Anyone have answers?

Hi everyone. I have been wondering if being healed/cured 100% is real/possible or is 80%-90% reality and it’s just tms maintenance from there?
I consider myself 80-90% healed because I can go a week or two without anything then something small for a day or two. The back and fourth process is emotionally and mentally tiring after months. I just want to go full speed in my life and attack/go at, life with the same passion I use to have again, without having to be distracted by some pain every week or other week or month. Is being healed/cured 100% possible? Will this cycle be the rest of my life even if I do everything right? Can I go a full year or years without tms distracting my life. I just want to leave all this in my past. Can I get rid of tms once and for all? Or is it a part of me now.

 

Yes, you can. I absolutely have gone years without any major symptoms. I 'arrest' the new ones at the door, so to speak.

Will my Body ever 100% give up trying to use this strategy? I don't know, but I can think of a whole lot of other strategies for getting ym attention that I'd take a little pain over.

If you weren't aware this was TMS you might be writing the same sentence about 'coming down with health issues'

all of us who are 'cured' went through periods of frustration....Just keep going. It does get easier.

 

The wonderful - and frustrating - thing about this work is that everyone has a different take, and everyone takes a different path to what they consider recovery.

This is my belief - because I don't believe that what we call TMS* is an illness at all - it's an evolutionary brain mechanism designed to keep our ancestors safe in a primitive and dangerous world - one where the dangers were few and very concrete (food, shelter, injury, illness, dangerous animals). The only purpose of this mechanism was to get us to live long enough to breed and somewhat raise the next generation - that's it. In today's world, most of us are privileged enough to live in physical safety, right? But we learn very early on that we have to worry about our future, about our education, employment, finding the perfect partner, and starting to prepare early on for living an absurdly long life well beyond our usefulness to the propagation of the human race. Worse, the intangible concerns that our brains perceive as threats to our survival now include the pressures of social media, fears about climate change, resource shortages, pandemics, and the growing threat of world war, and a constant barrage of entertainment and news that our poor brains can't possibly hope to absorb.

It's no wonder the whole world is freaking out and mental health professionals are officially in short supply.

This is, in fact, just TMS maintenance - @Baseball65 -style - and this is where you want to be.

How you choose to react to your TMS brain mechanism trying to trip you up is totally up to you. Acknowledgement and Acceptance go a long way towards the recovery process. To me, recovery means getting on with your life with full knowledge and acceptance of the TMS mechanism that will always be with you, and finding your own way to face it with equanimity when it pops up again - as it will. My therapist reminds me frequently that TMS is just trying to protect us, which means that acceptance and self-love is the way to go.

~Jan

*Note that what we call TMS has been and continues to be called many other things outside of Dr. Sarno's immediate influence. The significance of the mindbody connection has been well known for centuries, and what he did was study that, and combine the information along with his own theories in a brilliantly-understandable way for the average person. The PPD Association - whose members include all of the well-known names in the field, with Dr. Schubiner, Alan Gordon, and our own forum founder among the founding members - has adopted the term PPD: Psycho-Physiological Disorders. Dr. Sarno himself acknowledged near the end of his career that TMS might as well stand for The Mindbody Syndrome, because he had already determined that the mechanism covers many more symptoms and conditions than can be explained by muscle tension and oxygen deprivation.