Does TMS Discriminate with Age?

Yeah, but I believe perfectionism and people pleasing don't just develop automatically and genetics are not too much of a factor,( parents have role in that tho but probably its more about what they teach you and not about "blood"). I think the underlying reason is low self-esteem. If you are a people pleaser you think deeply that you have to do something extra so people accept you and then you get some sort of satisfaction or temporary boost of self-esteem from that. Perfectionism is more like you have to prove something to yourself because you dont feel too valuable. I know people who are perfectionist because they want to impress other people so they feel better about themself- I am one of them too.

So people pleasing and perfectionism is only tip of the iceberg and means somewhere along the lines things happened in your life that you learned you arent't worth enough and should compensate.

Things like TMS happen for good reasons, they are distractions. I learned how much the pain and the efforst of finding the cure occupied 70% of my life.

And maybe you can't even name the events that caused you this kind of compensational behaviour cause you buried it deep inside yourself, or even if you know about it you probably don't give it too much weight. And boom you get the TMS.


I visualize it that everyone have a big bathtub and everytime something wrong happens bit of dirty water pours in it. Size of the bathtub depends on the individual (how much shit you can take in life) and the amount of dirty water that spills represents the size of the problem. There's a threshold where it breaks out from your bathtub and gives you symptoms. For a while you can just remove the stopper from the bathtub and drain the water and clean up the bathroom a bit- that's when people have very quick recoveries which can be immediate or takes a couple of days but they are fine. Other people let the dirty water to pour for years or decades. It contaminate the whole bathroom but with a bit of a cleanup you can still make your bathroom clean and nice- takes more time tho but you can still do it only yourself or with little help. And last case is when the water just flood everything and things in the house starts to rot. You can still restore your bathroom and house but you have to remove and change lots of things, taking out the stinky carpets and furnitures and changing them to new stuff, and maybe thinking about how can you minimize damage in the future in case it happens again. Its much harder, you may or may not capable of doing just yourself (therapy, self-helf groups, whatever).

 

That visualization is amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. That makes so much sense. And I didn't mention it in my original post but I actually am currently attending therapy (for over a month now) and I think I'm really starting to see some improvements.

 

I had my first TMS symptoms at age 4 when I had my first migraine headache. My migraines were definitely TMS and are gone now.

 

I'm so happy for you, Ellen!
Since I've started meditating again early in the am, my headaches are less frequent. I look forward to the day when I can banish them entirely!

 

Hi Jeremy-- I see you've gotten a lot of good feedback but I'll trow mine in too. I'm almost 24 now, I've had moderate to severe TMS symptoms for about 2 years now. (And now that I know about TMS, I can recognize other things in my childhood and teenage years that were probably TMS too.) So it isn't just older folks. And in Georgie Oldfield's book "Chronic Pain: Your Key to Recovery," (an alternative TMS book that is like Sarnos' books) she also uses examples of TMS patients' she has helped who were kids. So yes, definitely. You sound like a classic TMS sufferer, from all I've read. 3 years is a long time to live with pain (and the fear of pain, which is probably worse), but it is so good that you found your way here at a relatively young age. My advice is to follow the program and to regularly interact with the forum. When my pain comes back, I really find it helps to interact with people here, read their stories or watch videos. It can be really isolating because TMS is hard to explain, and maybe embarrassing. I avoid talking to most of my friends about it because I don't expect it to make sense to them. But it really, really helps to connect with a community that gets it: it help to keep it solidified in your brain that it's legitimate, if that makes sense.

 

Thank you so much for helping me out. I really appreciate you taking the time to write that. It's so nice to hear from others that share a similar experience to mine, that is, experiencing TMS at a younger age. I'm definitely going to look into the book from Georgie Oldfield, as I've constantly been looking for different books about TMS. I just finished "Pain Free for Life" by Dr. Scott Brady and It really spoke to me. It did a much better job of explaining TMS (or what he calls AOS - Autonomic Overload Syndrome) and he lays out a clear path to overcoming the syndrome. I highly recommend it if you haven'y read it already. Again, thank you so much for your support and advice.

 

Sarno stated that TMS tends to happen between the ages of 30 and 60 which are generally the most stressful years of human life, so you are probably a little young being 18 to have chronic pain ... but I'm sure it does happen.

 

Thank you for the recommendation! It can be so helpful to have informtation presented to you in a few different ways. I'm looking for that book on Amazon right now.