Since becoming more knowledgeable 'TMS', i've been working towards accepting that my pain and aches, which usually keep me from being seated or standing for prolonged periods of time, are not from the little structural findings on my past MRIs (Discs, Stenosis etc..)... Things have been improving, but anytime I sit in my specific padded rolling chair, i tend to get the aches in my butt & lower back quicker than my other main seat. I'm sure a good part of it is more of a conditioned response and the fact that though I try not to, i just expect and anticipate the discomfort to come when I sit in it, but I was just looking for some opinions. If the pain is 'TMS', can certain chairs still aggrivate low-back conditions, Causing it to occur sooner than others?
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Can certain chairs cause low back/butt pain, even if it is TMS?
- Thread starter 44nickn
- Start date
Adam Coloretti (coach)
Well known member
Hi! Sounds very much like a conditioned response to me. I think I understand your question though, and whilst I'm not a spine expert I would say probably no more than anyone else. Your spine is tremendously durable, even with those findings. If you sat for 10 hours then maybe your back would be more stiff with a certain finding vs someone who doesn't have that finding, but then again maybe not, and it would be a different type of pain (if it even was pain - I doubt there would be actually, it would probably be closer to stiffness) or discomfort than what you're experiencing now (assuming what you're experiencing now is TMS). I'm confident you'll be able to tell the difference, especially as time goes on
Hi @44nickn. This is my take on it. I think you’re almost certainly spot on framing this as a conditioned/predictive mind-body response. In mind-body terms, that kind of reaction is something your conscious mind can’t just switch off with sheer willpower. Your brain has learned to treat sitting in that chair as dangerous, and it reacts automatically. We retrain it mainly through what we do—repeatedly showing the brain, via action, that the situation is completely safe.
If I were in your position, I’d treat the rolling chair as a baby‑steps exercise. Start with however long you can usually sit in it before symptoms reliably show up. Then, add only a small amount (like 1–2 minutes) each day or every few days, as long as symptoms stay manageable and settle afterwards. The idea is to kind of “fly under the radar” of the brain’s alarm system and repeatedly demonstrate that the chair itself isn’t a threat. I’ve found this approach really helpful with my own TMS sitting issues.
It’s also worth noting that the brain tends to treat new or unfamiliar situations as more threatening simply because they’re uncertain. An unfamiliar chair can trigger symptoms sooner, even if it’s just a bit less ergonomic than your other seats. Baby‑steps work well here too: by using the new chair in tiny, repeated doses, you teach your brain that it’s familiar and safe, not a novel threat. Doing this had a sort of 'knock-on' effect of helping my brain relax about my sitting on a variety of different types of chairs and seats.
To your question: yes—even if your pain is primarily mind-body/TMS, some chairs can still bring symptoms on sooner than others. Anyone, whether they experience mind-body/TMS symptoms or not, would, for instance, experience discomfort or a numb backside if they sat on a hard wooden park bench for hours! That doesn’t mean the chair is damaging your back. It usually just means your brain has learned to treat that specific chair or posture as a stronger trigger—often because of past discomfort and pain experiences, less familiarity, or minor ergonomic differences.
If I were in your position, I’d treat the rolling chair as a baby‑steps exercise. Start with however long you can usually sit in it before symptoms reliably show up. Then, add only a small amount (like 1–2 minutes) each day or every few days, as long as symptoms stay manageable and settle afterwards. The idea is to kind of “fly under the radar” of the brain’s alarm system and repeatedly demonstrate that the chair itself isn’t a threat. I’ve found this approach really helpful with my own TMS sitting issues.
It’s also worth noting that the brain tends to treat new or unfamiliar situations as more threatening simply because they’re uncertain. An unfamiliar chair can trigger symptoms sooner, even if it’s just a bit less ergonomic than your other seats. Baby‑steps work well here too: by using the new chair in tiny, repeated doses, you teach your brain that it’s familiar and safe, not a novel threat. Doing this had a sort of 'knock-on' effect of helping my brain relax about my sitting on a variety of different types of chairs and seats.
To your question: yes—even if your pain is primarily mind-body/TMS, some chairs can still bring symptoms on sooner than others. Anyone, whether they experience mind-body/TMS symptoms or not, would, for instance, experience discomfort or a numb backside if they sat on a hard wooden park bench for hours! That doesn’t mean the chair is damaging your back. It usually just means your brain has learned to treat that specific chair or posture as a stronger trigger—often because of past discomfort and pain experiences, less familiarity, or minor ergonomic differences.
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Thank you for the advice. I had a dual/bilateral inguinal hernia surgery in Early June, and since have made progress. While recovering, I read 'The Mindbody Pres.' and learned about 'TMS'... Around the same time, I had started some home 'P.T.' exercises for Post surgery, though It's the similar routine I was told to do long ago, regarding my back pain (bridges, bird/dog etc..) Though there are 2 things that may be helping (TMS realization/acceptance & PT ex's.), since I've seen progress, I haven't stopped the basic 'P.T.' exercises, however, I really do think learning and studying 'TMS' is a big help... It's always so tricky because for other health reasons, I'm on prescription medicines throughout the 2x/day that coincidentally help pain, so I have 3 thoughts of what's helping: PT exercises, TMS acceptance or Meds. Either way, It's improving, so I've been keeping it all so far.Hi! Sounds very much like a conditioned response to me. I think I understand your question though, and whilst I'm not a spine expert I would say probably no more than anyone else. Your spine is tremendously durable, even with those findings. If you sat for 10 hours then maybe your back would be more stiff with a certain finding vs someone who doesn't have that finding, but then again maybe not, and it would be a different type of pain (if it even was pain - I doubt there would be actually, it would probably be closer to stiffness) or discomfort than what you're experiencing now (assuming what you're experiencing now is TMS). I'm confident you'll be able to tell the difference, especially as time goes on
Thanks for the help and approach, I will surely put it to use..I had a dual/bilateral inguinal hernia surgery in Early June, and since have made progress. While recovering, I read 'The Mindbody Pres.' and learned about 'TMS'... Around the same time, I had started some home 'P.T.' exercises for Post surgery, though It's the similar routine I was told to do long ago, regarding my back pain (bridges, bird/dog etc..) Though there are 2 things that may be helping (TMS realization/acceptance & PT ex's.), since I've seen progress, I haven't stopped the basic 'P.T.' exercises, however, I really do think learning and studying 'TMS' is a big help... It's always so tricky because for other health reasons, I'm on prescription medicines throughout the 2x/day that coincidentally help pain, so I have 3 thoughts of what's helping: PT exercises, TMS acceptance or Meds. Either way, It's improving, so I've been keeping all so far.
Adam Coloretti (coach)
Well known member
Makes sense - I would lean towards if it ain't broke don't fix it at the moment given you're improving - you're covering all bases and you can always re-assess further down the line
I am glad you like what Bloodmoon said. I am going to expand on it.
Sarno regarded repressed emotions as the primary cause of TMS. But he also recognized that if you have repressed-emotion TMS, you might also acquire Pavlovian-conditioned TMS. Here is how he explained it in Healing Back Pain on page 21:
“The process of conditioning, or programming, seems to be very important in determining when a person with TMS will have pain. For example, a common complaint of people with low back pain is that it is invariably brought on by sitting. This is such a benign activity one is mystified by the fact that it initiates pain. But conditioning occurs when two things go on simultaneously, so it is easy to imagine that at some point early in the course of the TMS experience [caused by repressed emotion], the person happens to have pain while sitting. The brain makes the association between sitting and the presence of pain and that person is now programmed to expect pain while sitting. In other words, the pain occurs because of its subconscious association with sitting, not because sitting is bad for the back.”
Later in The Divided Mind Sarno wrote on page 127:
“One of the prime characteristics of TMS is that the pattern of symptoms will develop as a result of Pavlovian conditioning. People will experience the kind of symptoms they have learned to expect to experience, just as Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the presentation of food with the ringing of a bell. . . . Experience with large numbers of patients in our clinic makes it clear that these are programmed responses having no relationship to anything beyond what the patient is conditioned to expect.” (The italicization of "expect" is Sarno's, the underlining is mine.)
If chair B aggravates your pain sooner than chair A, my guess is that the the nature of the chair is not the cause. The cause is that you unconsciously expect sitting in chair B to do that.
Please excuse me for getting technical, but I think it might be useful to explain why uncovering Pavlovian conditioning is not at all like uncovering emotions repressed by defense mechanisms. According to contemporary neuroscience, we have two kinds of long-term memory--declarative and nondeclarative. Pavlovian conditioning memories are nondeclarative. We can consciously experience declarative memories, though it might take some effort if they are repressed. Nondeclarative memories can never be consciously experienced, period. That is not because they are deeply repressed but because they are stored in a part of the brainstem that has no direct or indirect neurological link to the cortex, where consciousness arises. A person can only surmise what Pavlovian conditioning memories exist in his or her nondeclarative long-term memory.
For an example of successful surmising, see the following carob tree story by Baseball65 at
https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/the-role-of-triggers.8274/ (Dr. Schubiner's Blog - The Role of Triggers). It is currently the last post in the thread.
Brilliant piece, @Duggit — I always look forward to reading your postings.
I understand the distinction you're making between uncovering repressed emotions and inferring a nondeclarative conditioned response, and I'm not questioning that distinction. I'm wondering about something a little narrower: does the conditioning necessarily have to begin with pain being experienced while sitting?
Could the initial association instead be between sitting and a particular emotional or physiological state—say, prolonged stress, threat, frustration, or emotional conflict—with pain becoming part of the response later?
I ask because of my own experience. When I first started a very stressful job, my office chair was completely comfortable. I actually liked it enough that I considered buying one for home. But I was sitting in that chair while dealing with an increasingly stressful environment involving the public, office politics, and backstabbing. After a few months, that same chair had become unbearably uncomfortable, and eventually sitting in general became associated with considerable discomfort and pain.
I also remember when my back pain first came on away from that office chair. I was sitting having dinner at a restaurant with someone I considered a friend, but was increasingly beginning to realise didn't really respect me. At the time, I didn't make any connection between those feelings and the pain; I simply assumed it was the chair I was sitting on that wasn't very ergonomic.
This is partly why I wonder whether Schubiner's discussion of triggers might leave open a slightly different sequence from the particular example Sarno gives. Schubiner describes stressful events and emotional states as helping to activate or reinforce the relevant pathways, and then discusses various situations, movements, places and other cues becoming conditioned triggers for symptoms. I'm not sure he specifically proposes the sequence I'm describing, but it seems to leave the question open.
Perhaps the sequence could potentially be something like:
sitting + repeated stress/threat → association between sitting and that state → sitting becomes a conditioned cue → pain/discomfort subsequently becomes part of the response.
That would be a little different from Sarno's example, where pain occurs while sitting and sitting subsequently becomes conditioned as a cue for pain. But perhaps the two aren't mutually exclusive possibilities.
So my narrower question is really whether, within Sarno's model, the thing initially being conditioned necessarily has to be pain—or whether an emotionally or physiologically threatening context could itself become associated with the activity first, with the pain response developing subsequently.
I'm not presenting my own experience as proof of the mechanism, just as something that made me wonder whether the emotional context and the conditioning process might sometimes interact in that direction. It seems to me that this could fit reasonably well with the broader way Schubiner talks about emotional processes and conditioned triggers, even if he doesn't specifically describe this particular sequence.
I understand the distinction you're making between uncovering repressed emotions and inferring a nondeclarative conditioned response, and I'm not questioning that distinction. I'm wondering about something a little narrower: does the conditioning necessarily have to begin with pain being experienced while sitting?
Could the initial association instead be between sitting and a particular emotional or physiological state—say, prolonged stress, threat, frustration, or emotional conflict—with pain becoming part of the response later?
I ask because of my own experience. When I first started a very stressful job, my office chair was completely comfortable. I actually liked it enough that I considered buying one for home. But I was sitting in that chair while dealing with an increasingly stressful environment involving the public, office politics, and backstabbing. After a few months, that same chair had become unbearably uncomfortable, and eventually sitting in general became associated with considerable discomfort and pain.
I also remember when my back pain first came on away from that office chair. I was sitting having dinner at a restaurant with someone I considered a friend, but was increasingly beginning to realise didn't really respect me. At the time, I didn't make any connection between those feelings and the pain; I simply assumed it was the chair I was sitting on that wasn't very ergonomic.
This is partly why I wonder whether Schubiner's discussion of triggers might leave open a slightly different sequence from the particular example Sarno gives. Schubiner describes stressful events and emotional states as helping to activate or reinforce the relevant pathways, and then discusses various situations, movements, places and other cues becoming conditioned triggers for symptoms. I'm not sure he specifically proposes the sequence I'm describing, but it seems to leave the question open.
Perhaps the sequence could potentially be something like:
sitting + repeated stress/threat → association between sitting and that state → sitting becomes a conditioned cue → pain/discomfort subsequently becomes part of the response.
That would be a little different from Sarno's example, where pain occurs while sitting and sitting subsequently becomes conditioned as a cue for pain. But perhaps the two aren't mutually exclusive possibilities.
So my narrower question is really whether, within Sarno's model, the thing initially being conditioned necessarily has to be pain—or whether an emotionally or physiologically threatening context could itself become associated with the activity first, with the pain response developing subsequently.
I'm not presenting my own experience as proof of the mechanism, just as something that made me wonder whether the emotional context and the conditioning process might sometimes interact in that direction. It seems to me that this could fit reasonably well with the broader way Schubiner talks about emotional processes and conditioned triggers, even if he doesn't specifically describe this particular sequence.
Adam Coloretti (coach)
Well known member
Makes complete sense to me what you're saying and I think it really ties into Sarno's main distraction theory. The environment brought up some very confronting feelings and emotions for you, so the brain in a panic looks for a distraction/an alternate explanation. It's a lot easier to subconsciously blame it on the chair than face the emotional music so to speak - and that initial explanation (much like a first impression) I think locks in and voila, you have a conditioned response to sitting.
Come to think of it with your first question, looked at a certain way does it ever just begin whilst sitting? Perhaps in the specific instance where you injure yourself whilst sitting (like if you sat on something sharp). There has to be an initial catalyst - either you already think you're injured and sitting down makes sense to hurt (so it does - which was my situation), or like in your example there's an emotional trigger and the sitting gets falsely blamed.
I think the answer yes.