Day 36 Can't control my TMS or other people

[Endless luke]

Is there anything in your life you feel like you can’t control? How does not being in control make you feel? Can you connect this feeling to a personality trait?

The two things that came to mind are my TMS and other people. I'm not sure which is the most important one for me to write about today. I am sure these two things are related. As much as I try to control TMS it's clear that I have gotten no closer to mastering it. That my thoughts of progress are delusional.
While I don't like to think that I try and control other people I do make efforts to get people to like me and in the case of my parents I did try to get them to help me/ understand me. Efforts in this latter arena were likewise delusional. I spent a few years in family therapy with my parents and we often thought we were making progress- that we had a very good therapist, that we had achieved understanding on a certain point. Yet nothing was anywhere near as helpful as when I gave up and decided that I couldn't spend another minute trying to get my mother to understand me. That gave me such personal responsibility and increased sanity that I can not imagine going back to the place I was before.
Which seems to indicate that I must do the same thing with TMS. I must simply give up trying to beat it and live with it. I must not look for progress but remove my desire to have progress. This will be much harder to do than with my parents.
As far as getting people to like me that aren't my parents I'm making decent progress. I still get lonely often and I try to work to change this but I don't have much urgency and know that I can handle being lonely. One of my big epiphanies is that it's okay to simply go to bed sad- there's nothing that needs to be done. In addition as far as finding relationships there are many things that I won't do in order to be liked- I'm very authentic now and try to be as honest as possible.

 

[Forest]

One problem people routinely run into is that they try to heal themselves. When you have this mentality you tend to focus too much on your body and your symptoms, which is what your unconscious is trying to get you to do. Because TMS symptoms are benign, there is nothing you need to fix or heal from. You simply need to be more allowing of your emotions. Steve Ozanich posted about this a while back, and if you haven't seen it, I recommend checking it out.

I have seen a lot of people make progress when they stop trying to beat TMS, and begin to start living. The reason for this is that you no longer worry so much about how your symptoms are, which is the whole point of accepting that your conditions are benign. Your point about I must not look for progress but remove my desire to have progress, sounds like it is straight out of Alan Gordon's Outcome Independence article. This is exactly the attitude you should be having, and it shows that you are in the right mindset to recover.