The prompt today was to write a forum post about how I'm doing so far and what my apprehensions are.
I think I've improved a lot, but its been a lot of ups and downs. Things seemed to be fairly steadily through last week. A friend of ours from out of town visited, and we had such a wonderful time, and it was so good to have a friend around again. But then she left, and it threw me into a bit of a depression and several very symptom-heavy days. It was like moving all over again.
One really interesting thing about this was that the first day after she left, I came home and told my husband I'd had a pretty rough day. I'd had lots of symptoms and I was practicing being aware of what I was thinking/feeling - but what I kept thinking all day was that I was simply frustrated by my symptoms still being so strong. When I mentioned my bad day to my husband, he said "yeah, I thought it might be a tough day today" and when I asked why he thought that he told me that after he moved away from his family, it was always hard to leave them again after visits, that it took him a few days to recover. And it dawned on me that OF COURSE I was having a bad day because my friend left, and that I was ALREADY repressing it.
Good news: the last few days have been much better on the symptom front, but also on with feeling/remembering that I have control over this. Its just fear, its just TMS, everything is fine.
That being said, I am running a race tomorrow, and I am very anxious about it. Exercise anxiety is something I've developed over the last few months, which is very frustrating because exercising had been helping my anxiety before that. I get so much hypochondria surrounding exercise - that my heart will explode or something, even though I have no heart problems. So I've been a constant broken record of self talk today. It helps, I just have to keep it up.
I think I've improved a lot, but its been a lot of ups and downs. Things seemed to be fairly steadily through last week. A friend of ours from out of town visited, and we had such a wonderful time, and it was so good to have a friend around again. But then she left, and it threw me into a bit of a depression and several very symptom-heavy days. It was like moving all over again.
One really interesting thing about this was that the first day after she left, I came home and told my husband I'd had a pretty rough day. I'd had lots of symptoms and I was practicing being aware of what I was thinking/feeling - but what I kept thinking all day was that I was simply frustrated by my symptoms still being so strong. When I mentioned my bad day to my husband, he said "yeah, I thought it might be a tough day today" and when I asked why he thought that he told me that after he moved away from his family, it was always hard to leave them again after visits, that it took him a few days to recover. And it dawned on me that OF COURSE I was having a bad day because my friend left, and that I was ALREADY repressing it.
Good news: the last few days have been much better on the symptom front, but also on with feeling/remembering that I have control over this. Its just fear, its just TMS, everything is fine.
That being said, I am running a race tomorrow, and I am very anxious about it. Exercise anxiety is something I've developed over the last few months, which is very frustrating because exercising had been helping my anxiety before that. I get so much hypochondria surrounding exercise - that my heart will explode or something, even though I have no heart problems. So I've been a constant broken record of self talk today. It helps, I just have to keep it up.
