EIGHT

STORYTELLERS

“SING TO ME OF THE MAN, MUSE, the man of twists and turns. . . .”

As one who stands in awe of the human musculoskeletal system with its splendid carrying capacity for heroism and folly, I reread Robert Fagles’ translation of the first line of the Odyssey and it always stuns me.

Before pausing for breath, Homer casts a magic spell to conjure up a “man of twists and turns . . . ,” deftly capturing our legacy of muscle and movement.

Odysseus—the man of twists and turns—is the first Everyman of literature, not counting Enkidu, a character in the four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh. This poem, carved on stone tablets and buried in a Middle Eastern desert, was discovered a century ago. Enkidu has his fans, yet as a proxy or double for the Babylonian warrior god Gilgamesh, he rode on supernatural coattails—not fair!—and therefore lost stature.

Fiction, whether it is epic verse or modern potboiler, is a form of biography, an account of events and adventures that take place as the quest for life’s meaning unfolds. Odysseus and Enkidu discover that nothing is permanent, everything keeps changing.

The realization comes as a great shock to both fictional characters and real people. Modern storytellers still grapple with the implications. All living things are in permanent negotiations with their environment over what must be done to accommodate change.

Each of us creates a story that explains who we are and why we are. Like Homer, we commit it to memory (not paper, not even granite tablets) and thereby imbue the story with transcendent power. Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with the question that launches all stories: “Who’s there?” Nearly four hours later the suspects have been rounded up—adulterers, murderers, lunatics, the heartbroken, vengeance seekers, the unlucky, and all the rest is silence.

Without exception, visitors to an Egoscue Method clinic bring a story with them. I suspect that is also true for every other alternative and mainstream health-care operation in the world. People never leave home without their story.

Over the years, I have learned to listen closely to those stories, and I have discovered just how important they are. The narratives can be filled with insightful information, plot points, character development, surprises, growth, confusion, crisis, and suspense. Many physicians and other health practitioners think they don’t have time for these stories. They speed-listen for ten minutes, home in on the usual symptomatic patterns, order up a few tests, and diagnose. Their Newtonian micro-medicine—the quest to find the broken part, no matter how small it is—rules out other options, even though modern medicine tends to treat the symptoms and not the problem anyway.

In the process, there is a huge disconnect. The physician is unable to make more than a cursory use of an invaluable resource, and the patient cannot determine whether the person he or she has turned to for help fully understands their situation. The uncertainty can cast a dark shadow over the relationship at the precise moment it needs to be on the firmest possible footing.

So, it is another example of bad doctors and good patients who are poorly served, right? No, not really.

The fault lies with the stories. Severe musculoskeletal system imbalance and the resulting acute energy shortage have frightened people facing unwelcome, unavoidable change, doubt, complexity, and mystery. Stories that once were told to provide hope, strength, and patience now spark dread and helplessness in the storyteller. In short, our stories have little in common with Odysseus’, which gave him the strength to find his way home—through twenty years of twists and turns, through bravery, trickery, and bloodshed.

Another important point about these stories: they are irrelevant. Change quickly washes away context. For example, a valid observation about your health or mental outlook that a doctor made six months ago, let alone six years ago, has lost all but the slightest shadow of its original meaning. Change is so pervasive—from the external stimulus of a changing environment to the inner landscape that results from the body’s response. Stories are generally woven together using incidents, episodes, and individual crises to form an overview. The product is then used to explain the past. In the hands of someone with a negative mind-set, this overview becomes an encyclopedia of excuses—an autobiography of failure. Worse, this method of storytelling is held up as an indispensable way to prepare for the future and manage outcomes. Stories such as these are in the same league as the utterances of false prophets.

A ten-year-old story is worthless. The client who brings it to us is not the same person as he was when it happened. But he may try to be, thereby creating havoc through poor choices, frustration, and anger.

For roughly my first twenty years as a postural therapist, I considered the stories my clients brought with them on their initial visits to the clinic to be, at best, a package of clues that explained why they were in pain or, at worst, a social nicety that allowed us to build a solid working relationship. I hardly noticed the obvious: the clients who made the most progress on correcting their musculoskeletal dysfunctions were the ones who readily put their stories aside. They focused on how they were feeling at that moment, not on the memory of how it felt when they were told at age fourteen that they had scoliosis or other chronic conditions. As I encouraged them to change their posture and range of motion, they felt the pain diminish and function return. The old story ceased to matter as a new autobiography took shape.

I concluded that it was best to get the storytelling over the sooner the better, and to encourage the client to pay attention to how he or she feels—not how they felt. That protocol worked, except for a small percentage of people who used their stories to explain why they couldn’t possibly get well. Frustrated, I would often—way too often—shoot holes in their story to force them to give it up.

As long as the numbers were small, I could persuade myself that the Egoscue Method was amazingly effective. We are now up to close to a million people who have been helped by the method. The failure rate for many years was about 3 percent. Statistically speaking, that’s pretty good. But the thought that I couldn’t help some three thousand people really bothered me. Even more disturbing, the failure rate began moving higher as musculoskeletal imbalance became the new normal.

After much soul searching, I decided that the only solution was to devise a way for the client to change his or her story without being forced to admit that he was changing it. Reworking the heath-care paradigm one story at a time was extremely daunting until I realized that all the problematic stories were fear-based. Furthermore, each fit into one of three broad variations that can be deconstructed like this:

• I’ve been to everyone and tried everything. Nothing works. I don’t know where to turn. Help me if you can, but you probably can’t. This is not my fault.

• I’m determined to figure this out and to take control. What’s your solution? There are so many moving parts. Your recommendations are in conflict with other schools of thought. Have you considered . . . ? I need another opinion. Are you aware of this new study?

• What makes you so smart? None of this stuff works. It’s all a scam. Nobody has an answer. Prove it. I don’t feel any different.

I hope that captures the emotional and behavioral predilections of the three without holding them up to ridicule or suggesting that one or another is more or less desirable. I do not want to offend you—because your story may fit one of these categories.

The storytellers behind all three of these variations are afraid to go inward to obtain and marshal the resources needed to recover or sustain their own health. The stories were self-created to shield them from fear and to allow them to go on living in the presence of it. The storytellers inadvertently walled themselves off by denying personal responsibility, insatiably seeking new facts and treatment options without making commitments, or unintentionally wrapping themselves in the Teflon of cynicism to stand aloof on the sidelines.

Your own story is much richer, deeper, and meatier than my abbreviated outline, but if you can feel your way to the essence of the story I believe you will find a platform from which, together, you and I can work to restore your postural balance, your limitless energy, and your perfect health.

In the next three chapters I will describe the musculoskeletal markers of the three story lines and personality types. There are physical and functional characteristics for each. You’ll be able to pick them out of a crowd; better yet, you’ll be able to look in the mirror and recognize yourself. Then I will present menus of E-cises (Egoscue exercises) that can help recover musculoskeletal system balance and which are tailored to work with your specific story and type.

Rather than falling back on your story to explain why you can’t restore your balance—I’m too busy, it’s too late, it runs in the family, it’s a birth defect, Egoscue’s too pushy—focus on how you can really do this.

Really.

You are enough.