Day 8

[Caminofrances]

Hello everybody,
It was emotionaly hard to think about negative past facts or actual stressors, and to try to connect the dots. I am not sure having discovered emotions or thoughts that I was not already awared of. Anyway, it increases my anxiety level and I am quite worried about feeling uncomfortable like this and to recover of this anxiety.
I have tried to talk to my brain about my "fake" pain. It seems to work briefly. I still feel anxious about my situation and future recovery and habilites to be happy again.
I am in a psychiatric hospital since 6 days because I felt no hope to cure and not enough strong to go throught this situation, and so had some bit of suicide thoughts. I should go back home today.
I hope better days will come

 

[dlane2530]

Caminofrances, I have been practicing with anxiety for several months now using Claire Weekes' methods. I wonder if you should spend a few days starting with that before diving full-on into the TMS treatment. Anxiety is part of TMS for many and it is often a smokescreen for other things. Understanding anxiety is really helpful because than you can pass through the anxiety into the TMS work instead of getting stuck in the anxiety.

Once you have the means to respond to anxiety, it will still take some time to go away but you will start to see glimmers of hope -- good hours, periods of the day, even whole days, then weeks. Samuel Eddy has a wonderful series of short videos introducing how to practice with anxiety:

As many have said here, Claire Weekes is the gold standard for anxiety and is sort of a twin for TMS treatment. They go together and are, essentially, the same thing, but a little different.

Please don't lose hope. You may feel as though you are the only one to have been as low as you are now. Trust me, many of us have been there. And we are recovering. And some of us have already recovered!

 

[Caminofrances]

Dlane2530,
Thank you very much for you message, truly.
You gave me hope and reminded me that I am not alone on this way, and that is certainly the best thing to offer in this siutation (to me, at last).
I have listen one of the book of Claire Weekes (the first on your link). Her face, the voice and her messages are really comforting and reassuring.
Soon, I will listen more of Samuel Eddy.
If you can tell more about the idea of "smokescreen" and/or how it is a bit same but different of TMS, I would be interested in.
Anyway, thank you.
And by the way, I saw that you writed about Santiago de Compostela. I have walked on the way one week last spring, and it was (surprisingly to me) one of the best experiences of my life.

 

[dlane2530]

I am walking the last 115 km of the Camino Frances next month! So of course, I love your "name" here.
Re: smokescreen, sometimes we use one emotion or sensation to defend ourselves from feeling another. I've witnessed this in my children many times. I have one child who becomes angry so that she doesn't have to feel sad, for example. Dr. Sarno saw TMS as the body creating physical symptoms to distract us so we would not feel our rage or other strong feelings. Anxiety can fill the same role -- our body gives us fear when it senses that we are on the brink of facing past traumas or other strong feelings, for example.
I do think Dr. Weekes is also correct, though, about sensitization. Basically, the nervous system becomes so overwhelmed by stress that it sees danger/stress everywhere. Accepting anxious symptoms without engaging in further fear about them (she calls this second fear) teaches the body that these sensations are safe. We can practice the same way with other emotions...and of course with chronic pain.
As Samuel Eddy says, "This is unpleasant, but it is not serious. So we an allow it and go on with our day."
For me, anxiety peaked right as I was making great progress in trauma therapy. Then came the chronic pain symptoms. Both were my brain's effort to protect me from revisiting trauma and changing my behavior to reflect reality instead of danger.