
Ken: My pleasure.
Dr. Stracks: It's easy for me to remember when we first met, because you were in my class the night of "Snowmageddon" in Chicago — January 31st, 2011 — which was actually the first night I ever ran a session over telehealth, since we all ended up meeting by phone instead. That was over 12 years ago now, so it may be hard to recall in detail, but it's helpful for listeners to understand what life was like for you back then. Can you give us some background?
Ken: What ultimately led me to Dr. Stracks was the end of many years searching for a solution to severe low back, left hip, and left leg pain. I'd tried a lot of different things over several years — the very first symptoms actually appeared back in the mid-90s, though I won't go that far back today. On and off, I experienced classic sciatica symptoms and tried different solutions — exercise, chiropractic care — and it would come and go. But around 2008, the symptoms returned with a vengeance, more severe, and didn't go away. It became a lifestyle that involved a constant baseline of pain — I've said many times it was just "bad days and worse days." The pain was always present and had come to dominate my life.
After a couple of years — literally two years and 13 different doctors and all kinds of treatments — I was at the end of the road and pretty desperate. The way I found out about Dr. Stracks was that my wife works at our local library and brought home a book. I looked at it and thought, "that's not for me, that doesn't make any sense," and pushed it aside. Later, I actually read it — Healing Back Pain by Dr. Sarno — and things changed immediately for me. I had a completely new understanding that there could be an emotional source to my pain rather than a purely physical one. That was the key part of my story: despite all the visits to different doctors and every kind of imaging, there was never any physical abnormality found — no ruptured discs, no arthritis, nothing anyone could point to. Yet I had terrible pain.
Dr. Stracks: Do you remember what the pain was like day to day back then — mostly in your back, or your legs?
Ken: There was some low back pain, but I think that was more from stiffness — my body compensating on the left side. The real pain was in my left thigh — classic burning sciatica. It varied a lot with movement and activity: tingling and burning down into the foot, you name it. I've been told I have a dry, sarcastic sense of humor, and I used to tell my wife it was "red-hot knitting needle day" — that's what it felt like in the back of my leg. Some days were better, some worse, but it was nearly always present. I was constantly conscious of where and how long I'd have to sit — at work, in meetings, on car trips, on planes, at church, in movie theaters. Standing usually gave some relief, not a disappearance of symptoms, but less pain.
Dr. Stracks: You'd seen 13 different practitioners — what else did you try before reading Dr. Sarno's book?
Ken: All of the usual: orthopedists, neurologists, chiropractic care. I love exercise, I'm a very active person, so strength training and stretching weren't hard for me to commit to — but even strong and flexible, the pain didn't go away.
Back to the real turning point: in the fall of 2010, I read that book, and I felt like he was writing about me — long, painful symptoms, no physical evidence, bouncing between doctors with no relief. After doing some pretty intensive research on Dr. Sarno and others, I found Dr. Stracks, right in my backyard in the Chicago suburbs. As he mentioned, his first class had just three or four of us in it — and the last in-person session happened to fall during that classic Chicago blizzard, 21 inches in 21 hours.
Dr. Stracks: It really was a doozy.
Ken: It really was.
The First Breakthrough: Understanding the Mind-Body Connection
Dr. Stracks: So you read the book, recognized some of the personality traits described, and noted you'd had no abnormalities on imaging. Can you think back to how you started to get better?
Ken: The very first step was simply reading, in black and white, that there's a real connection between physical pain and emotional sources. I'd never heard that framed that way before, and it made immediate sense — think about how embarrassment makes your face turn red, a physical response to an emotional trigger, or how stress about a presentation can upset your stomach. Now someone was telling me that childhood issues, life stress, and work stress could cause my body to divert tension into something else, as a distraction. It clicked immediately, and that's where the real healing began — simply with that awareness.
Dr. Stracks: From there, you sought me out, had a consultation, and took my class. What strategies did you use to help yourself move forward and calm the pain?
Ken: Beyond the foundational book knowledge — understanding the science behind it — the biggest piece was working through a big workbook, physically writing things down to peel back the layers, identify personality traits and emotional triggers, and make the connection between those emotional issues and how the brain behaves.
The single biggest benefit I got, because I did it the most, was journaling. I still have the notebooks right here on my bookcase, filled with writing from back then. Over the years I've thumbed through them and referenced techniques like free writing and cluster writing. I know a colleague of yours, Dr. Howard Schubiner, has a book called Unlearn Your Pain — I believe we used something similar as a basis for a lot of what I was doing: brainstorming on paper, writing about stressors, thoughts, feelings, and even writing letters. There was something about doing it physically — thinking it through and putting pen to paper — that felt almost like releasing it, letting it out of its cage. That was incredibly helpful.
I'm a list person — I love lists — so I'd copy out reminders, tips, and strategies from Dr. Schubiner's and Dr. Sarno's material and keep those lists handy. For the first year, maybe 18 months, I referred back to them fairly regularly to reorient my thinking and remind myself of the key points of my journey — literally retraining my mind. I love the image one of the presenters used — I don't remember if it was you, Dr. Stracks — of a path worn into the grass from walking the same route over and over. That's exactly what had happened between my emotional issues and physical pain: a neural pathway burned into my system that I had to abandon in favor of new ones. That image, and understanding how the body actually works, was very powerful.
Dr. Stracks: Were there specific stressors in your life at the time that you think contributed to the pain, or was it more that the uncertainty and worry kept it going once it started?
Ken: Back when we were working together, I identified quite a few — and I think this is true of human nature in general: if you ask someone to name the two or three most impactful things in their life, you'll get maybe 80% of the real picture. In my case it was things like job stress, family history, being a father, being a husband, childhood issues. I don't think there was anything deeply hidden that took a lot of digging to uncover — the real breakthrough wasn't finding some buried secret, it was making the connection that these things, whatever they were, could actually show up in my body. That was the "aha" moment — now we've got something to work with.
Dr. Stracks: My memory is that journal writing was really important for you. Was there a meditation component too?
Ken: I knew you were going to ask that. I tried it — it wasn't for me. I did do it for a while, and it probably benefited me at the time, but it just wasn't my thing long-term. I stuck with the physical, written aspect — like I said, the notebooks are right here in front of me. I don't look at them every day, but maybe once a year I'll flip through them, and it's a real validation of the healing that happened, and more importantly, how it happened. And yes — actual pen and paper, page after page, not typed notes.
Gradual Progress and Returning to Activity
Dr. Stracks: My memory is that after we met and you took the class, you kept gradually improving — less pain, getting back to activities and exercise.
Ken: Absolutely. I'd stopped running, since running is punishing on the body when you're in pain, right around the time I met you, and I didn't run again for about six months, which really bothered me. At some point you encouraged me to try it again — and here's the curious thing: being a distance runner never made my condition worse. That inconsistency was always lurking in the back of my mind — how could I run and not feel worse? There was never a good answer to that question under a purely physical explanation.
Dr. Stracks: It's important to notice those kinds of discrepancies. If someone were truly structurally injured in the way people assume, they wouldn't be able to run five miles. A lot of people notice their pain is worse at work but not at home, or worse on weekdays than weekends — those inconsistencies start to poke holes in a purely physical explanation, and that's exactly what helps people move forward.
Ken: Exactly.
Dr. Stracks: I have a memory from around late 2011 — about a year after we first met — of a conversation where you'd made huge progress, maybe 80% better, but had plateaued. In my memory, you were doing a lot of journaling, a lot of reading, maybe some meditation, and spending hours a day on it, and the question became: what else could you do? I actually still use you as an example — anonymized, until now — of someone who had to learn to "try softer" instead of "try harder," because the answer for continued improvement was actually to spend less time working on it. Does that match your memory?
Ken: I think the timeframe between stopping the formal in-person sessions and that famous blizzard phone call was more like six to eight months. In the fall of 2010, I read the book and got literally immediate relief, and then the real journey began. Working with you, there were these big plateaus — a decrease in symptoms, then a long plateau where I was working and working and getting frustrated that nothing was improving. And you told me not to try so hard. The more important shift was that I kind of let go of it — I didn't walk away from the approach or the process entirely, I just stopped actively working at it so hard. I felt I'd gotten so much out of the process already that I could ease off it for a while, and my symptoms decreased further from that. It was like that last bit of discomfort faded away over time.
Dr. Stracks: I think part of it was that you already had all the knowledge you needed — you'd uncovered what needed uncovering, written out what had been held inside — and there was a trust piece to it: you knew what you needed to do, and you no longer had to spend so much time consciously focused on it. Instead you could redirect that energy toward physical activity, family, and work.
Ken: Exactly.
Twelve Years Later
Dr. Stracks: So what's life been like for you since — roughly a year after you first learned about the mind-body connection, you were back to doing what you wanted physically. For the last decade or so, do you ever get flare-ups? What's life like now?
Ken: Life today is awesome — I'm very blessed, retired, with a lovely wife and family. As far as symptoms and the amount of time I had to manage this, it gradually decreased. Initially I think I had more flare-ups, maybe tied to stress at work or elsewhere, but as the years went by, the frequency, duration, and intensity of those flare-ups just kept drifting down. There were a couple of times I told my wife, "I haven't even thought about this in a year." We got to the point where years would pass without me even remembering I used to have this terrible leg pain, or that I went through this whole process. That, broadly, is how the last 12 years have gone — it's moved into the background of my life.
I still periodically get some discomfort in my left leg, mostly when sitting, but I don't get scared or worried about it anymore. It's become so ingrained that I can just acknowledge, "yep, my leg's a little sore," and move on. I don't want to overstate it or make it sound like there's a trick to it — I just think, because of the process and the path I went through, it's enough now to notice it and keep going.
Dr. Stracks: One thing I've heard you say before is that the process of noticing the soreness and moving on barely takes any time at all now. Early on, it might have meant pulling out the journal and writing to figure out what was going on underneath — but these days, with the confidence you've built, you notice it, acknowledge it, and go on with your day.
Ken: Exactly right. A handful of times over the years I've pulled out those journal notes or flipped through the books again — just for validation of what I went through, and it's a tool. When you've asked me to join some of your sessions and speak, I talk about how I feel like I was given tools to manage this, and they've worked tremendously for me. Exercise-wise, I do whatever I want these days — happily retired, 61 years old, a little slower maybe, but I can do just about anything I want physically.
Advice for Others
Dr. Stracks: Any other thoughts for people listening who are struggling with this? Some people pick up a book and it clicks right away and they move forward quickly; for others, it takes a while for the ideas to sink in, even with journaling and everything else, without much movement at first.
Ken: That's actually one of my favorite questions to answer. Something that's really struck me throughout this whole process — going back to sitting with two other men and Dr. Stracks, hearing their stories, and later the times I was invited to join a group session or speak myself — is that everyone's situation is different and unique. I'd catch myself listening to someone's story thinking, "that's not right, that has nothing to do with it," and then realizing, "wait, that's her story, and it developed differently, from unique life experiences." I heard people say meditation alone worked for them and writing didn't, or vice versa. We're all wonderfully unique human beings.
The fact that my progress happened as quickly as it did, and that I didn't have to deal with this daily after a fairly short period, puts me — based on what I've heard from others — in a somewhat special category. But the understanding and belief that these issues can have an emotional source, if you accept that and start to feel healing and improvement from there, means you're on the road to recovery, even though everyone's specific journey will look different.
If you've been working on this for a couple of years already without much relief, my heart genuinely goes out to you — please keep going, it's real. Your experience will be unique, but the process and the tools available through Dr. Stracks and others are what matter. Use whichever tool gives you relief — in my case it was writing, reading, and lists, and reminding myself regularly how the brain and emotions are connected.
Dr. Stracks: There's a lot of wisdom in that. I tell people regularly — as much as I wish there were one single pathway for everybody, everyone's path looks a little different. The first step is understanding and recognizing that the mind and body are connected, and that it shows up physically. The second part varies by person: for some it's uncovering things that haven't been said, for others it's becoming quiet and reflective, for others it's working on important relationships. Everyone finds their own issue and their own way to address it.
Ken: One more thought — I actually had this exact thought again just this morning. This isn't like having a sinus infection, going to the doctor, and getting an antibiotic — which is what I wanted for my leg pain, honestly: someone to say, "ah, here's your problem." But if you accept the emotional-physical link, there's no pill for it. You have to work at it, and how you work at it is going to be your own path and your own journey. We live in a world that wants immediate answers to everything, but that expectation doesn't really apply here — you have to unravel your own background and understand how the condition developed for you specifically. It's a very different model of healing than what we're used to in the medical system, which is very much built around sinus infections and strep throat. This is about self-exploration and understanding — and, often, trying softer instead of trying harder.
Dr. Stracks: Any other thoughts before we wrap up?
Ken: I think I've covered what matters most to me. Just — view it as a unique process. You'll learn about a whole collection of tools and ideas, and some will resonate more than others. Be patient, and believe in it. Because we're all unique, your path through the healing process will look different from mine — but I hope, through my example, it's clear that it's very real.
Dr. Stracks: We'll end there. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your story.
Ken: Absolutely — happy to help. Good luck to anyone going down this path.
Dr. Stracks: I know how helpful it's been for others to hear stories like yours before starting their own journey. And as I mentioned, if anyone listening wants more information about our practice or working with me or the staff here at Cormendi, check out our website, CormediHealth.com, and get in touch — our staff will follow up with everything you need. Every time we record one of these, I'm reminded how lucky I feel to be part of this community of people working so hard, in brave, creative, and cutting-edge ways, toward healing. With that, we'll end here. Take care, everybody.
Dr. John Stracks practices mind-body medicine via telehealth nationally and internationally. Dr. Laura Burke is a certified health and wellness coach specializing in the social dimensions of chronic pain and illness. To learn more about working with Dr. Stracks or the Cormendi Health team, visit cormendihealth.com. You can find Dr. Stracks and Dr. Burke's first interview on the Cormendi Health YouTube page.