Acid relux symtoms

Hello everyone. I was hoping to hear success stories in treating acid reflux and gerd with pain reprocessing therapy and tms techniques. I have successfully reduced my migraine symptoms with pain reprocessing therapy but then I started having acid reflux three weeks ago that is persistent. I am having so much fear around the symptoms that they will never go away or may cause damage that will lead to other illness. I went to the dr and they put me on two week round of medication and if that does not help they will do testing to rule out any physical cause for the acid. I just have a feeling this is caused by stress and tms since it started as my migraine symptoms disappeared. Can anyone give me hope and experience with this symptom?

 

Hi @corri d - it looks like you've already found some older posts, which is usually my first suggestion - to do a keyword search within the Success Stories subforum. Reflux is well-known to be a stress-based symptom even outside of the TMS community, and countless success stories include reflux on their list of symptoms that were overcome. It's certainly one of my symptoms, which I can relieve almost instantly with mindful breathing. The hard part is remaining mindful!

You've been around a while, but the truth about life is that new symptoms can and will occur due to changes in outside stressors, and due to our survival-mode brains that never stop wanting us to live in fear. And good grief, isn't the outside world dysfunctional enough right now to cause existential distress? People are not acknowledging the stress that this puts on our sense of well-being - I think that's because it's too big and way too much out of our control - so our brains our repressing those thoughts and replacing them with symptoms. It's an epidemic right now.

It's probably time to revisit the techniques that helped you earlier this year, go back to Curable, etc. and do some honest and open writing for yourself about the things that are subconsciously hanging over your head and causing distress. The basic technique, practiced by Dr. Sarno and by mindbody practitioners before and since (Claire Weekes being a prime example of "before Sarno") is to face, acknowledge, and accept.

You can do this. Breathe, write, meditate, and take back your equanimity from your poor fearful brain.

 

[QUOTE="corri d, post: 137389, member: 19131”] . . . started having acid reflux three weeks ago that is persistent. I am having so much fear around the symptoms that they will never go away or may cause damage that will lead to other illness. I went to the dr and they put me on two week round of medication and if that does not help they will do testing to rule out any physical cause for the acid.[/QUOTE]

Dr. Sarno himself suffered from gastroesophageal reflux. Here is what he wrote about it in Healing Back Pain:

"I have learned that heartburn means that I’m angry about something and don’t know it. So I think about what might be causing the condition, and when I come up with the answer, the heartburn disappears. It is remarkable how well buried the anger usually is. Generally for me it is something about which I am annoyed but have no idea how much it has angered me. Sometimes it is something that is so loaded emotionally, I don’t come up with the answer for a long time.”
​

Since you appear to be familiar with Alan Gordon’s pain reprocessing therapy, with its emphasis on the role of fear in causing chronic painful conditions, I will add this. Sarno explained in Healing Back Pain that the reason we repress anger is because we learned a long time ago that experiencing it can produce “very unpleasant consequences.” In other words, we repress it because we fear experiencing it. This fits well with Alan Gordon’s emphasis on the role of fear in chronic pain. Remember that Gordon said the first goal of pain reprocessing therapy is to stop fearing that the pain means there is something wrong with your body. Similarly, Sarno said that to recover from TMS, a person has to reject that the cause is something structural and accept that the cause is something psychological. Perhaps I am reading too much into what you wrote, but it looks to me like you are still looking "to rule out any physical cause for the acid.” Until you do that, I don’t see how a mind-body approach of any kind is going to help you even though it has helped others with acid reflux.

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Yes, in my experience GERD and similar symptoms are definitely TMS. Mine flared up almost immediately a couple of years ago after some very, very stressful life events involving danger to my partner (as I perceived it). And then, even after it all got resolved, I noticed that these digestive issues had become my "go-to" symptom to worry about. I even went through a couple of agonizing endoscopies back then because I was believing it was a hernia, and maybe there was a surgery, but after waiting and waiting for some kind of response, the expert doctor basically said that she has had the best results with a particular anti-anxiety drug! She actually said that even the pharmaceutical antacids don't work for long (and that the surgeries often cause more trouble than they resolve). Of course I laughed to myself, because when the doctors tell you it's anxiety... well! This all The Rage! Needless to say I didn't take the wonder anxiety drug. Back to the Sarno drawing board. As someone mentioned above, the fear was about how ANGRY I was with the people involved, and not wanting to, or being able to, express and fully acknowledge it. I also find it very important to move anger and other emotions through my body with breathwork and various energy practices (which is part of what I help my clients to do).

 

Hi did you have a lot of burping with the reflux?