About this time last year I spent a couple of weeks alternating lying flat on my back and perching uncomfortably on the edge of a chair due to a back injury. Though can we call it an injury really, when it hurt because I stepped out of the shower and it felt like lightning struck my back?

Once upon a time I hurt my back for real, doing active things like diving, or going over a jump all alone while my horse remained firmly on the take-off side, or trying to lift something I thought was no longer attached to my tractor only to find myself trying to lift my tractor. So maybe thrice upon a time is more accurate. Now sometimes it just goes rogue when I put on my socks, or open the cat food bin, or reach for a water glass. My favorite may have been when I was putting on my leggings to go to yoga class. It’s hard to walk into a yoga class and say “I’m here to twist myself into new and bendier shapes, but I can’t move much because I hurt myself putting on my pants.”

I am prone to psychosomatic illnesses. I used to think that term meant that you think you are sick when you are not. Imagined symptoms. I have since learned that it means an actual physical illness that is aggravated by a mental factor. Because my body (rightly, it seems) doesn’t trust me to take care of it, and (also rightly, it seems) thinks I need to be hit with a 2×4 to get the point, my psychosomatic illnesses present in the most obvious of ways.

For about a year and a half in my mid 30s I became incapable of talking about what I needed to talk about in my most important relationship. I have always been a talker – to a fault, perhaps – but I lost all ability to speak up when I needed to during this period. I had laryngitis maybe once in my life before this, but for that year and a half, at least every other month I lost my voice. Not a slight raspiness, I mean LOST. My voice was reduced to somewhere between a croak and an inaudible whisper. Over and over and over again, I became physically incapable of speaking. Circumstances finally forced me to start talking, and the laryngitis went away.

In a more concise example, I work from home but every few weeks have to go to the office. With alarming consistency the weekend before I have to go, I have a flare up of hemorrhoids. This is how my body (or my brain) handles me: “This is a PAIN IN YOUR ASS. Get it?” Got it.

This back thing, though. It’s not as clear to me. I have a couple theories. While my bout of back pain was at its worst last winter, Rose pointed out that while I couldn’t pick anything up, I could put things down that someone else has handed me. I find this significant, but I think there is more to it. It never got completely better, and in May I was once again felled doing something simple that I do every day.

I’ve seen doctors about my back pain a lot of times over the years. They either haven’t had much to suggest (take these drugs, don’t do those things), or they have wanted to do things I am not willing to do (steroid injections into my spinal column, surgery). Back pain seems to lend itself to so-called pain management without much to say about the cause of the pain or a solution to the pain.

I’ve read a lot about back pain, too, and I believe a lot of the things I’ve read. John Sarno claims that back pain that moves around (as mine does, from one side to the other, or from my lower back to my hips), or is accompanied by other pain (shoulder, neck, upper back – check, check, check) has its roots in emotional trauma, and I think that’s pretty likely. As previously noted, I’m not the best at recognizing that before my body takes over to demonstrate it for me.

I’ve tried a variety of body work, including standard physical therapy, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, massage. They all help me feel better in some ways, and they have all helped pains I have had in other parts of my body go away, but none of them really touch the lower back situation. This time I started looking at other techniques – the Alexander technique, which seems to be based on postural awareness (I haven’t gotten very far with that one yet). The McKenzie method – the exercises for that are the complete opposite of most back therapies I have tried. Both were quite a bit more helpful in terms of relieving extreme pain than most things I have tried, but did not get to the point of making the pain go away, and then it started to get worse again.

Eventually I found myself at the landfill, barely able to get in and out of the truck. Rose was out of town and as I drove away, feeling pretty sure I was going to either pass out or vomit from the pain, or maybe both, I tried to ward off a panic attack while weighing the benefits of going home or driving myself to the emergency room. I was pretty sure the ER would not in fact help much, though all the drugs were sounding pretty good right around then. I drove home, crawled into the house, and collapsed on the living room floor with my phone to google all the ways in which terrible lower back pain might mean I was dying of something rare (so much for warding off the panic attack).

When I got tired of that, I started to google sacroiliac dysfunction, because it seemed like most of my pain, always, was around my SI, even if it manifested in different spots on my back. I had a tennis ball in reach, and as there was little chance of me using anything that wasn’t in reach, I looked up SI trigger points. This is an extremely undramatic story of healing, in which I moved a tennis ball around to different SI trigger points until I no longer felt like I was going to die, or like I wanted to. For the rest of that day, and the next day, I had to visit with the tennis ball about once an hour. I had a nice collection of ass bruises, and while lying on the tennis ball on the bruised parts over and over and over didn’t feel great on the bruises, I started to feel like maybe I could move like a person again. I was able to increase the time between “treatments” over the next few days. It’s been a couple of months now, and I carry a tennis ball with me everywhere I go, but the chronic hip pain I have had for several years is completely gone, and I haven’t had lightning bolts to the back since May.

As with every other time I’ve had out-of-the-blue back pain, I’m not sure I’m any further enlightened about the cause. I’m happy to have found something that makes it feel better. I not so secretly believe that trigger point therapy is magic. I have a feeling that the real magic for me was finding out that there was something I could do to help myself, rather than looking to someone else to fix me. And maybe, just maybe, I have learned a little bit about how not to pick things up that are not mine to carry around.