Entering healthy people world

I spent many years on pain forums and now that I feel good I spend time on exercise forums like r/ running or hybrid athlete. It blows me away how many healthy people there are. The chronic pain reddit has 131K people and r/running has 4.1M. On top of that if you've spent a lot of time in chronic pain reddit you will see only about half of people are severe - bed bound/disabled/very limited life. Many of them work because "they have to" (cause the reason disabled people don't work is they just don't feel like it. Not because of crippling pain. These two groups argue with each other in chronic pain reddit). The people in r/running are doing 25-70 miles per week. When they get a pain or issue they will rest a few days and if its not gone by then they are shocked. These are the lives of healthy people. They have no idea of the dark abyss of suffering that exists outside paradise island. It made me realize how extraordinarily rare it is to have debilitating symptoms. This is why people don't accept the high level of pain someone claims to be in. I just didn't think so many people were this healthy.

 

Those chronic pain support groups are the absolute worse in terms of being ruinous for mental health. They give the perception that no one gets better because the only people there are those stuck in the misery of their symptoms, those who got better often want to put such a terrible past behind them. I spent way too long in the abyss of those forums

and you are right regarding ‘healthy’ people, hopefully they never realize the despair that sets in when your lose your physical activity outlet. When I was healthy (lol I was never healthy, but when I wasn’t guarding my body and monitoring symptoms nonstop) I never appreciated or had gratitude to be able to do physical activities I loved. I used to dread exercise and would force myself to do it because i felt I had to, now I would be content to be able to do those same exercises.

your post is good reminder to show internal gratitude for what we CAN do.

 

Yea, the chronic pain reddit is awful. If someone posts a success story there it is often removed because it's considered gaslighting, ableist porn, invalidating peoples feelings, blaming people for their situation. If someone gets better from fibro or me/cfs or some condition that is deemed incurable then people say "you didn't really have that condition then." In other words, an incurable condition will always remain incurable because once someone is cured they didn't really have it. Even posting about psychological origins of conditions gets banned. They will say big pharma stops people from getting better but it's really themselves. It's why I don't feel sympathy when reading their posts. There's a percentage of people who are willing to do whatever it takes to get better and are open to mindbody work but I don't have the personality to deal with the vitriolic majority.

The appreciation for life is monumental after getting better. It's like being granted a second life and it's better than the first.

 

Oh boy does Reddit have a staunch skepticism and borderline hatred for mind body medicine. I remember when I was deep in the post vasectomy pain subreddit hell, I stumbled upon Sarno from a nice person there, which led to me searching the rest of Reddit for other people using his methods. A bunch of people going “well I have this condition so it won’t work for me” or. “My *insert X-rays, mri, lab work* shows I have this so that won’t work for me, you’re being insensitive.” And so on and so on. These people have been so medicalized, and when you grow up in a society that worships doctors and the modern medical model it’s not hard to see why they’re against anything that they perceive to be woo woo. Even though the concept of Mindbody medicine is not new, and if you mentioned ideas of Freud or Carl Jung or one of many who paved the path of modern psychology they lap up what they say, not realizing they were early proponents of mindbody medicine. Not to mention the concept of the mind and body being one system is an established idea in cultures throughout the world.

f*ck Reddit, haven’t been on that site since I started this journey 4 months ago, one of the best decisions I have made regarding my recovery. It’s time we as a society start holding these social media conglomerates responsible for the damage they are doing to be people via their shit algorithms and promoting of science that harms people or silencing science that helps people.

and f*ck modern medicine for its absolutely abject failure in managing this chronic pain crisis. Keep letting private equity swallow up every corner of medicine and keep people hooked on drugs and letting them die deaths of despair.

sickening

 

Yea, many people quit before they even start. You’ll be rewarded for putting effort into your life. I think about what the difference is between someone who decides to do this stuff vs the majority who don’t.

 

❤️fantastic!

 

It's weird. I know what you are saying where there are so many people that do so much physical activity and don't seem to have any pain or "issues." But I also see the other side where I know a lot of runners where there is the super heightened sense for anything that feels off, especially if they have been injured before. (Gonna vote a lot of them have TMS even if legit past injuries).

I unfortunately latched on to my memories of interacting with these people and their various problems and time off running and pain and surgeries... and it's been very negative for my own recovery even though I have such little injury or pain history prior to the past year or so.

It's very hard for me to access how I used to be about pain after running. I know I used to not care, but that person is so far gone. I try so hard to say to myself "would a normal person freak out about pain like this or just move on?" I know they would move on and that is why it does not linger.

I have a neighbor who is an ultramarathon runner. She has a running streak (ie has run every day) for like 5 years. She even ran a mile the day her youngest was born (after she was born she got on the treadmill). She has had sprained ankles and all sort of other things she just keeps running on. Not at all healthy either, but shocking the vastly different responses that someone can have to pain or perceived injury.

 

Definitely amazing the different responses and perceptions!
Even throughout my own life, I have changed so much regarding this. I used to not even give any of it a second thought and would just keep on keeping on! I went a several year streak as well, not all days running, but definitely walked multiple miles if I didn't run - rain, heat, whatever.
Fascinating to think about.

 

I think a lot of TMSers were like your neighbor though, myself included, self imposed pressure that we had to do something whether that’s exercise or something else. I can speak for myself that I always used to pressure myself to exercise, play sports, something physical everyday, even if I wasn’t feeling all that well. I never really worried about minor chronic stuff that in all likelihood was TMS. Eventually I got very into martial arts mainly bjj and Muay Thai, and felt like if I didn’t go 5 days a week I was pathetic/ weak/ a failure. One day I started getting UTI symptoms (rare in men, turned out to all be TMS) after a day of antibiotics I felt better and went to a bjj class then next day, I got home and a few hours later my minor uti symptoms progressed to 9/10 pain where I could no longer empty my bladder, again nothing ever found but that lasted roughly a month but that primed me obsessing over my health that culminated in my current debilitating chronic symptoms. Eventually the body says it has had enough, we just often can look at the past with rose tinted glasses not acknowledging the role we played in treating ourselves crappy, and setting ourselves up for this situation. But we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s a shame it takes this severe of a lesson to make us realize.

 

Yup this is me! I would take a few days off a year usually due to we were traveling and there were not enough hours in the day. But you bet I tried my darnedest to get a walk or 10,000 steps in!

 

Yes I am very similar, in my 20s and early 30s needing to hit the gym every day and then my mid 30s on, running almost every day. My brain definitely said enough and was so strong in its response it gave me runner's dystonia which literally was like not only can you not run anymore, you cannot even walk.

 

You will find the biggest chunk of hate for Sarno in the back pain Reddit. I am mesmerized by it some days when I'm bored and scrolling the internet.

I still try to exercise every day but definitely much different than a few years ago when I tried to do 3+ hours a day. I will never forget one Sunday I did a 10 mile run and followed up with P90X Plyometrics, and I was so proud of that. I cringe now. Much more variation now in what I do each day and in half the time or less.

 

Let me guess. The Sarno haters on that Reddit thread never ever ever get better. But they can't see that.

 

I was only on the POTS subreddit for a very short time because immediately ended up with someone fighting with me for trying to offer some solutions.

 

Before I discovered the Sarnosphere, I spent a few days on a forum dedicated to ME/CFS (not sure if I'm allowed to name it). It's a very negative place and if you get better, posters will tell you you never had CFS in the first place. In fact, Google's own ai search tool still tells you CFS is incurable and that only 5% of sufferers will ever dance again. I was horrified when I read that. Thank goodness for Sarno and his students.

@dystonicrunner I have to confess, I sometimes like to read the Sarno hate as a perverse exercise in Schadenfreude.

 

And the sad part is, you don’t even need to fully believe in Sarno’s ideas, or only use his methods to see progress. But spending your time in a ‘support’ group full of spiraling people and obsessing over your symptoms is the literal opposite of what anyone should be doing. And people with early TMS/minor symptoms will stumble into these groups and make their situations so much worse by reading the horror stories.

 

Yep Jan. It’s akin to addiction, where people really need to hit rock bottom before being open to change/help, and unfortunately even then it’s no guarantee of them being receptive. People get medicalized and become so caught up with and identified with their conditions/symptoms. It’s all very sad. I remember when I first started looking into to this stuff I thought it was a scam, I thought Dan Buglio was paying people for their success stories so he could sell stuff. We can become so jaded and hardened by life that we can be skeptical of well intentioned people.

 

She got some serious hate as well after she put her FB page behind a pay wall. I chose to stay with her but she lost a lot of people. There was some nastiness going around for a bit.

 

It's almost scary how much they recommend surgery there.