Evidence Sheet - strenghtening knowledge

Hello everybody and thank you for thr help that is being offered here!

I realized in the last couple of days that while I've been telling all my friends and myself that I suffer from psychosomatic pain for some while now and am also seeing a therapist for that reason there is still some deeper doubt.
The palpable physicality of the sensations and the clear feeling of their locatedness just on a gut level gives me the feeling that the reason for the sensations is in my face and throat, not in my soul or psyche.
It's weird. Like I truly am sure that the onset and maintenance of the pain is due to anxiety and stress. But somehow it just feels sooo physical and local. Which of course it does.

I felt it would be good for me to post some of the evidence I have for the psychosomatic origin of my pain on this forum, just to get it out there and make it more 'official'. And to be honest, I would also love gettting some comments or ideas of you good people about it.

So here I go:

1. Pain started without any physical reason or accident.

2. Symptoms started
a) after I had done a 3 month meditation retreat and was incredibly sensitized and introspective
b) after I had met a new partner there whom I wanted to marry and move to the US for
c) my dad was diagnosed with stomach-cancer (before I developed physical symptoms, I had a tremendous rush of insomnia and anxiety about my dad for two good months)
d) felt torn between my new love/life in the US and love and solidarity with my dad for some incredibly intense months
e) worked in two schools plus on publishing two books while taking care of my dad during chemo, skyping with my new partner everyday, selling all my belongings in Germany and never gave myself any rest in that time. Just kept on running in order not to feel.
f) my dad died two weeks after what they had told us was an difficult but standard surgery under extreme (for me) circumstances in the ER.
g) while learning that my new big love actually was way more ambiguous about our relationship and her ability to be in it than our romantic beginnings had entailed.

3. Symptoms don't react im any way to
a) many forms of physical treatment
b) strong prescribed pain meds and muscle relaxants
c) stretching and selfmassage

4. Symptoms used to have a strong jumping around kind of quality on my upper left body. They only settled more permanently in my TMJ after a dentist told me he believes the reasons for the pain might be clenching. Which doesn't make much sense to me because the symptoms are as high in the evening as in the morning and I don't clench unconsciously during the day. I ve heard from a ton of people who have severe grinding going on without any pain or with only ten mins of pain in the morning. (this one is a tricky one for me and I appreciate any comments!)

5. MRIs of face and spine are fine. I do have a strong scoliosis and there is some theory linking TMJ to scoliosis but whatever. (shit, that s another one where it creeps in!)

6. Everybody who hears my story is like, yeah, that sounds like psychosomatic pain.

7. I obsess about the pain wildly.

8. The pain is there 24/7 which I don't think is how any structural pain would behave.

9. The pain just feels kinda weird and, well, in a sense different.


Well, that is that for now. After writing all of that, i feel quite convinced again. Still feels like something weird is going on with the muscles in my throat. Maybe another osteopath could help?? (...)

 

Thank you again, Jan!

It is meaningful to me that you see me doing good work! It really strenghtens my belief in my ability to fully recover and go back to living life fully and deeply!

Inspired from what you wrote, I did some very convinced talking back to my brain before when the symptoms started to flare from being a weird and not really uncomfortable tingling (getting more of this lately) to stromg pain. What can I say, it actually worked. Not in any mindblowing way, just the pain didn't explode as I had anticipated. Good.
Milimeter by milimeter. (Using some metric system analogies here...)

Concerning Nicole Sachs:

I like her a lot. She kind of started me om really getting on bord of doing this again two weeks ago. (after reading Sarno some months ago but retreating to googling stuff about silent reflux and TMJ for some months...)
Her concept and way of presenting just make a ton of sense to me. And it was her analogy of unacceptable feelings to predators that finally gave me some picture of how this healing myseld might look like. Obviously her sucess-stories are hugely important for me to establish hopefulness and belief.
Weirdly enough (and again, not weird at all) while I feel I would basically do anything to get back to chronicsymptomfree living, I find myself avoiding the Journalspeak (even though I am a writer and it feels quite natural to sit down with pen and paper).
Just had 3 days of having a ton of time and just not doing it. Rather checking out a ton of posts on this forum.
I like your phrase of 'your brain on TMS'.
It's shocking for me as somebody who was always seen as really smart and brilliant that intellect is not of much help in all of this. Rather to the contrary.
(my therapist jokes about this a lot.)
And then, to be fair, I do remember being much more im contact with my feeling self before the pain set in. So in a sense it is not a fixed given that I avoid and repress emotions. It also is situational.
One question:
In journalling I keep on coming back to the events of last year and the complicated, intertwined and twisted feelings of love, hatred, fear, anger, jealousy and despair that my dad's sickness and dying as well as the collapse of my relationship and life-plans generated. While there has been other stuff going on in my life, there was never anything this intense in such a short time. I feel I could just journal about that for days on end. And it is very repetitive. From what you've observed and experienced, how important is it to link all of that to childhood and earlier memories? My childhood was really free of ACEs and I felt loved a lot, was super popular im highschool and really felt blessed by life until one year ago... AND my parents had horrible and loud fights a lot which totally made me feel that expressing anger is super-dangerous.

I like your talking your brain out of clenching. Will do that.
My dentist even told me that he believes psychotherapy and exercise are much more important for me than the nightguard he made me.
It feels as though most of the doctors i spoke to are very aware of the mindbody-connection. This really isn't some fringe hippy-dippy-thing (as Nicole says) but established and ancient knowldege.
Well.
I will meditate now with my mum and then I will actually sit down and let some feelings and words flow up.

I have another question around expressing feelings that I have, but I will save that for another day.

Again, thank you! I appreciate your help and while I never was a fan of social media, this forum is a good thing.

 

BTW, I love this:
'That's your TMS brain again, just trying to distract you with meaningless chatter masquerading as important information.'

Somebody I worked with in the kitchen of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center some years ago once interrupted my attempts at small-talk with a very sweetly delivered:
' Listen, David, we can talk about the food and comment on that. Everything else - as Krishnamurti said - is idle chatter leading nowhere.'
I could start telling that myself when my mind goes TMSing.
'Idle chatter - leading nowhere.'

 

In my personal experience, the onset of especially severe chronic pain happened when I learned to suppress my emotions to the point that I felt nothing. It took me years to unfreeze my emotions. My TMS is long gone, but my process of getting my emotions back is still going on, almost 8 years since I first read Dr. Sarno's book. Remember, your pain and your emotions are connected vessels. Until you learn how to safely manage your emotions, your pain is likely to continue.