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From my meditation teacher--She experienced the deaths of her two siblings (when they were in their 40s) only 3 weeks apart and had to move her residence at the same time. Some years later she was hit by a car while crossing a street and endured severe physical injury. So as you can see, she's dealt with both physical and emotional pain, both of which were "real." As we are learning on this forum, the TMS we experience is just as real in our brains as emotional and physical pain that have a "real" cause. So I know that I can learn something from people who have experienced external trauma, of whatever nature.

And here's what my teacher learned--
Pain can bring you into present time, the only place we can operate from.
We have an inner compass for what's important and we're allowed to attend to that first. We have other responsibilities, but one of them isn't endlessly trying to be perfect or to please others.
And if we're not going to be victims, then we need to be heroes--those are the choices. So choose hero.

Being heroic doesn't have to look "big." It can look like, "Hey, I just realized I'm in denial. Let me see what I can do about that." "Say there, I just noticed that I'm adding a whole lot of anxiety to a situation that's already troubling or even infuriating. I can do something about that."

I see no conflict between the "emotional causes" ideas about TMS and the brain circuitry approach, because it's all routed through the brain and the autonomic nervous system anyway. I can speak to myself about my brain pathways or plasticity or I can speak to myself about repressed emotion...or both! "Thinking psychological" changes my brain circuitry.

Look how far we've come.