ABSTRACT
Why did I feel I needed a therapist? The primary reason was a serious lower-back problem. I was thirty-nine years old. For years I had kept myself in shape to play tournament tennis and do heavy handson construction work, but that Christmas my back had been so bad I’d had difficulty walking. Despite regular physical therapy, I’d been forced to make major changes in the way I lived. For ten years I had been investing in real estate, remodeling houses, and renting them out. I was building the equity I would need to acquire and operate a small, rural tennis resort near the northern California community where I live. Now this was no longer a reasonable goal. My social life, too, had centered on tennis, and I could no longer be a part of that world. My back problems were, and are, real: two partially herniated disks, a malformed vertebra-the list goes on. Yet I suspected there might be a psychogenic component as well. Somatizing-releasing emotion as physical symptoms-was my mother’s way of expressing herself, and I despised her hypochondria.
