Help: Advice on what to do.

Hi Guys,

I'd just like you to give me some advice.

I'm 21 years old and have been suffering with chronic pain for 3 years now.

Problems in my life started around the ages of 17 where my mother was getting very depressed and started drinking until this became an obsession. Over the years the drinking would get worse and worse until she started to be abusive and extremely depressed to where she started to set the house on fire, stab her self beat us all that kind of stuff. This made me build up a lot of anger which I could generally take out doing boxing and playing rugby.

As all this continued I started to want to get away and decided I was going to go to Australia backpacking. I planned out my trip over the year while saving enough money to fund myself for a year. I started going running 3 times a week to get fit for it until a problem started in my hip. I hurt a lot sitting after 30mins and had a catching in my hip everytime I lifted my leg. I saw 3 physios who said its fine and just aggravated I then went and had an MRI where they told me I had FAI and a Labral tear which needed surgery. I canceled all my traveling and got quite depressed. I then looked up forums on people who had this surgery and it didn't sound all too easy or successful, I got even more depressed but went ahead with it anyway not knowing better at this age. This was september 2013

I don't want to write too much about my hips but in the end I found out the recovery sucked and then got told I need another operation on my left hip I got this done a few days before my 21st Birthday. July 2014

My mother continued her drinking throughout this difficult time and called me a lot of names such as cripple spastic, and became even more abusive.

I kept up with my physio but was still in pain with my hips until around December when while still in pain I thought I may as well just go traveling and see how I get on. I love exploring places and me any my friends go out every weekend looking for new places we haven't been before I booked my trip to Australia for April 2015. In February while out with some friends walking I stopped to get my camera out while they carried on walking, I hadn't really run as I read that people who had FAI surgery shouldn't really but decided I'll half run 100m to catch them up. I wasn't running properly as I was scared of hurting myself but 2 days after this walk I had awful lower back and hip and foot pain.

I thought this pain should only last a few weeks as I went to paris a few months before and once I was back my hips started to hurt but that pain went after 2 weeks however this one didn't. My back pain became so painful I couldn't get out of bed. I started to get depressed again thinking I'd have to cancel my travel plans. As the weeks went by seeing different physios all who said I haven't hurt my hips again I didn't believe any of them and I didn't believe any of their methods were working.

I ended up going to the gym twice a day once in the morning 6am and the evening 6pm. I was desperate. My life became very restricted, I hate being indoors but sitting in all day everyday sucked. My lower back pain, hip pain was all too much. I couldn't go into work because I was hurting too much and my only way around it was to sleep all day and all night so I didn't think about the pain. My family got quite sick of me, I didn't every complain I was hurting I'd rather just sit in my room and keep my thoughts to myself, I didn't really like sympathy from people because how can some one give it when they don't know what its like.

One evening while laid in bed (my mum still being abusive) my dad ran into my room pulled my by my legs out of my bed and dragged me a long the floor shouting that I'm faking and its all because I didn't want to go to Australia. He threw my bags at me and told me to leave.

I took the train to my Grandmas house and stayed at hers for the next few weeks, I had also left my job by this point. I didn't want to talk to people and was just desperate to find a way out, I grew a beard and long hair and really didn't care about my appearance. I also started to think of ending my life as an easy way out.

The pain was still in my right foot hips and lower back. I got an MRI on my lower back which came back as fine. I also had full blood tests and all that which came back fine.

My Grandma then kicked me out because I didn't want to speak to my mother (her daughter) so I went to my friends house to stay which was very kind of his parents to allow me to. I kept moving around physios and osteopaths to try find a way out of this when I came across upright health in America. The two guys here have done countless research on why FAI and labral tears in the hips isn't a mechanical issue and labral tears don't actually cause pain. If you read the studies https://www.thefaifix.com you can see what I mean.

I bought the book and did all the program everyday 6am and 6pm for 1hr: 30mins each time.


I wasn't too worried about my hips at this point but was more concerned about my back. The pain now was more in the kidney areas, which was extremely painful. After a month this pain had now also moved into my upper back and neck. I went on holiday with some friends and during the day while doing photography I felt 80% ok however on an evening all the pains would return. I just thought it was the heat during the day relaxing my muscles. I then went home and the pain returned all day.

As the months went on the pain in my lower back had pretty much gone along with the foot pain and a lot of the hip pain. However my upper back killed. Everyday all day I'd just think of ways to resolve this pain.

I then started to get acid reflux constant burping and pain in my chest, this became pretty painful in the top abdominal muscles. I went to the doctors and they gave me some tablets which didn’t help in anyway so I went back and got some other tablets. After a month or so the stomach problem went away.

My Grandma who i was only living with a month ago (at this point) died suddenly from a stroke, she was perfectly fine as I was helping her in the garden a few days before. She could walk, lift, climb everything but suddenly she was gone… Been as depressed I was a few weeks before I thought this would push me over the edge, but It didn’t, I think more so because I had to keep strong for my brothers and other family members.

Once the stomach pain had gone, I then developed a constant tight throat and a lump like feeling in there. This was more annoying than painful. I started reading healing back pain and started to believe I had TMS.

I had already tried, the egoscue method, various physios, osteopaths, doctors and nothing seemed to be working so I thought maybe it is TMS. I kept reading the book and the more I read the more I believed.

I went to Kefalonia with my friend and brother and actually for the first time in a long time hardly had any pain. I then returned to England and the pain was there but I could only feel it about 20%. I still had this feeling in my throat though but even that wasn’t as bad until the last few days of the holiday.

Feeling much better I decided to go out to the park with my brother to throw this small rugby ball about. I started to run a little, again this was compensating running even though I wasn’t in pain I ran in a way which felt I couldn’t hurt my hips. My hips were actually fine for about 2 months before this. The next day I woke up in pain from my hips, the same old groin pain, pain when sitting etc.

And well this is where I am at now.. I still don’t know if my hip pain is pain from TMS or just a flare up from my injury a few years ago.

If anyone could give me any advice, I’d really appreciate it.

I’m also sorry for the extremely long message but I thought I may as well write it all.

Thank You

Samuel Rhys

 

Hi Samuel,

Welcome to this site.

You've had a horrendously difficult start to life. You have been treated terribly by your parents. Your grandmother wasn't much help, and now you have the grief of her death. Amidst all this you're trying to be strong for your family, while keeping your feelings inside. This is a perfect storm for TMS.

The hips are a very common place for TMS to cause pain. And TMS will often cause pain in a place where there was a previous injury. I think you're right to be suspicious of the pain.

TMS exists to push feelings out of our consciousness. Try to turn your attention from the symptoms to your emotions. Stop worrying so much about your obligations to others, and do more to nurture yourself. Remember that you have been through a lot, and always treat yourself with the kindness you deserve, even if others do not.

Let us know how things go.

 

I am sad for all that you have had to endure at such a young age, Samuel. Depression and substance abuse are such an evil it's hard
to understand how it could have been inflicted on the human race.

As David says, this is a perfect storm for TMS. And look at what you said:

The fact that you still have some other symptoms, or some that come back at night (when you have less to distract you, like sight-seeing) is just more proof that your symptoms are TMS. The variation and extreme swings in your symptoms all point to TMS. The severity of some is scary, but we've all read stories of incredibly severe symptoms that go away when consciousness is awakened.

YOU know intellectually why this is happening to you, but you don't yet have the tools to unlock your deep unconscious so that your brain can let go. In the UK, there are a growing number of TMS practitioners who are following in the footsteps of Georgie Oldfield and completing the SIRPA certification, and my best recommendation is to start working with one of them, immediately, if not sooner :^)

I'll follow with some links, and in the meantime I want to wish you all the best, and know that we are pulling for you.

Jan

Georgie Oldfield: http://www.georgieoldfield.com/
http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/Georgie_Oldfield,_MCSP

SIRPA: http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/SIRPA
http://www.sirpauk.com/

SIRPA Practitioners in the UK: http://www.sirpauk.com/find-a-practitioner/

 

Hi Samuel,

I can tell you are an incredibly strong and resilient person - you've endured more hardships than anyone deserves and yet are able to reach out for support and continue working to heal yourself. Please realize how courageous and strong you are! I agree with the recommendations in the previous posts - they have shared some valuable wisdom. Please, don't give up. Please be kind to yourself and continue your journey of healing yourself. Sunny

 

Samuel, like the others, I am heartbroken that you endured so much painful and unfair treatment throughout your young life. It is honestly no wonder you suffer from TMS. I hope you can come to have faith in the full belief that your pain is TMS. Throughout your journey of healing and getting rid of this pain once and for all, I hope you can focus on loving yourself and nurturing yourself. You deserve that, despite the way you've been treated by others. Throughout your journaling, make sure you use positive affirmations to instill love and peace into your brain.

 

Thanks you all very much for your feed back!

I've never actually spoke about all this to anyone apart from one of my friends before.

I am going to visit Georgie Oldfield in a few weeks she's just on holiday at the moment, I have bought her book and have been reading that, so i'm going to try some of the methods in there.

I do find my hip/groin pain hard to accept as TMS as I don't know if it is just aggravated, however i'm pretty sure I've done higher impact activities, then what I did the other week with no problems at all. But with the other activities I was in the moment and the thought of hurting myself didn't enter my brain.

Hope you all have a great weekend, I'm going to try go to the Lake District with my friends to get some photos today.

 

Hi, Sam I too feel worry for your awful family experiences. It seems to me that your mother has her own TMS anger and is taking it out on you and probably others. I have little to add to what others have written you, except that you have come to the right place in this web site. Many of us have had TMS from emotional pain and because of our total 100 percent belief in TMS have healed. I urge you to begin the Structured Educational Program, free in the subforum of this web site. It helped me and many others to discover the emotional causes of our pain. I learned mine from journaling about my boyhood and that I was repressing emotions from when my parents divorced when I was seven. I was able to forgive them, even though they had both long since passed. Forgiving is very generous and can help to heal pains. We may be able to forgive but not forget. That is harder.

 

Hi Jan,

I have just been reading your story and you mention that you had hip pain after your surgery, well after the last few months of my hips being ok, they now hurt quite a lot. Was your hip pain TMS ? I read it can return/stay at an old injured site because the brain remembers the pain?

Thanks!

 

Thanks Walt, I will certainly look into doing that program on the sub forums. Im pretty convinced that my back pain was TMS and the stomach problems, neck pain, arm, feet and hand pain is TMS too, however I find it hard to get my head around my hips as I have had surgery on both of them.

 

Hi, samuelrhys. I think you need to work more on the emotional causes of your TMS and to believe totally, 100 percent that your symptoms are not structural but are caused by TMS. You had a rough childhood, but you can put that behind you once you recognize it. Then don't dwell on it.
Dr. Sarno says we don't have to solve our emotional problems, just recognize them. Then get on with your life and enjoy it.

 

Samuel, I know that all pain is generated by my brain - whether there is a reason for it or not. It is NOT at the site of pain. Cells or neurons or something (I don't even know what) that reside at at the site of an injury will send a signal to the brain that a pain signal is needed to alert you to a problem - but there is no actual pain at the injury until the brain processes that message and creates a pain signal to send back.

You have to understand that fact of physiology before you can really believe in the mechanism of TMS. Our brains are totally in charge of creating pain signals, and they are perfectly capable of sending a pain signal for its own reasons, which seem to be for the purpose of distracting us from what it thinks are dangerous emotions - dangerous, because if we're wallowing in negative emotions, we might not notice true danger lurking ahead.

The thing is, this served us quite well when our only job was to live just long enough to breed the next generation, but it doesn't serve us at all in modern society. Remember, in primitive times we'd likely have been dead well before age thirty, and we'd have been way too busy trying to survive to be bothered by TMS.

To understand the phenomenon of remembered pain pathways in the brain, you could look at phantom limb pain. This famous Ted Talk by VS Ramachandran is a fascinating look into three brain conditions, the second one of which is a case of phantom limb pain (starts at about 9 minutes in but he's a wonderful speaker, you'll enjoy the whole talk).

My "hip pain" wasn't in the hip joint at all, but at the surgery site, where they cut through all those big muscles in order to insert pins into the break in my femur. I was told it would take a year of PT to heal all that muscle tissue, but five years later I still get pain and stiffness there. I'm so used to it that I don't even think of it as TMS or not - basically I don't spend much time thinking of it at all - and yet it has to be, because the muscle tissues obviously healed a long time ago. It doesn't keep me from going to the gym and doing lunges and squats and anything else I might want to do (or that my trainer makes me do, LOL).

 

ohh mate..
how can your dad do that to you. I am shocked. Sorry for your situation.

You have been through a lot. I totally understand this.

I see that you are going to start working with Georgie which is good start. I am doing my first session tomorrow through skype. I am not in UK at the moment. As there are no major structural issues. In time you should get better.

 

Hi Guys,

So I went to see Georgie who said that I do have TMS, she also told me that my (current pain) hip pain is TMS and impingement is TMS etc.

thefaifix.com backs up the theory of how many people have labral tears and 0 pain.

The problem is after all this research I have done over the past few months I still can't fully accept that my hip pain is TMS I have accepted that my back pain, stomach ulcers, lump in throat, foot pain, hand pain, upper & lower back pain. All moving around different areas of my body was TMS, however all this has gone now, yet my hip pain more so when sitting for a long time is now hurting again.

I have tired journaling and guess I shall keep trying.

Thanks

 

Hi Samuel - this certainly sounds like progress, so give yourself credit for a good job so far!

You've had your hips checked out, right? Nothing wrong that needs urgent attention or anything obvious? If so, you have nothing to lose at this point by pursuing the TMS option to the fullest. But that does require a complete commitment to the diagnosis, as you know intellectually.

It's likely that your hips are giving you the most problems because you are still beating yourself up for having the surgeries (or for trusting the medical professionals who advised the surgeries). So you'll want to put self-forgiveness and self-acceptance high on your list of goals. Also, surgery is like a major injury - there are a lot of memorized pain pathways involved. Phantom limb pain tells us that memorized pain is produced by the brain in exactly the same way as so-called "real" pain.

Your emotional life so far, in your very few years, has been absolute hell. You were obviously emotionally abused and neglected by the very people who were supposed to cherish you and protect you. Their treatment of you is unforgiveable. The thing is, you've got to have a lot of unresolved deep emotions in your unconscious, which your brain is desperately trying to repress. You know in the front of your brain that you have anger, but what your brain is repressing may also include shame and guilt, emotions which abused children often suffer in the mistaken belief that they aren't worthy of being loved, or that their parents would love them if they were "better". These are powerfully negative emotions, which the brain considers way too dangerous to face, especially for a small child, so it starts repressing them. It's no wonder that you started having symptoms so young - your reservoir of repression must be overflowing. This is very common amongst victims of childhood abuse.

I hope you will do the Structured Education Program unless you're doing Georgie's program. The SEP is free which makes it worth a try, anyway. The great thing about it is the daily structure - designed so that you make gradual progress and don't get burned out.

Keep us posted!

 

Hi Jan,

Yea Georgie is a physio and she checked my hips out and said there is nothing wrong. Also while my back was hurting a lot and all the other pains I actually forgot about my hip pain, for example I want to Kefalonia with my friends and I sat for the whole plane journey with 0 pain. It was only when I went and kicked this small rugby ball around which weighs nothing that I was actually fearing doing it but did it anyway that the pain returned. My hip pain also is not in the joint like walking is fine and I can move my leg around with out any impingement... So this all does make sense to me but I just find it hard to believe.

The other thing I want to ask is, I have been stuck in this town all my life I was meant to leave when I was 18 but because of my pains I haven't left yet. I have till Feb to get to Australia so my visa doesn't expire, problem is there are quite a lot of reasons but I am also kinda scared of going incase my pain gets bad, especially on the flight. I decided though I am going to get away from everyone and go around europe for maybe a month mid October on my own, but then I do have fears about the idea.. I just really want to get away from this place, my family and this job and basically be who I want to be.

Thanks for that I shall start on that program on Monday.

I really appreciate your response I also hope you have a great weekend!

Thanks

 

Hi Samuel,
I was also in a lot of doubt that my RSI, tendinitis /osis was TMS. I was working as a massage therapist when the pain started in my right forearm, so you would think injury right? I've dealt with persistent pain the last 7 months, until I finally committed to that this was TMS. I finally took off the wrist brace and the pain skyrocketed but then calmed down. Every time I challenged the pain and increased my activity, the pain, fear and anxiety would skyrocket and then decrease as I worked with the tools from this wiki, my therapist, affirmations and meditation.

This week I finally went back to doing massage. I knew I needed to even though it hurt and caused me tremendous anxiety. And you know what? After 4.5 hours of massage this week I am completely 100% pain free. Unbelievable considering I was told I would never massage again.

Samuel, I am so sorry you have had a rough upbringing and face many challenges with your family. For my recovery what was and continues to be so important is surrounding myself with people who love and care about me, while minimizing contact with negative and toxic people is essential. Obviously you love and care about your family, but keeping a distance until you learn to love yourself and keep your energy strong around them may be something to consider. This is something I had to learn around my preteen stepdaughter. I also had to forgive and be compassionate towards her suffering (while keeping a distance). Now that I've learned to be stronger and love myself more, I can be in the presence of the negativity without it affecting much.

Good luck on your journey. You are in a safe place here, with many people who care about you and your wellbeing and will support you as you begin to achieve the life you deserve.
Much Aloha.
Andrea

 

TMS CONGRATULATIONS! Who--or what --told you that? Contact them and show or tell them how wrong they were and to stop spreading misinformation placebos. EDIT : I MEANT NOCEBOS not placebos--been hitting too many tennis balls, its playing with my marbles.

 

If there is poll for the biggest believer or fan of TMS.. you will stand out
I like that...

 

Thanks Indi!

EDIT : I MEANT NOCEBOS not placebos--been hitting too many tennis balls, its playing with my marbles.

 

Hi Samuel,

I'm so happy that you followed up with us all and let us know that you were able to see Georgie. I hope you feel some relief from having gotten an official diagnosis from a TMS practitioner. Everyone has already given you great advice. I hope you see that you are in good company and have lots of support in this community.

I am really impressed that, despite all the challenges that you have had to face, that you have remained so persistent, courageous, and strong. It sounds like you know what you want - to get away, to travel, and as you say, be your own person. Now you have the chance to do that as an adult. I can relate to your fears about traveling; I was also nervous about traveling when I was sorting out my symptoms. On the other hand, it seems that your previous trips have been something you've enjoyed and times when your pain decreased. So, I hope you will keep up your courage, your determination, and your persistence and do what's best for you - and be extra kind to yourself, too.

Thanks again for keeping us up to date, and good luck! Sunny