Jerome

Note: I’m French, English is not my first language, please be kind with me
To explain who I am now, I think I have to share some parts of my past.
Until I was 10 years old, I had a quite normal childhood, I think, except that I was very close to my mother. Any kind of separation from her was very stressful for me.

At 10, when I started middle school, I experienced school phobia. It was too stressful for me. I had a stomach ulcer at that time. I was unable to go to middle school classes, so I studied through distance education for one year. After seeing several doctors and psychologists, I finally met a wonderful psychologist. Thanks to him, I came back to school (for just a few hours) after only one meeting, using cognitive behavioral therapy. (This was in 1995; very few people knew about it in France as it was quite new.) I started going to middle school normally the following year. School became a pleasure and became “easy”; I had high grades.

Nothing special happened until I was 20. At 20, during my second year at a French preparatory school for the “Grandes Écoles,” I had a kind of burnout. It started with a big panic attack. I went to the emergency room, did lots of exams (everything was OK), and saw a psychiatrist who prescribed antidepressants. It was very sudden; of course, that day I was very anxious and disappointed by what was happening…
I don’t know if it was the side effects of the antidepressants or my state of mind, but I spent six weeks feeling very bad, unable to stand up, sleeping all day long between panic attacks. Then it slowly got better day by day. The doctors told me to stop my studies. I didn’t. I finished my preparatory school, did the final exams, and got accepted into an engineering school in Paris.

After a while, I tried to stop the antidepressants several times but did not succeed. I felt very bad each time and had to take them again. After many years, I discovered on forums that this drug had to be tapered very, very slowly, not just over a few weeks as the doctors said. I tried once over several months. I started having a lot of muscle tension and pain. I stopped tapering and went back on the drug. In 2021, my new girlfriend encouraged me to try stopping the drug again, but even more slowly. I started again, and the muscle tension and pain came back. But this time, I decided to keep going. I still haven’t finished tapering, even though I have decreased the dosage by more than 90% so far.

The muscle tension and pain have decreased (thankfully, because it was horrible—I couldn’t even stay in bed at night), but I still have pain and muscle tension almost every day.
Of course, I have tried everything I could find to improve my condition (chiropractor, massage, acupuncture, yoga, special diet and supplements…).

I haven’t done many exams because I understood that my problem was in my brain. The pain often changed location, changing every day and so on. It didn’t make logical sense to be structural.

Nevertheless, until now, I have been unable to get rid of the pain… except once, for some months. At first glance, the situation is surprising. It happened in 2023 when my girlfriend left me. I was really not prepared for it. It was a big shock. I decided to let her go and fully change to become a better “new me,” to show her that new me some months later, hoping she would come back. Of course, she didn’t But I changed a lot. I did a lot of sports (I lost 8kg in two months, and I was only a little overweight), met new people (including my current girlfriend), reconnected with childhood friends, and so on. I forced myself to overcome all my fears, found a new goal, and changed so many things in my life that the pain stopped. I think my brain was too busy with that “new life” to deal with the pain. Unfortunately, after a few months, when my new life started to stabilize, the pain came back, and it’s still here.

I’m sure it’s TMS, and I recognize myself in everything related to fear. I fear everything. I force myself not to let fear win, but it’s an everyday fight. I had school phobia because of fear at 10; I know what fear can do if we let it take over. And I fear my pain. I always think about it, even when I have no pain.

I suppose my fear is linked to my emotions. A side effect of antidepressants is that you don’t feel your emotions, good or bad. Everything feels flat. I discovered this while tapering the drug… I started feeling emotions again. But I suppose I repressed many emotions during the 20 years I took that drug.

Now I have to find the right techniques to overcome my TMS. I’m sure I have found the right forum now