The video is good: it explains everything that happens, why chronic pain exists, and the various symptoms the brain can generate. But at the end, it mentions that the fastest way to heal is simply to live the best life possible, and that seems a bit simplistic to me.
He said it's the "quickest" way but that doesn't mean necessarily 'fast'! Your recovery will be quicker if you get on with your life as best you can despite your symptoms, finding little bits of joy where you can, like the example he gave of the woman who at the beginning of her road to recovery could only move her hands so she decided to enjoy dancing her fingers to music, and from there she gradually did more and more things and fully recovered.
And, if you remember from the video, he actually says that the recovery process is simple but hard to do. One of the reasons it's hard is because
we get in our own way — despairing, catastrophising, doubting the symptoms are mind/body, etc. We believe our scary thoughts, but, as Dr Schubiner says in the video, what we need to understand is that our thoughts are not really
our thoughts, they are our brain's— they’re what the brain is throwing at us. He says,
"if you can begin to step back from your thoughts and see that your thoughts are driving reactions in your body... that is an amazing process that is sometimes the key to getting past this."
Getting on with our life as best we can despite our symptoms is what Dr Sarno advised as well; it was his number one instruction — and that advice has helped and worked for thousands of people to recover!
I think that might apply more to manageable pain, but in the case of this constant and deep pain, I’m not sure how realistic that is.
It's completely realistic! My pain wasn't “more manageable pain” — it included "constant and deep pain" plus a load of other profoundly debilitating symptoms for good measure. I was totally bedridden for over 18 months because of it and housebound for many years. But, eventually, I found out about mind/body work and followed the advice to get on with my life as best I could despite the symptoms. I had to do it in 'baby steps' because my symptoms were so disabling... and now I’m no longer bedridden or housebound, and functioning really well. The success stories sub-forum has numerous other people on there who were badly affected by their symptoms.
I completely understand that when pain feels relentless, it’s easy to believe your case is different or somehow worse — I felt like that too at one point. But I learned that this belief itself keeps us feeling stuck.
No one with mind/body/TMS symptoms is an exception to getting better and losing their symptoms, even if it feels that way.
Dr. Hasma, like Pain Reprocessing Therapy, talks about a more direct way of unlearning pain: basically, not reacting to it with fear or emotions, but responding with a sense of safety. I think that approach feels a bit more useful to me.
Carry on listening to and taking notice of what Dr Hansma advises because he's great and also because Dr Schubiner is actually saying the same thing as Dr Hansma (Dr Schubiner is also a proponent of Pain Reprocessing Therapy, he says so in the video)... Throughout the video, Dr Schubiner actually says that in order to recover we have to show the brain we’re safe, because it thinks we’re not — it thinks we're in danger. And — guess what? — the major way to do that is by getting on with life as best we can despite the symptoms.
the brain can take an undetermined amount of time to change—it’s uncertain.
Yes, that’s true, none of us knows how long it will take. But we always have a choice about how to think about our situation — either negatively or with hope. If you keep on reminding yourself that it could take a long time, then what you focus on is likely to be what happens. Like I said in my other recent reply to you in another thread, thinking this way serves as an additional barrier or wall to get over on your recovery journey; in that respect it's you getting in your own way.
