Do you think marijuana helps or hurts your TMS journey?

I have noticed that over time marijuana tends to turn me into someone who is less emotionally capable. I have the protection of being high and forgetful but it feels like over time it takes away from your emotional health. At least in the frequency that I use it sometimes which is daily and often.

I also notice an increase in symptoms or new symptoms begin as a result of trying to quit marijuana. I generally go through 3-4 days of insomnia and anxiety in trying to quit. Theres no option of weaning off to curtail those rebound symptoms either it seems. Its all or nothing.

For me, while I don't think I can resist using it at times due to emotional fatigue, I find that it worsens my resistance to stress and helps to further convince me that i'm dying when symptoms are present.

I know some use marijuana to help with neuropathic pain so i'm interested to see if anyone can relate to my experience or would pose an opposite experience. Maybe weed has helped someone to calm their minds and overcome TMS symptoms. Thanks

 

Good questions, @Bicepmuffins, which I can't answer, but I do want to warn you and others to be alert for spammers, who troll the web for this topic. If someone new submits a post that seems "off" just hit the Report link, and a moderator will review and monitor it. They usually post once, and then come back later to edit their post with a hyperlink, hoping to avoid detection, I guess. We count on our community to keep our forum free from scams and spam!

 

Although... I said I couldn't answer, but I would in fact encourage you to try a keyword search and see what comes up, because it's certainly been discussed here before, and often mentioned as something given up by people reporting on their successful recoveries from symptoms.

My general impression from past discussions is that people do not find it useful if they try it specifically for TMS symptoms, while quite a few others who already use it find, as you're perhaps experiencing, that it gets in the way of doing the work effectively. Which makes sense, because anything which is designed to change your perceptions is pretty much going to act as a distraction, and as we know, our brains use distractions to repress emotions.

I smoked whatever passed for pot back in the 60s, when it did almost nothing, and did not care for the altered state it induced when I tried it off and on in the decades following, and that includes today's very controlled edibles, even trying the different types. But I'm also the one who likes many types of alcohol, while wishing it wasn't alcoholic, for the same reason - I don't care for the altered state of mind. Probably a control thing . It certainly made me a cheap date back in the day...

 

Why not look not into why you smoke and what happens when you try and quit?
You use it do to “emotional fatigue” but it makes you paranoid and vulnerable to the emotional feelings which induce stress. Because it IS our emotions that induce stress... yet you are looking for emotional reprieve.
Emotional fatigue from what and why? Is it a fatigue or are you trying to run from thoughts and emotions because of how they make you feel about yourself? Tms work can help you examine this, open and soften yourself to these thoughts and feelings and realize you are ok, and that emotions are normal, and pass quickly. It’s thoughts and patterns that stick around (but can change).
What happens to your thoughts when you try and quit? You try to quit and stop sleeping and get anxious. What if that wasn’t a physical reaction? What if your thoughts created these things? What do you say to yourself about quitting or why you use?

Absolutely no judgement here, but sometimes we do things for reasons we are afraid to face. They become internally powerful when they inherently really don’t hold much power.

 

My personal belief is that marijuana is known to induce feelings of paranoia and that is the last thing that anyone with TMS should want induced. We are already having subconscious paranoia of a sorts. I don't think exacerbating that would be useful.
In addition, marijuana creates a sense of ambivalence and I view that as ultimately further pushing down the feelings of anger and other emotions that we've tucked away that need to surface.

 

I find that the altered state is really helpful when I’m stuck with a lot of negative thoughts. rapid perspective change has been a useful tool for me in getting to know myself better . But I understand not liking being your best self either

 

I often feel a general sense of malaise and a lack of real interest in things. Weed helps make things interesting. Like if my friends drink to loosen up, weed does that for me. But if I do it regularly it starts to suck my soul out over time.

This last time I started smoking weed because my dad died and I my family was smoking weed together and it was a stressful environment. It was easier to smoke in order to sleep in new environments and stuff like that.

Also, when I’m sober the workweek tends to exhaust and depress me a little and I tend to avoid meditation after work because I’m too tense to be responsible. I have social anxiety about my biweekly 9am 1 on 1 with my boss which has been much better for me with a wake and bake. Idk, if I’m sober too long I start becoming bored and feel boring. I have problems lol

I quit weed often. I get insomnia, anxiety and nausea as a rebound with new or worsening tms symptoms. This current tms experience started from a weed rebound. After quitting I feel better for a while and over the course of days and weeks,the accumulated feeling of something missing draws me back to using weed only sometimes. But it’s hard to only sometimes

 

That’s true. It does allow you to stuff down the bad feelings and essentially ignore them for as long as you’re high. Thoughtful reply thank you

 

I'd say that you aren't really looking into the real reasons behind your need for weed "I'm bored" - is a pretty surface "reason". TMS work is about the willingness to look deeper, to face the fears that our symptoms and repression are hiding from our conscious mind. Plus there's all the contradiction to your message. I smoked because it's easier to sleep...but when I smoke I get insomnia. Take your time to really think about this, beyond intellectualizing and the "stories" - take days, ponder it (without pressure), with curiosity. It's pretty much like asking someone why they binge eat. "Because I feel like it sometimes" or "I get hungry" is frequent answer, and we all know, there is always more to it than that.
I also think Booble is right. I have a family member who is a pot head and totally paranoid.

 

I think you're right. I think I haven't completed my work. I think I just realized tonight that my TMS has extended further back than I thought and that it causing multiple other problems in my body that I never considered were TMS until tonight. I think I thought I beat TMS and think now that I only just started to find its inception. I will work on quitting and also start spending more time in deep contemplation.

Smoking does help me with insomnia. I used to think it slowly made it worse as the tolerance grew but what was happening is I would start withdrawing in the night during sleep and wake throughout the night sweating and emotional. Insomnia was often the reason I started smoking after quitting but it wasn't this last time. This last time was because it made my experience around my family better and more emotionally relaxed when I visited for fathers funeral and then after that it became a physical/ emotional dependency and after that, it helped me to forget I had pain sometimes bc of the bad short term memory. Ive grown more paranoid over the past few months since starting. The paranoia replaces my sane baseline but I am not completely lost in it. However, based on the fact that I have stayed in TMS and that the withdrawals give me new symptoms is probably enough evidence its not helping in the long run.

 

A sure sign that it's a crutch which is never a good thing. Though very understandable.
I'm very sorry about your dad. I lost both parents not too long ago one after another. When my dad was diagnosed I was a bit of a wreck and the idea of having to go to a funeral was terrifying. The odd thing, at least for me, was that the anticipation and thinking and worrying about how I was going to feel was actually worse than the reality.