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Feel free to read my profile story, and then read some Success Stories - you will find an enormous variation in experiences and stories leading up to what is almost always a self-diagnosis of TMS.

Look, I'll be honest - I was doing really well for a number of years, but it's been tough the last four, and 2020 has been an absolute bitch, with a shutdown-related volunteer job that took over my life in the spring (edit: which I allowed to take over my life) and not in a good way. I managed to work myself into a case of sudden-onset RA, which is a real condition with obvious test results, and now I have to be a good patient and take it very seriously, which is hard for me to accept, because I want my symptoms to be pure TMS. I blame emotional stress and distress 100% - if not a certain level of despair as well. Which means I'm blaming myself, and that's a vicious cycle. So I'm taking the meds, but also doing my best to to apply TMS techniques, and working with a TMS therapist for the first time. The disaster that is 2020 makes this immensely harder.

As an obvious TMSer, you're on the search for a solution, and you want to do it in the most perfect way possible, thus your repeated questions about when and how, as well as the lengthy recitation of physical details (this is very common amongst newcomers, and I didn't actually read any of it, sorry - I've become skilled at skimming right past those to get the to real issues).

Obsessing about physical details and tests and results and specialists, constantly asking yourself what to try next when the current ones fail to produce a result - these are all distractions. I mean, do you see how it looks when it's said like that? These activities are designed by your primitive fearful brain to distract you and keep you in a state of hyper-vigilance in a world in which you are anxious and nervous - but in which, most likely, you are lucky enough to be physically quite safe, right? Your primitive brain doesn't know this. It thinks that your anxiety must mean that you are in imminent danger of dying from some wilderness threat, so it ramps up the fear and anxiety more and more. Until you make yourself sick and suffer symptoms.

If you truly believe there is something physically wrong with you, then you are in the wrong place. But if you're ready to get off the diagnostic merry-go-round, and try something completely different - then welcome. We have a ton of resources. But you must find your way to making a 180-degree change in the relationship you currently have with your body and your mind.

What we advocate here is getting in touch with your repressed emotions, and with facing your fears,. You must become mindful of how your primitive nervous system keeps you in a state of hyper-vigilance, worrying constantly about danger, in order to supposedly keep you safe. It doesn't care if you're comfortable or happy - it just needs you to stay alive long enough to breed the next generation - that's the goal of all life, right? This survival mechanism was fine when we lived in a primitive world with a very few, very tangible dangers - dangers which we rarely survived past age 25 or so. But this mechanism is completely wrong for the lengthy lives we live in the modern world, with its inexhaustible supply of intangible anxieties, past, present, and future, to say nothing of recent technologies which allow us to be bombarded with information 24/7.

So if you want to not just live, but also enjoy the longer life that modern medicine has given us, you have to be willing to make some radical changes in the way you relate to the not-so-wonderful aspects of modern life - starting, most likely, with facing your anxiety. That's where I had to start (see my profile and book list).

~Jan