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I've suffered with atypical trigeminal neuralgia for around 13 years. The first bout was attributed to tooth-grinding and I did the whole mouth guard thing. My life was super stressful at the time but rather than deal with the stress I sought out cures. As my life calmed down, so did my pain but I believed this was due to taking manuka honey. Honestly, I thought it had resolved an underlying infection or something. Ah well, we live and learn.

I was totally pain free for a couple of years after this and then BAM, following a long and weird period of being really and desperately unwell, my hubby was diagnosed with Parkinson's. My pain came back with vengeance. Same old dental route prevailed for about five years, but at the latter end of this I discovered Sarno. This forum didn't exist so I relied on the books and the tmshelp forum, which although excellent in its own way really didn't help because the focus was on pure Sarno, i.e. Journaling and therapy and suchlike.

Nothing was helping. I was getting worse and worse. This forum was created but sadly I was at the end of my rope and I decided I'd had it with the whole TMS business. I thought it bullshit and I took my leave. In hindsight this was the very best thing I could have done because I was tying myself up in knots of desperation. Now you have to appreciate that all this time I was not taking painkillers. I was balling it out. Back then the whole 'stop taking meds' aspect of Sarno was pretty strong. Screw this. I went back to the doctor and got both the diagnosis and the relief my tortured body was screaming for. I started on a very low dose of amiltryptaline which mainly served to help me sleep like a baby. And sleep it appeared, calmed my nerve.

A little while after this, my hubby and I went to the coast to celebrate our anniversary. He was sleeping and the hotel room was too dark to read a book, so I opened my iPod and found a PDF of the first draft of David Hanscom's book. I flicked through and was astonished and delighted to read that one of the first things he did with his pain patients, was to get them sleeping properly. This was fully corroborated by my own experience. I read about his thoughts on how the nervous system became over-sensitised and a light bulb turned on in my brain.

For a long time I focused only on sleeping. No more overwhelming myself with information or god help me, trying to heal. I realised how insanely I had been pushing and pushing for a cure. I had generated HUGE amounts of tension and stress in doing so. Then I turned my attention to replenishing my poor body which had been battered by all the stress. I started to follow the Weston Price dietary protocol because I was scared that my teeth would be adversely affected. At this point eating, drinking, brushing my teeth, wearing make-up...all were seriously compromised because they took my pain from 10/10 to off the scale. The thought of interdental cleaning induced a paroxysm of terror. I was probably completely insane at this point.

So sleeping helped a lot. I did begin to feel better. My pain levels dropped from off the ceiling, at least in the mornings. Come early evening they were veering into awful again, and by nightfall I was once again demented. But we have to live.

My overall health was improving. The deeply nutritious diet affected a dramatic change on how I felt and looked, and I was sleeping very well. Then one day my boy and I decided to start swimming thinking that water therapy would be great for his Parkinson's racked body. This is where my healing galvanised. Turns out that my body and mind just adore the water. I used to swim as a kid and had forgotten how much I loved it. I also loved the jacuzzi and hot tub. As the weeks passed by, my body began to uncoil. It realeased tons of tension. My pain started to go away.

All was good for a while. And then I was sexually assaulted at the baths and the actual experience, combined with the legal process (I prosecuted the bastard), caused the perfect TMS storm. There were long periods when I couldn't swim or if I did, the gossip about the incident left me feeling pretty disturbed (no one knew it was me so they had free-reign). Putting this dreadful experience aside, I was able to see quite clearly how TMS operated in my life. I came back to the forum, and thank the gods, a sea-change had prevailed and a more wide-ranging healing philosophy was held. Through helping others, I helped myself.

All is water under the bridge now. I am swimming regularly (and safely. He was found guilty and amongst other things, I have an indefinate restraining order against him). The whole ugly episode meant I did a lot of inner work. Interestingly, I have found that releasing all the tension from my body enabled me to return to more emotional and psychological based healing with greater results and insights. This ties in well with David Hanscom's protocol in terms of soothing the nervous system before you do anything else. I am also incredibly aware of how emotions feel in my body. I am alive to the physiology of emotion and allow myself to feel it. I no longer cringe from it, or try to push it down, or over-intellectualise it. I let it be what it is. I suppose this is why my lengthy response is germane on a post about Claire Weekes. Healing is not about accepting your pain but rather about accepting how your emotions feel as physiological concomitants to thoughts and cognitions. I believe the repression occurs at the point at which we deny how our body feels. We don't like how anxiety feels so we run from it. We don't like how anger feels so we fight it. And some of us don't like how pleasure feels (Guilt? Shame?) so we stuff it down. And on and on.

The biggest error we all make in our healing is to over-analyse our emotions rather than simply feel them. The reams of journaling, the endless chronicles of pain displayed in endless posts, the dissection of our personality, the blaming and scapegoating...all are second darts. All are intellectualisations. Make no mistake, they are fine ways of building pathways back to wholeness and healing but they are not the root.

The root is to be able to feel how you feel, to surf the waves of emotion without judgement, to feel ALL emotions and not privilege one over another. You don't need to seek them out. They come unbidden. You simply need to feel them in the moment they live and surge through your body. The more you do this, the keener your ability to differentiate between emotions gets and the better able you become at integrating all emotions into the full repertoire of what it means to be human.

Wow. That was a freakin' long response. I didn't expect that, but it was a stream-of-consciousness that I was helpless to stop. I hope it helps you and others glean some insights into your way back to yourself and to a life without pain.

With blessings and love,

Plum x