Consciously wanting symptoms?

The last week has been playing whack a mole with a few different symptom imperatives... Dizzy, anxiety, pelvic pain, and then really weird muscle weakness sensation.

On one hand this is great as two of these symptoms were new to me so tms is confirmed and that's a relief.

On the other hand the symptom imperative is annoying... Each symptom takes a four to twenty four hour turn and then immediately morphs into one of the others.

Anyway a weird situation happened today that I'm wondering if anyone else has ever had.

I had a two hour gap where I had no symptoms. What should have been a joyous moment turned into me actively and obsessively looking for the pelvic pain, which wasn't there.

Sure enough, after enough attention it has come on. As per usual, it's distracting, uncomfortable, and anxiety provoking.

What's frustrating is I did this to myself. Nothing unconscious here. Part of me was super relieved I had no symptoms, yet the other part of me felt uncomfortable that I was asymptomatic. It just did not feel right and I had the feeling of "how can I go into the world without pain?" So very weird..

Anyway, when it did eventually become I felt a little better temporarily until the usual tms response kicked in.


So what's wrong with me?

Do I secretly like the pain in some perverse way?

Am I just uncomfortable being "normal" after pain for so long?

Am i bored in my life and need the pain as some sort of drama to endlessly deal with?

Is it so I have some internal excuse built in in case I need to bail on a situation?

Is it cause I know, even in pain, nothing truely bad ever happens and part of me doesn't feel the same way otherwise?

I don't know but so far in my journey I've never had the conscious choice to bring on pain and I'm very disappointed that, at least part of me, did.

 

I've had something like that. It's so shocking to have no symptoms that you end up scared of such a huge change and they come back. But I'd look at it as just another quirk in the symptom imperative, and not think there's something wrong with you that you seem to want to bring the pain or symptoms back, or that you're some kind of masochist. The function is still the same: to keep some kind of distraction going. And it's a sign of great progress since you have the symptoms "on the run" now as Dr. Sarno said. He was also adamantly against the "secondary gain" theory in that a patient is said to be using the symptoms to get out of responsibilities or to gain sympathy. It's extra cruel to know that people who subscribed to this theory also thought the pains were structural. So, they couldn't heal the pains, and then the patients were also blamed for dramatizing them! Sickening.

So, better to focus on primary gain which is that the symptoms are distracting you from intense feelings, and keep exploring sources of frustration in your life.