dizziness

I'm glad you found my response supportive.

With physical injuries, what I’ve found helpful to remember is that most fractured bones heal in roughly 6–12 weeks, muscle strains in a few weeks, and more severe ligament tears in months up to around a year, depending on severity. So if pain lingers long after those typical tissue-healing windows, it is very reasonable to explore brain–body factors rather than assuming something is still badly injured. This segues into what you say here...

... which imo is indeed a good example of the brain automatically causing you to guard. However, what I would say is to be cautious about dwelling on labels like ‘bad posture’, because they can paint a vivid picture in the mind that feels permanent. Sure, take their advice as to how you can improve the strength of your right side as the guarding has caused an imbalance... but treat those labels as temporary patterns rather than fixed defects causing symptoms. For example, I was told that my lower back pain was due to narrowed, dried out discs combined with an exaggerated curvature of my spine in my lumbar region causing me bad posture and strain, causing me muscle pain. However, these days I don't have that pain anymore, yet I still have the narrowed, dried out discs and exaggerated curvature of my spine; the only thing that's changed is that I've been using techniques to calm my fearful brain.

 

The posture thing is something that I feel in my body, it’s since 1983 that I actively avoid bearing weight or sitting on the right side to avoid the pain. I cannot lift my right leg like the left one and there is some damage to the femoral nerve. It is very clear to me that avoidance of the pain on the right side has caused this extreme difference between the two sides of the body. Plus with the car accident I had a brain hematoma which caused me to lose the sense of touch completely in the whole right side of my body, which eventually came back to almost 95% after two years, as the hematoma got absorbed. Also my right psoas was cut during surgery in an attempt to remove a giant mass that was glued to it, so that may be also cause for the weakness of the right leg.
So glad to hear you don’t have the lower back pain anymore!

 

Psoas heal. The physical body heals and recovers.
The mind, however because of all you’ve been through is probably not quite caught up to the fact you’ve physically healed. Like you mention: our body can reflect habits of the mind as it remembers the physical mental and emotional pain and trauma which is stacked upon all the other we have had and have often hidden in our lives in an effort to carry on.
The body keeps score.

 

@emmastath Thank you for sharing your background story; I am so sorry that you went through so much trauma. In this regard, @Cactusflower has already said (above) exactly what I was going to write in reply.

 

I do believe in the mechanism you just described so well. I have experienced it. The problem is that it is not consistent perhaps because the variables change. I know the mind can heal, but I also know that many times what we think was the mind was actually the body that healed itself, which it would have done anyways, whether we involved the mind or not. When I got that monster mass in the abdomen, I did practice Qi-Gong to help my body heal and in fact 3 months later the mass that the surgeons had not been able to remove had disappeared and they were baffled. However one of the two surgeons said that what happened wasn’t a miracle but that because they did manage to remove a very large fibroid - but not the other mass- that was pressing on the iliac vein, that cut the feed to the giant hemangioma so it started clotting and eventually disappeared. So whether I did qi-gong, mental healing or not, the result would have been the same. The problem with all those theories is that they are partly true, the mind can actually heal, but not every time and not everything, and the key is to be able to differentiate between what is and what is not possible.

I do find Sarno’s concept very interesting and hopeful, but somehow incomplete as far as these questions go.For example, I don’t think the repressed emotions are necessarily rage, they may be fear, dissociation, or may be caused by ones genetic nervous system nature, we’re all different. In that light am not so sure focusing narrowly on repressed emotions may be helpful for everyone, but learning to recognize the sensation of tension in the body may be more useful and then pay attention to what thoughts or feelings may come with it, so as to be able to ‘read’ oneself and one’s body in a practical way. Insisting on telling people to look for repressed emotions or trauma, may push some people away because they cannot relate to that, but they could potentially learn to recognize the sensation of tension in their body and go from there into their emotions and state of mind. Some sort of biofeedback monitor would be very helpful I think to achieve that. I sure would love something that could help me realize the tension in my body.

It’s not that people may not want to heal, everybody wants to heal and get rid of the pain, and i believe hidden rewards for being sick or suffering, even though valid, are not that common for the majority of people, other things may be going on, like communication problems with doctors due to language barriers for example. I’ve seen a lot of immigrants ending up disabled not because they want the benefits but because they cannot communicate well with the doctors and the doctors dismiss them, are suspicious of them and blacklist them. Women are also ‘discriminated’ against in a similar way because of the stereotype of the ‘hysteric’ female for example. The result being delayed healing or chronic problems from something that was initially minor. If patients do not feel believed and respected, I think there’s a negative vicious cycle that is created that prevents healing. Many people are being told it is all in their head, and kicked out the door. That creates even more resistance. These people don’t respond well to bodymind theories, they tend to stick to their guns and resist the idea, exactly because they don’t feel believed and they’re in a battle to prove they’re telling the truth. All these psycho-social factors play a tremendous role in whether a person heals well or at all. That’s why I think we have to be very careful on how we talk to someone about this because their issue may or may not be possible to heal with TMS work and they may need more diagnostic tests instead.

That’s why I think we should start with ‘I believe you’, ‘your pain is real’ as Sarno says, to prevent the defensive reaction that causes even more tension, and focus more on learning/teaching the skill to recognize tension in one’s body - perhaps with the help of a biofeedback system- and then gently guide people into the exploration of their thoughts/sensations/emotions while doing this. Perhaps hypnosis might be helpful with that?I don’t know. The important thing is for the person to learn how to recognize TMS, manage to associate it with whatever is there in their psyche and learn how to release it and eventually trigger the healing process.

 

I do think rage is a part of it, but the rage can definitely cover other emotions. I saw a talk by Dr. Schubiner who explained that Sarno saw a lot of back pain in his practice but that over the years, Schubiner has seen an increase in other symptoms in patients for a few years, and then it shifts: popularity of complaints for a few years might be fibro, then it shifts and carpel tunnel is more "popular" in patients. Interesting. He also reports a significant shift in "popularity" of emotions like sadness etc. as the main emotion he sees people struggle with. So you are absolutely right, there is not one emotion. People are complex. You can have rage and sadness at the same time. Nobody had ever explained this to me before - I was totally unaware of the idea of having multiple emotions at one time (and I was a trained counselor!)
I also think you are right on about the lack of holistic medicine in the West. I guess that goes with the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. Heck, we've also narrowed it down to each individual body part by having specialists so specialized they can't focus on anything but their singular specialty eg. a podiatrist ... Of course it has it's place, but I think it's also a hindernace, isn't it - no ability to see the person as a whole beyond a foot.

Incidentally - I tried biofeedback and it didn't work at all for me. I could ace the entire process yet still be completely tied up in anxious knots - and boy, was it expensive! Hypnosis isn't very successful for TMS. The most helpful things are EMDR (which integrates the mind and body), Family Systems and Dr. Schubiner and his collegues is practicing another form of psychotherapy that is proving quite successful (but very few people are practicing it yet). Somatic Therapy (which is also very underutilized in the US) is another wonderful therapy that combines mental health with relaxation techniques and is very much in the mind/body holistic person camp. If you have not yet watched any of the films from Live Wild, I highly suggest them: https://www.livewildfilms.com/ Love Heals is the story of one of the film makers who, after having a high pressure career and a high pressure personality suffered from chronic pain. It continued after operations. Then she met Dr. Hanscom who encouraged her incredible and very unique journey to healing. She still has pain, but no longer has chronic anxiety and a small life. Ends up she suffered childhood trauma that was completely repressed. She eventually found her sadness but it took awhile, and some really unique therapeutic (or connecting and feeling safe with a therapist) methods to finally find the rage. It helped her move on to form this partnership in film and leave her high pressured job behind and seek out ways to feel more whole. Her journey is beautiful and I can't wait to get to Sedona to try standing on a mountain top!

 

Yes, emotions can be so complex, and the hardest part is to find a therapist that will help the client to realize they can feel both anger and love at the same time towards someone, usually parents, and to feel OK with it and own it, not as something negative, but as a result of the dynamics of the relationship and of what happened in their early days. Also, some people feel negative emotions towards their parents without the parents having been inherently ‘bad’. I think the crucial thing is to stop the blame and accusations and look at things like cold facts in a story.Nobody’s perfect after all. Of course cases of abuse etc are a completely different story.

Thank you for sharing about your experience with the biofeedback. I haven’t had it. I tried psychotherapy for over 12 years, hypnosis and A.R.T. which is similar to EMDR. I found hypnosis the most helpful. It helped me get over a 3 year long agoraphobia with panic attacks in a month! ART was also quite interesting in that it produced so many and clear realizations! Talk therapy has done absolutely NOTHING for me! Body psychotherapy with movement was very effective on the other hand. I’d like to try somatic therapy by the way.

Am now in Ch 4 of the ‘Divided mind’ by Sarno.I still think doing this work with a Sarno informed therapist would be the best option.