Day 9 Day 9 & 10 - A bit of relapsing

So Sunday night despite trying not to be afraid of my pain, leaning into it and trying to acknowledge, ask myself what rage or fear do I have and sit with it, I ended up getting this migraine I couldn't shake and took my Sumatriptan medication so I could comfortably get to bed.

Part of me started beating myself up about it, then I acknowledged I shouldn't put so much pressure on myself. I just got frustrated that I seemed to be doing better and got a migraine and couldn't understand what unconscious rage or fear I had going on to determine this.

This kind of led into yesterday/today where I had more head pressure, ear crackling, dizziness, and really bad post-nasal drip/phlegm developing due to allergies being bad in my area. I keep acknowledging and accepting and catching myself when I put too much pressure on myself, but started going down a path that I think I have a sinus infection and want my ENT to do a CT on my post-surgery 12 week check in on Friday and googling chronic sinusitis symptoms and then caught myself and stopped. I think it really came out of frustration and lack of discipline with outcome independence, so I'm trying to work through that but it's hard and I recognize it takes time.

I have been sleeping much better and managing the anxiety/fear of pain, boredom, etc. so much better, but it has not been easy. Today the pain has lessened a bit and I know in my mind I can still go out and do all normal activities with these headaches/head pressure, but find it very difficult to keep telling myself to stop waiting for an end result/set day! I feel like I have really brought up all the past emotions/rage I have been feeling over the years this past week and unsure where to go from here with digging deeper into them.

Things I am trying my best to do:
- acknowledge the pain and don't judge it or try to get rid of it, just see its there and don't avoid it
- stop putting so much pressure on myself when i get a headache/head pressure and deem it a relapse or that I'm never getting better or get overly frustrated and start to panic
- don't let the fear of head pressure/pain hold me back from anything
- not google symptoms

Does anyone have any other tips for me?

 

Looking at where you're at in the SEP, I think it was pretty close to the same time that I really started exploring my past emotions as a very young child, and learned how to nurture that young child, the way we all want our mothers to continue nurturing us.

During the writing exercises, I would find myself listening to my brain trying to convince me to NOT write certain things down that popped into my head - typically because they were too embarrassing/shameful/guilty - but I could "hear" my internal dialogue, saying "oh, that's not really important, don't bother writing it down". It was hard, but I forced myself to write them down anyway, as much as I didn't want to.

Of course, I knew I had to explore those in the followup phase of the exercises, which again, I really did not want to do. But it was very freeing to finally do so. I didn't uncover anything earth-shattering. There were no big revelations, but I did explore some of my childhood fears and anxieties, which allowed me to go back further, and that's where I finally experienced myself as a very young child - maybe four or five years old. I was very surprised to discover just how awkward and isolated I felt at that age, and putting together the bits and pieces of our family history, I was able to figure out that I got a lot of very anxious attention from my 30-year-old first-time mom (who'd had a miscarriage), for the first year and a half, until my brother was born, followed by two more kids - which of course totally changed the family dynamics, and left me kind of on my own, since I was, of course, a "good" girl. Not only did I have to grow up, like we all do (and Freud is probably not wrong when he theorizes that this alone is a cause of lifetime rage) but I also quickly lost at least 75% of my parents' attention very early on - a completely normal occurrence - but how can it not affect the oldest children in a large family?

So here I am - I had a pretty good, quite normal and functional childhood, with two parents who loved and cared for us. We didn't have any big traumas or family deaths - not even of the three grandparents that I knew. And yet I've spent a lifetime dealing with chronic anxiety, and, looking back of course, TMS symptoms off and on all my life, until they became overwhelming and debilitating the year I turned 60 (in 2011).

I believe that in my case, my mother's excessive anxiety (married late (for that time), miscarriage at 28, an only child with no experience of small children and a first-time mom at 30), was the cause of my excessive anxiety. My father was a classic perfectionist, and I can see now also suffered from anxiety, and in his case, a not particularly functional childhood (I suspect his unsuccessful father may have suffered from fetal alcohol brain damage, and his mother was a cranky old bitch - and not a very good grandmother).

Anyway - long story short, this is an illustration of how far back you can (and probably should) go to experience your youngest possible self, and the emotions, fears, insecurities, and rage felt by that youngest self. I found it really useful, and eventually very freeing. This also illustrates how someone who has not experienced trauma, neglect, or abuse, can still end up with debilitating symptoms of TMS.

And let's be clear: anyone who HAS experienced any of those dysfunctions in childhood - or even something as non-life-threatening as a judgmental or controlling parent, is going to have a harder time with TMS than those of us with loving parents.

Also, this s*** can go back for generations, so it can't hurt to examine the upbringings of your own parents.

 

Thank you for this post, JanAtheCPA! This just sparked my thoughts to dig deep for my next post!