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dizziness

Yes it does sound the same. This all started 7 months ago. I felt totally spaced out with major brainy fog. It honestly felt like I was recovering from a stroke or something. I didn't feel like myself. But I also got a lot of migraines and still do. They have reduced significantly but when I do get them I feel like they are deep within my ear. When I don't get them, I am dizzy and especially dizzy when I move my head around. That's why it's so weird. Ok, I understand having a migraine can make you dizzy but not having a migraine and still being dizzy? I also have extreme sensitivity to loud noise and my eyes have changed too. I have light sensitivity and when I am in the aisle in a grocery store, it's just hell. It's like I'm on a psychedelic drug or something in terms of the funny things my eyes do. But at the same time, anxiety also can cause light sensitively and ear changes and I know I have anxiety.

I am leaving on a trip on Friday without my kids . I have a 16 months old that I feel terrible leaving for only 4 days. This thing is revving up because 1. I am scared to be dizzy while away and 2. I have extreme guilt. But im also depressed because during all of this, I also have bppv and had the true spinning which is so traumatizing.
 
sacolucci23 said:
But wouldn't migraine also fall under TMS?
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You are in luck! Migraines were Dr. Sarno's very own symptom that lead to his TMS theory. A colleague of his tipped him off that they were psychosomatic. Do some research in the books or search or google Dr. Sarno and migraines and see what you find.
 
sacolucci23 said:
But at the same time, anxiety also can cause light sensitively and ear changes and I know I have anxiety.
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Yep, I've had all of that and sometimes still do.

The BPPV is distressing, because it is so bloody disorienting, and frightening. I just remembered something - my brother was diagnosed with BPPV at one point, and he was advised, in addition to doing the Epley maneuver, to take an aspirin, which he said really helped. I am also reminded of an article I read a few years ago, about how taking a simple OTC pain reliever can easy psychological pain and distress along with physical pain and distress. I had a colleague a couple of years ago who suddenly experienced sudden and frightening dizziness - I suggested she take a Tylenol or an ibuprofen (I forget which, I don't think it matters) and she felt significantly better in a short time.

I'm not sure if this remains effective in the long run, but if it can help you get back on track in the short run, that's something. I still say you're going to have to do the psychological work - that's what will work in the long run to banish TMS.

Good luck

Jan
 
JanAtheCPA said:
Gosh, this sounds familiar, sacolucci. Back in 2011, I went to a dizziness and balance clinic where I was tested for every possible cause of my dizziness/foggy head/off-balance, etc. Only to be told by a young woman at least thirty years younger than me, that my balance was better than hers. At this point I had a session with the head PT/owner who said, literally, the following: "When we see people like you ("we can't find anything wrong") our diagnosis is an irritated vestibular system. I would like you to try the migraine diet and see if that helps, because my theory is that you might be a migraineur".

Don't you think that "Migraine Associated Vertigo" and "migraine vestibulopathy" just sound like different names for the same thing I was told?

If they were being truthful, they would just call it "We Have No F***ing Idea".

But anyway, that night I went home and researched migraine diets on the internet. I found a forum where they were all talking about their migraines and their diets and NONE OF IT MADE ANY SENSE. There was absolutely no pattern or consistency, and many people said silly things like how they could eat cheese and chocolate but they couldn't eat avocados, for crying out loud (I am not making this up - someone claimed that she only got migraines when she ate avocados). I was already well-versed in the power of the placebo effect, and I kept visualizing **Placebo Effect** in big neon letters as I read these posts. The only post that I took seriously was someone who recommended reading The Divided Mind (Dr. Sarno's fourth and final book) and that's what I did, and that's how I got at least 90% of my life back in relatively short order (feel free to read my Profile story for all the details and list of symptoms I had).

That being said - the vague dizziness is the one symptom that keeps coming back to bug me. I totally forget about it when I'm busy and distracted, but it often comes back quite consistently in certain situations, which can only be the result of brain memory. The difference between now and then is that it's mostly quite manageable, and, more importantly, I really don't fear it (Claire Weekes helped a lot with that as well as with my chronic life-long anxiety). It's an annoyance, and if it gets too persistent over a period of time, I will sit down with pen and paper, and I'll do some writing exercises that I remember from the SEP. And practice some mindfulness and try to relax and breathe more.



All of you - I highly recommend doing at least one of our programs, because if you're all struggling this much, you need to do the deeper emotional work - knowledge alone isn't enough. The Structured Educational Program (SEP) is on the main tmswiki.org site, and Alan Gordon's Pain Recovery Program is here on the forum.

Jan
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Thanks Jan, I think you are right.

I had such quick, almost overnight, success with pretty much eliminating all my carpal tunnel-like symptoms. I couldn't understand why I couldn't apply the same logic to the floaty feeling. But I think it's a much bigger challenge and will involve some 'deep work'. I started the SEP, did 6 days and then fell into classic 'It's not helping, it's never going to work' thought processes. I know I need to stick with it and give it time.

I will start again, thank you for your advice. x
 
colls100 said:
Thanks Jan, I think you are right.

I had such quick, almost overnight, success with pretty much eliminating all my carpal tunnel-like symptoms. I couldn't understand why I couldn't apply the same logic to the floaty feeling. But I think it's a much bigger challenge and will involve some 'deep work'. I started the SEP, did 6 days and then fell into classic 'It's not helping, it's never going to work' thought processes. I know I need to stick with it and give it time.

I will start again, thank you for your advice. x
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Do you feel dizzy when you turn head? I get dizzy looking left or right or if I move my head too quickly.
 
"The TMS diagnosis and treatment protocol are not accepted by the mainstream medical community because they don't comply with the standards of evidence-based medicine. Critics in mainstream medicine state that neither the theory of TMS nor the effectiveness of the treatment has been proven in a properly controlled clinical trial. Considering the application of the TMS diagnosis to phenomena of migraine aura, more specific objections can be made. From a neuropsychiatric viewpoint, Sarno's notion of TMS is modelled after Sigmund Freud's doctrine of conversion, a defence mechanism whereby emotional stress is repressed and "converted" into physical symptoms (Freud and Breuer, 1895). However, in migraine with aura, stress just acts as trigger or precipitating factor, not as cause. Migraine is not a psychological or psychiatric disease but one which results from biological and physiological alterations. Therefore, Sarno's interpretation of migraine aura in terms of a conversion disorder, and its expansion to include persistent aura, have to be rejected from a neuropsychiatric point of view. Moreover, as Sarno has included lack of known physical cause among the diagnostic criteria of TMS, the making of this diagnosis to explain either transitory or persistent migraine aura phenomena can be rejected on the grounds of Sarno's own diagnostic criteria, as the neurological disorder migraine with aura has to be considered as a known physical cause which is an exclusion criterion for TMS."
​
---> I don't buy this. Migraine is TMS like many other disorders.
 
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sacolucci23 said:
Do you feel dizzy when you turn head? I get dizzy looking left or right or if I move my head too quickly.
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In order to recover, I believe it's really important to stop obsessing about details and differences. "Dizziness" covers a lot of different sensations, and the fact is that every single type or sensation of dizziness can have EITHER a physiological/pathological cause, OR it can be caused by your primitive fearful brain as a function of TMS.

Worrying about the particular type of dizziness that you have, and trying to compare it to the type or types that someone else has, is not a good use of your time or energy! If you are worried about your dizziness, you must have it checked out by an appropriate health professional.

If that person can't find anything wrong, then your next step is to assume it's TMS. And if it's TMS, the best advice I can give you is to train yourself to just use "dizziness" as a very generic term, and leave it at that. I tend to say "vague dizziness" since I don't want people to waste time asking me if I have vertigo. Not that it matters!
 
JanAtheCPA said:
In order to recover, I believe it's really important to stop obsessing about details and differences. "Dizziness" covers a lot of different sensations, and the fact is that every single type or sensation of dizziness can have EITHER a physiological/pathological cause, OR it can be caused by your primitive fearful brain as a function of TMS.

Worrying about the particular type of dizziness that you have, and trying to compare it to the type or types that someone else has, is not a good use of your time or energy! If you are worried about your dizziness, you must have it checked out by an appropriate health professional.

If that person can't find anything wrong, then your next step is to assume it's TMS. And if it's TMS, the best advice I can give you is to train yourself to just use "dizziness" as a very generic term, and leave it at that. I tend to say "vague dizziness" since I don't want people to waste time asking me if I have vertigo. Not that it matters!
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Thank you for this. I've been checked out. I've had an MRI, CT scan, detailed blood work, ear tests and all is normal. it makes sense not to focus on it as that is the point of TMS in the first place
 
sacolucci23 said:
Do you feel dizzy when you turn head? I get dizzy looking left or right or if I move my head too quickly.
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I'm by no means a TMS expert, but my first instinct (before I read Jan's reply) was that it probably won't help either of us to compare the details of our dizzy feelings. Ironically, I was doing okay(ish) with it before I knew about TMS. Then I got the carpal tunnel thing, found out about TMS and cured the hand pain.

But since then I have felt the dizzy feeling get worse because I have been focusing so much on it. That's the most frustrating thing about my journey so far. That it's actually temporarily making the dizziness worse. But I know that's because I am thinking more about it. And I need to push through.

My point is that we can't worry too much about the specifics of our dizziness. That just increases our focus and solidifies it's purpose as a distraction from what is really going on.

If you're anything like me, you probably have some level of health anxiety now. And it feels like sitting around worrying and thinking and researching and monitoring every change and symptom of it will help. And is somehow productive because if you're not paying it attention how will you ever fix it or find a 'cure'? That's why TMS is so effective, because the opposite is true.

You (and me both) need to keep switching our focus to the EMOTIONS. And disregard the physical. If the dizzies were going to hurt us, they would have done by now. And the other worry, that they're going to last forever, is exactly what is causing the FEAR that is the ultimate distraction. As I said, I'm not a TMS expert, but I'm beginning to understand the concept pretty well. It's just the putting it into practice that I struggle with.

Like you, I've had every test under the sun and there's nothing wrong with me. This has to be our answer :)
 
Walt Oleksy (RIP 2021) said:
My subconscious mind has stopped the back pain
but now I feel some vertigo and dizziness.

Sarno says on page 142 of HEALING BACK PAIN
that TMS can cause "dizziness (often)."

So that's what's going on.
Anyone else suffer from this?
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Hi, for me dizziness sometimes comes with fainting/collapsing. As I have Dysautonomia and sometimes drops of BP when standing, it is hard to tell whether it’s related to stress/anxiety or it’s physical. General lightheadedness for me is triggered by eating sweets, carbs on empty stomach, certain foods and certain chemicals as well as barometric changes.
Having said that, I noticed that during the 2 weeks latest lumbago - lower back pain spasm- while in excruciating pain and in bed obviously, I didn’t feel dizzy, nor for the 2 subsequent weeks when trying to walk again. I think what they say about ‘energy goes where attention goes’ is somehow true. The body cannot deal with many things at once it prioritizes. So perhaps when the back pain subsides the other problems are felt more again?
 
@emmastath This is an old thread from back in 2017 and very sadly Walt (to whom you have replied) passed away in 2021.
emmastath said:
while in excruciating pain and in bed obviously, I didn’t feel dizzy, nor for the 2 subsequent weeks when trying to walk again. I think what they say about ‘energy goes where attention goes’ is somehow true. The body cannot deal with many things at once it prioritizes.
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Either it has to prioritise or it simply doesn't need more than one symptom if a single symptom is doing the job.... In Dr Sarno's view our brain's aim is to divert our attention and keep it diverted to a symptom (or symptoms) to stop us from expressing anger because it perceives expressing our anger to be potentially dangerous to our wellbeing and survival (e.g. raging at our boss and possibly hitting them on the nose could risk us getting hit back, and losing our job and stability).

Same goes for our brain being fearful and feeling unsafe in the modern world because our brain remains primitive in respect to interpreting modern day stressors and stresses (e.g. being stuck in traffic, work deadlines etc) as if they are lions and tigers about to attack us.... If just one severe symptom is doing its job by keeping us housebound or bedridden and away from those stressors, then job done, our brain can drop the other (perhaps more minor) symptoms it was created. (Sometimes the brain doesn't drop those though... I was rendered bedridden by extremely severe buttock and back muscle pain and my brain only dropped one of a myriad of symptoms that I was experiencing at the time; my brain well and truly wanted me to be 'hobbled' from going out into the big, bad, dangerous world!)
 
BloodMoon said:
@emmastath This is an old thread from back in 2017 and very sadly Walt (to whom you have replied) passed away in 2021.
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I am so sorry about Walt. :-(

For the rest of the reply, at some level I agree, but I still have many questions regarding how the whole system works. I am saying this despite the fact of having grown up in a family that believed in psychosomatic illness and the subconscious mechanisms that may produce the sumptoms of illness or even accidents. For me it went a bit too far and into negative magic thinking and didn’t make sense really. For example when I had an accident at school and three thoracic compression fractures which landed me in hospital for a week and a body cast for 3 months, I couldn’t understand my father telling me “so you did all this for not to have to go back to Greece?”, we were living in Belgium at the time temporarily.His theory was that because I didn’t want to go back, my subconscious mind ‘provoked and accident to immobilize me’…

He believed the same for illness and muscle injuries like back pain, from which he suffered himself frequently. By the way I think he also had EDS. So in general, illness and accidents were seen as something deliberate that our minds create for x’y’z reasons. That didn’t make sense to me as a child, and I felt let down by him, especially because he didn’t really help me understand the whole thing, just dumped responsibility on me and the expectation that I should mae sense of it all. Well, I didn’t…

So, now, I find it very hard to revisit the same line of thinking, even though I do believe there is some truth to it, my problem is to be able to see where the line between reality and negative magical thinking is.
 
@emmastath
I hear how deeply invalidating and confusing it must have felt as a child to have your real accident (those thoracic fractures sound brutal) framed that way by your dad—like you subconsciously orchestrated it to avoid Greece. That's not just unhelpful; it dumps unfair responsibility on a kid already in pain and a body cast, and almost certainly fearful at some level, especially without real guidance. No wonder it left you wary of psychosomatic ideas.

That kind of thinking echoes Dr. Sarno's TMS theory, which drew heavily from Freud—positing repressed emotions (particularly rage) as the hidden driver of pain. It's a similar vibe as your dad's take: everything boils down to the unconscious, which can feel like "negative magic".

Modern neuroplasticity views, like pain reprocessing therapy (PRT), frame it as your brain's protective wiring amplifying pain through learned threat responses. Real injuries like yours happen, but ongoing symptoms can persist via stress-emotion loops without implying you "chose" them.

To protect my energy in these threads (past family dynamics hit close to home for me too, but in a different way), I'll keep it practical: if you haven't already, check out The Way Out by Alan Gordon. It's a straightforward workbook blending neuroscience with steps to rewire brain-driven pain—addressing doubt head-on without Freudian aspects.

The way I look at it is that, for whatever reason, the brain gets fearful, and my job is to help it feel safer. That simplification has worked for me—getting from bedridden and housebound to functioning pretty well by comparison.
 
BloodMoon said:
@emmastath
I hope am doing this right about replying to posts, if I understood right we need to cut the main text of the reply and keep the above reference?

Thank you so much BloodMoon for the reply, it made me feel understood. Yes, I too believe that after a main injury the bodymind may get stuck in protective mode and that may prevent healing/recovery.I have seen it happen to people I know and to myself to a great extent. It’s not a coincidence i think that most people who suffer some sort of accident, tend to associate it with the beginning of a chronic pain journey. Of course the injury itself may be the obvious cause but I think that protective brain mechanism is the one responsible for the -often- multitude of symptoms that seem to develop after an accident.

Thank you for reminding me of Alan Gordon’s book, I think I have it somewhere, but as I have a very bad memory I think I will read it again, as I did with Sarno’s book ‘Healing back pain’.Speaking of which I finally got to see the physio yesterday - I sustained a very severe back injury about 45 days ago- and I experienced tremendous relief from him working on my hip flexor and oblique on the right side - where the back pain is-and he explained to me that this was the result of a chronic issue of bad posture caused by pain guarding which caused me to virtually ‘inhabit’ the left side of my body since 1983 when I had a very bad car accident. Apparently my whole left side has become much stronger and the right very weak and much more hypermobile so my muscles work overtime to keep it together, which explains the incredibly tight hip flexor and obliques on that side.

Well, couldn’t get a clearer example of the mess caused by a brain guarding against pain, could I?
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Hmm, no, this does not look right, Emma. You don't want to insert your text inside the quoted text. Just make sure your cursor is on a new blank line before typing. You did it right when you responded about Walt.
 
I have no idea what you're referring to because I don't see any changes. Do you want me to just fix that post where you are trying to respond to BloodMoon? If I do that I'll remove these last posts between you and me, which will be out of context.
 
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