Trying Softer: Conversation with Ken Zych and Dr. John Stracks

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

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, and I'm here today with Ken Zych, an information technology leader who's now retired. I first met Ken in 2010 when he came to see me when I was working at Northwestern and took one of my mind body medicine classes and I'm super excited for him to be here and share his story of healing with you today.

Just to note before we get started, if you'd like to learn more about working with me or any of our staff, please visit our website at www.cormendihealth.com. Ken, thanks so much for being here.  

Ken

 My pleasure. 

Dr. Stracks

 It's easy to remember when I first met you, because I will never forget that you were in my class the night of Snowmageddon in Chicago on January 31st of 2011, which was the first night I ever did anything through telehealth.

We all met on the phone and that was a long time ago now. It was over 12 years ago, and so it may be hard to remember even back that far, but I think for people who are listening, it's helpful to set the stage of what you were experiencing back then and where you had been.

So can you give us some background about what life was like for you in the two thousands?  

Ken

What led me to discover Dr. John Straks was the end of many years of searching for a solution to pretty severe low back, left hip, left leg pain. I had tried many different things over a span of several years, and in fact, the real first symptoms appeared even in the mid nineties. I won't go back that far today, but on and off I experienced classic sciatica symptoms and sought different solutions. Lots of exercise, chiropractic, and it came and went. But then probably around 2008 symptoms returned with a kind of vengeance and were more severe and didn't go away, and it was kind of a lifestyle that involved some degree of pain. And I've said many times it was just bad days and worst days. As far as the pain, it was always present and it had come to dominate my life. And after a couple of years, literally a couple of years and 13 doctors and all kinds of different treatments, I was at the end of the road and I was pretty desperate.

The way I found out about Dr. Stracks was that my wife happens to work at our local library. She brought home a book. I looked at it and I said, that's, that's not for me, that doesn't make any sense. And I pushed it aside, but I later read that book called Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno. And things changed immediately for me. I had a new understanding that there could be an emotional source to my pain instead of physical, because the important part of my story was despite all the trips to many different doctors and imaging of different varieties, there was never any physical deformity. I didn't have any ruptured discs. I didn't have any arthritis. There was nothing physically wrong that anybody could see through imaging, yet I had terrible pain.

Dr. Stracks

Do you remember what the pain was like on a daily or monthly basis for you back then? Was it mostly in your back or your legs?

Ken

Primarily there was some low back pain, but I think that was more from stiffness or your body adjusting to accommodate for the pain on my left side. But it was terrible, terrible pain. Primarily in my left thigh. Classic burning sciatica. And it would vary greatly with movement, activity, tingling down in the foot, burning in the foot, you name it.

I have kind of a dry sarcastic sense of humor, I've been told, and I would tell my wife, “Red Hot Knitting Needle Day.” That's what it felt like in the back of my leg, burning pain. And some days it was better, some days it was worse, but it was nearly always present. So I was always conscious of where I'm gonna have to sit and for how long? Whether it be at work, in meetings, car trips, airplanes, church, you name it, movie theaters. I was like, where am I gonna sit? Where am I gonna be comfortable or can I stand somewhere? Standing was relief, not disappearance of symptoms, but it was less painful.

Dr. Stracks

So you had gone to see 13 different practitioners. What else did you do back then to try to relieve the pain before you read Dr. Sarno's book? 

Ken

Well, it was all of those practitioners you know, orthopedics, neurologists, chiropractic.  

I love exercise, I’m a very active person, so it wasn't hard to get me to do strength training or stretching. You know, I was strong and flexible. But the pain didn't go away. So, to get back to really what's in my story, the fall of 2010, and I read that book and I felt he was writing about me. About long, painful symptoms, no physical evidence, bouncing around different doctors with no relief. And, after doing some pretty intensive research about Dr. Sarno and other people, I ultimately found Dr. Stracks in Chicago, somewhat in my backyard. I lived in the Chicago suburbs. And so that's how we met. And as he referenced, he held his first class, it was just three or four of us. The last class was during a classic Chicago blizzard that year. 

Dr. Stracks

21 inches in 21 hours I think it was.

Ken

It was a doozy. It really was.  

Dr. Stracks

And, and so you learned about that. You read Dr. Sarno's book, you recognized some of the personality traits and the fact that you hadn't had any abnormalities on any imaging.

Are you able to think back to that time and remember how you started to get better?  

Ken

Well, the very first was reading in black and white, that there is a connection between physical pain and emotional sources. I'd never heard that and it made immediate sense. Think about it, you're embarrassed and your face turns red. That's a physical to emotional response. You're stressed about a presentation and you get an upset stomach.  Now someone's telling me about childhood issues, life issues, work stress, life stress, and my body is diverting tension from that to something else to distract me from it, and it clicked immediately.

And that's where the real healing started was just simply the awareness of that.  

Dr. Stracks

And then do you remember what happened from there? So you had the awareness, you sought me out, you had a consultation with me, took my class. And so what kinds of strategies did you use back then to help yourself move forward and calm down the pain? 

Ken

Well, the main things, other than let's call it the book knowledge of understanding the medicine and the science. And then going from there to a lot of different exercises to identify like physically writing this stuff down in this big giant workbook and working through things to peel back the layers to understand your personality traits, triggers, emotional triggers, and start to, again, identify all of that and make the link between those emotional issues and how the brain behaves. The biggest benefit I feel I got, because I did it the most, was journaling. I have them up on my bookcase right here. I still have the notebooks that are filled with my writings up here from back then. Over the years I've thumbed some through in reference, cluster writing and some other things. 

Dr. Stracks

Yeah, free writing. Cluster writing.

I’ve got a colleague, Dr. Howard Schubinar, who does some work with us now. He's got a book called Unlearn Your Pain, and we probably used that as a basis for some of the things that we were doing. And so it was about brainstorming and some ideas on paper and writing about stressors and thoughts and feelings and writing letters. 

Ken

Yes, yes. All of that. Thinking it through and doing something very physical was almost like releasing it, kind of letting it out of his cage and getting rid of that. That was incredibly helpful. Also, some of the other books and materials that I had read from Dr. Schubiner and Dr. Sarno. I'm a list person, I love lists. So I would copy out some of these reminders and these tips and strategies. I would keep those little lists and reminders handy for a while, probably for the first year or maybe 18 months. I refered to those things fairly regularly. Just to remind myself of my journey and some of the real more key things. The way to reorient your thinking, literally retraining your mind. 

I love one of the presenters, I don't know if it was you Dr. Stracks or where it came from, but the idea of a path in the garden. That you keep walking down it and that path gets worn into the grass. And that's what I came to understand happened with me between emotional issues and physical pain. That neural pathway that was burned into my system and I simply had to abandon the old one and create new ones.

And that image was very powerful. Or that understanding about how the human body operates. 

Dr. Stracks

And do you remember, were there specific stressors that were going on in your life that you think potentially contributed to the pain and symptoms? Or was it more, it got started and the uncertainty and the worry about it kept it going.

Do you remember what you thought was the underlying cause? 

Ken

Suffice to say that back then when I was working with you, I identified a lot. Whether I said it was job or family history, or being a father, being husband, childhood issues. I believe that whatever was most impactful to me in an emotional sense, that would've been the short list. 

And it wasn't so much that there were things that were way hidden under the surface.

Dr. Stracks

You didn't have to sort through that much to see what these things were, but really making that connection, which, like you said, that was the first time you had heard that, that these things could go on in your life, whether they’re work related or family related or anything else, and show up in your body. That was the important part. 

Ken

Correct. That was the proverbial aha.  Now we've got something. Yeah. 

Dr. Stracks

And I know that the journal writing was really helpful and important for you. Do you remember, was there a meditation component to it? 

Ken

I knew you were gonna ask me that. There was. I tried it. It wasn't for me. I did do it though. But that wasn't something I continued. It just wasn't my thing.

It's not like I look at the notebooks every day. But let's just say once a year I notice them and I just flip through it and it's a validation of the healing that has occurred and how it occurred more importantly. 

Dr. Stracks

And you actually took out a pen and paper, right?

Ken

Page after page after page. Yeah. 

Dr. Stracks

And so in that time, after you and I met and you took that class, my memory is that you kept gradually getting better, feeling less pain, I think getting back to activities and exercise.

Ken

I had stopped running because, you know, you're a runner. Kind of punishing on the body so I had stopped right around the time I met you and probably didn't run for about six months, which  really bothered me. Not getting that level of activity, but at some point, you said try it.

The curious thing in my health history was being a distance runner. How come I can do this and I don't feel worse? There was never an answer to that.  

Dr. Stracks

It's important for people who are working on this to recognize those kinds of discrepancies.

When you start to see that some of these pieces don't fit, if you were really injured in that way, you wouldn't be able to run five miles, or a lot of people will find that the pain's really bad at work, but not when they're at home, or it's bad on the weekends and not so much in the week.

Ken

And so, start to poke holes in this purely physical explanation. 

Dr. Stracks

Exactly. That's what helps people move forward. 

I have a memory in probably late 2010. It was about a year or so after we met that you and I had a conversation about how you had done really well and were probably 80% better, but I think you had stalled out at that point. You may or may not remember this, but in my memory of it, we talked about all the things that you were doing, a lot of journal writing, a lot of education, a lot of reading, maybe some meditation, and that you were putting in a lot of time each day. Like hours a day. And the question was, what else could you do? And so, interestingly, I use you as an example of someone who had to learn to try softer instead of trying harder, because in my memory of it, the answer for continued improvement was to spend less time working on it rather than more.

Is that fairly accurate? 

Ken

Yes. 

I read that book and I got literally immediate relief. And then the journey began. And then after working with you there was a big plateau. I plateaued for a very long time and I'm working and working and frustrated and it's not getting any better.

And you said don't try as hard. And again, the more important thing was I kind of let go of it. And my symptoms further decreased. I didn't walk away from this approach or this therapy. I just didn't try. I felt I had gotten so much out of the process that I could let go of the process somewhat for a while. And I improved more from that. It was kind of like the last little bit of discomfort and my symptoms went away after a period of time. 

Dr. Stracks

I think part of it was that you had all the knowledge that you needed, you had uncovered what you needed to uncover. You had written out what was being held inside, and there was a trust piece to it. You knew what you needed to do and you didn't have to spend so much time focusing on it and instead could focus on what you needed to do with physical activity and family responsibilities and work and everything else. 

And so what's life been like for you since then? There’s roughly a year's time frame between first learning that there's this mind-body connection and really feeling like you could do what you wanted to do physically. And so for the last decade, do you ever get flare ups? Is there ever any pain or what's your life like now?  

Ken

I would say life today is awesome. I'm very blessed and retired, have a lovely wife and family. So everything in that regard is great. But with respect to the symptoms and the amount of time I had to manage or put into, gradually kind of decreased.

Initially I think there were flare ups, maybe I was experiencing more stress at work or wherever, whatever the source of that was, and I had more flare ups.

As the years went by, the frequency, duration, intensity of those flare ups just kind of drifted away.  There were a couple of times I told my wife, I haven't even thought about this for a year. We got to the point where years or a couple years passed, where I didn't even think of the fact that I used to have this terrible leg pain or that I went through this process.

So that in general describes how 12 years have gone by, it has moved into the background of my life. I periodically get this discomfort in my left leg, primarily when I'm sitting. But I don't get scared. I don't get worried. I think it is so ingrained in my head that I can just think about it.

I just think because of my experience in the path that I've been on, it's enough to acknowledge that, yeah, my leg’s a little sore, but that's it. I move on. 

Dr. Stracks

And one of the things that I've heard you say before is that the process of noticing the soreness and moving on hardly takes any time at all.

Once upon a time when you were first learning, it may have been, let me get out the journal, let me write about this. Let me try to figure out what's going on under the surface, but these days, with your confidence in it, you notice it, you acknowledge it, and then you go do what you need to do. 

Ken

And a couple of times, you know, a handful of times I have either pulled out, like I've mentioned my journal notes or flipped through some of these books. Again, it's just the validation of what I went through. And it's a tool. When Dr. Stracks has asked me to come and join some of the sessions, I talk about how I feel like I was given these tools to manage this.

And it has worked tremendously in my case. 

Dr. Stracks

And exercise wise, you do what you wanna do these days? 

Ken

I do. This happily retired 61 year old. I might be a little bit slower. I can do just about anything I want physically. I'm in great shape.  

Dr Stracks

Any other thoughts for people who are listening and struggling?

And so what happens is that some people pick up a book and it really makes a lot of sense right away. And some people move forward quite quickly and other people take a while for the ideas to sink in or they do the journal writing and everything else and there's not much movement at first.

So any thoughts or encouragement? 

Ken

Sure and that's my favorite question to answer. And one of the things that has really, really struck me through this whole process going back to when I sat with these two other men and Dr.

Stracks and hearing them talk about their stories, and then the handful of times that I was invited to join a group that the doctor was having an informational session with. Everyone's situation is different and unique. 

I'm picturing in my mind listening to this woman talking, going, “No, that's not right. That's got nothing to do with it.” Then I'm going, wait a minute. That's her story. So the way this developed was different, unique. Maybe this other person said they relied solely on meditation and the writing did not work for them.

So we're all these wonderfully unique human beings and the fact that my progress went as rapid as it did, and then where I did not have to deal with this on a daily basis after a very short period. I think I'm in a very special category like that, where I don't have to work at it, simply based on what I've heard other people say.

So I think that's very important that what worked for me hopefully works for other people, but the understanding and the belief that these issues have an emotional source. If you accept that and start to feel healing and improvement from there, you are now on the highway to healing. Everybody's journey is gonna be different.

So, if you've tried this and you are working on it for, for a couple years, well my heart goes out to you. Please keep going. The process and the tools that are available through Dr. Stracks and others, that's what's important. Use the tool that makes the most sense or the one that you got the relief from. Like I said, in my case, it was the writing and the reading and the list and reminding myself of these things about how the brain works, the emotional issues. 

I think there's a lot of wisdom in that and I will tell people regularly, as much as I want there to be one pathway forward for everybody, everybody's got this slightly different pathway. And the first step is understanding. This recognition that the mind and body are connected and it shows up in the human body.

And then the second part, as you say, for some people it's uncovering things that haven't been said, For other people, it's becoming quiet and meditative and reflective, right? For other people, it's working on important relationships and everybody finds what the issue is for them and how to address that, and that's how people move forward.

One more thought. I actually had this thought earlier this morning. This isn't like when you have a sinus infection you go and you get an antibiotic. That's what we want, right? That's what I wanted for my leg pain was somebody to go, ah, here's your problem.

But if you accept the emotional, physical link, there's not a pill for that folks. You have to work at it, and the way you're gonna have to work at it is your path and your journey. So we want to live in a world where we want answers to everything immediately. Put that expectation aside. That's not this environment, that's not what we're dealing with here, right? You're gonna have to unravel your own background. How this condition developed for you. So yeah, it's a very different model of healing than we see in the medical system.

The medical system is very much based on sinus infections and strep throat, and this is about self-exploration and understanding, and infrequently trying softer instead of trying harder. 

Dr. Stracks

Thank you. Any other thoughts for people who are listening and working on this before we end?  

Ken

Gosh, I've said the things that are most important to me, but you know, again, view it as a unique process that you'll learn about a collection of tools and ideas.

And some of those ideas may be more impactful and some of the techniques may be more impactful. Be patient. And believe in it. And in that, because of the fact that we're unique, the way you come through your healing process is gonna be different. 

Dr. Stracks

So we'll end there. Thank you for being here and sharing your story and talking about it. You and others who have done well have talked about how helpful it was to hear people before you share their stories and talk about successes.

So thank you for being here and, and sharing. 

Ken

I'm very glad to help. Good luck to anybody who goes down this path.  

Dr. Stracks

So, and as I mentioned before, anybody who wants more information about our practice and working with me or the staff here at Cormendi Health can check out our website, www.cormendihealth.com and get in touch with us.

Our staff will get back to you with all the details that you need to know. Thank you for being here and listening every time we record. I recognize how lucky I feel to be part of this community of people who are working hard on healing in brave, creative, and cutting edge ways. So with that, we will end.

Take care everybody. Bye-bye.