Dr. Schechter's Blog Blog 11: Personal TMS Affirmation or "Mantra"

Originally posted: January 19, 2015

I discuss in Think Away Your Pain how self-talk and positive affirmations or blocking messages are an important part of breaking old pain pathways in the nervous system.

A patient came in recently with an effective one that he indicated I could share in my blog (anon. of course). "I know that I will think away my pain because I am in touch with my emotions. I am healthy, I am strong. I am painfree."

There are a number of excellent elements to this phrase. And I'm not even including the presence of my book title in the quote! The phrase affirms: a) emotional awareness b) health and vitality c) pain elimination. It is written in a positive, clear style. It is at the long end of effective affirmations, but works well for this patient. Each person should develop their own, ideally. It's okay to start with ones you've heard or read about.

The phrase, when repeated regularly, can be a blocking message for pain. It can be a message that eradicates the power of pain pathways that have developed in chronic (more than six months) pain/TMS. And it affirms the goal and desire for success.

Work on your own, if you have pain. Hopefully these tips will help you write one effective for you.

 

Thanks for posting this. I've copied and pasted it to save. It's a really great affirmation mantra.

Think Away Your Pain is a wonderful book.

If I feel any anxiety or pain, I just tell myself: "Hey, you're not even sick, so be happy." Then I laugh at myself for worrying.

A friend is coming here tonight who is in the early stages of a divorce and has other problems. He does his best to laugh at them.
He loves the Monty Python movies and we watched "The Life of Brian" a week ago. He asked me to put another Python movie
tonight. We laughed almost the whole time watching "Brian."

 

Ditto on the copy / paste / save / repeat!

 

speaking of thinking and pain... we were thinking about you today dr. schecter as we worked with your footage!

 

Michael, I look forward to seeing that video when you've had a chance to edit it. The comment about laugh therapy above reminds me of the classic book by Norman cousins where he discusses watching Three Stooges films in order to release the stress and tension that he associated with his rheumatoid arthritis or some other similar condition.The power of the self affirmation Phrase or tms mantra is really impressive and how it gets us to move from fear to belief and acceptance of the diagnosis and lead to the changes in neural pathways that we believe underlie a lot of the improvement.

 

I have been thinking a lot about mediation and ritual. Last year I started doing EFT at the start of mediation because I thought that the idea of the mantra was very centering. And the self directed attention that combined the physical and the emotional- and it made sense that if it was done with attention it could help to change the nerual pathways as discussed. This idea was well expressed by Dr. Schubiner in relation to mediation- the idea that mediation alone might help calm people down- but it was less useful in pain situations than if someone understood the underlying emotional connection and could connect the two. I wrote about my experience with EFT here http://rumur.com/eft-and-the-power-of-belief/

 

Recently I have come across affirmations through reading Joseph Murphys 'Power of Subconscious Mind' . its a useful book but has a lot of really hard to believe ''examples''.

I plan to read James Allens ''As a Man thinketh'' next. discovering how important this is.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/As-Man-Thinketh-James-Allen/dp/1482330741

I had done some CBT but before I discovered Sarnos perspective I kept getting dejected because I had a firm belief the pain would never leave...as this is what I had been told by several pain specialists. So already I was aware of negative patterns of thought.
I know I shouldn't but I logged pain scores the other day and the average score came down from 30/50 (whilst on morphine patches) down to 9/50. incredible and I wouldn't have believed it possible