Does everyone have a little TMS?

Curious if Sarno and the experts think that every human is susceptible to TMS? Are some of us just more prone to experiencing it's wrath? Do we all live with it to some degree and not even notice or understand it's influence? Is TMS or susceptibility to TMS genetic? Curious of people's thoughts...

 

I think that most of us think this is true, yes. It's a primitive brain mechanism which I think might have been designed to keep us on edge, on the alert and worried about danger, rather than wallowing in emotions and perhaps getting killed by that dangerous animal around the next rock. It worked okay when early humans didn't live very long - when our only job was to survive just long enough to breed and raise the next generation, and when the dangers were relatively few and very tangible (cold, starvation, and sabre-tooth tigers).

But in today's world? The mechanism does not serve us at all well. Not only is the world physically much safer for so many of us, not only do we live much longer, but we grow up having to plan to live much longer, which creates a whole set of intangible things to worry about. We start to worry very early on, and it never ends. By the end of our lives, we're worried about physical and mental disability, as we face the inevitability of our mortality. And throughout our lives we worry about having meaningful lives. I can tell you, primitive humans didn't do a lot of worrying about having meaningful lives - it was all about procreating and surviving, and life ended early.

It's well-known that many parts of our brains have not evolved much at all from the earliest primitive versions of Homo sapiens.

So you take the TMS mechanism and add in all the anxieties created by modern life, exacerbated in the last decades by massive information overload, population pressures, and real concerns about the future of the planet, and you've got the perfect recipe for TMS on overdrive.

I do think that there are people whose TMS is much worse than others, due to certain factors. Some of those would be a tendency towards clinical anxiety and depression, certainly anyone who experienced childhood trauma, abuse or neglect, and "inherited" TMS - by which I mean being raised by parents with TMS.

I think it's also important to understand that because this IS a normal (albeit primitive) brain mechanism, TMS is not something we can "cure" - but because it is a brain mechanism, and a primitive, unnecessary one at that, we absolutely can learn to control it, and especially learn to not give in to its goal to keep us in fear.

 

Awesome !!!!
Wise words to remember.