Northwood
Well known member
Hi, All, I’ve posted a few times. Briefly, I learned about TMS in January. I’ve read the literature accept the diagnosis, and have been doing my best to apply TMS recovery strategies to my own life. If you’ve read any books about TMS, you already know a lot about who I am. To date, I have had some success alleviating my long history of recurrent low back and butt pain.
Since starting the TMS work, I have come to see pretty clearly that my physical pain connects deeply with my parents—very early traumatic separation from my mom and, more profoundly (it seems) years of rejection and silence from my dad. I stopped calling my parents “mom” and “dad” years ago as a way of distancing myself from them. Interesting to experiment with reapplying those titles and noticing how doing so affects me. I see I’m a little past rage and into weariness and grief. Anyway, my father died this past Friday. I was able to travel to the hospice, sit with him during his final hours, say what I could (while he was unresponsive) and then later after he died sit with his body while waiting for the funeral home to pick him up.
When I returned to my home city, I experienced a gradual onset of low back pain that started on Sunday evening and became crippling by Monday morning, just before I was going to go into work. It was so painful, I had to call in. Spent most of yesterday in bed with periodic walks to keep moving. Today, early Tuesday, it’s a tiny bit better. But the pain is considerable. The whole rest of my body feels fine.
I am trying to understand the nature or message of this pain and what I need to do to get through it. I’m pretty sure it'1s TMS, though there is a possibility I may have strained my low back by recruiting it as I’ve been doing leg lifts to strengthen an extremely weak right calf which is still recovering from a surgery last fall. Perhaps the TMS is using that as its opportunity. I don’ t know. I do know that my father’s death is huge in my life, a final statement of his rejection and silence, and that via this TMS work I’m in the midst of daylighting my own buried rage and conflicted feelings on the long road toward healing, letting go, forgiving.
My question for the community is: what are resources to look at or advice you have regarding real-time strategies for recovering from a flare-up of physical pain? I don’t seem to be the “book cure” type. I don’t believe I have physical damage, so how best to proceed with this great pain? My hope is to be done with it, of course, to not linger in pain for weeks. I am applying techniques taught here, checking self-criticism, pressure, fear. Self-soothing. Feeling feelings, which is not easy, I’m finding—and trying not pressure myself to feel, that crazy balancing act. I'm bummed about the new delay in all the exercise I'd been doing, finally making progress. When should I resume "vigorous activity?" I guess I’d just like any leads or advice on things to do when the pain is severe and it’s a challenge to avoid obsessing or feeling overwhelmed, fearful. I really want to do what I need to do to put these encounters with chronic pain behind me so that I can live the active, pain-free life that I believe is possible.
Since starting the TMS work, I have come to see pretty clearly that my physical pain connects deeply with my parents—very early traumatic separation from my mom and, more profoundly (it seems) years of rejection and silence from my dad. I stopped calling my parents “mom” and “dad” years ago as a way of distancing myself from them. Interesting to experiment with reapplying those titles and noticing how doing so affects me. I see I’m a little past rage and into weariness and grief. Anyway, my father died this past Friday. I was able to travel to the hospice, sit with him during his final hours, say what I could (while he was unresponsive) and then later after he died sit with his body while waiting for the funeral home to pick him up.
When I returned to my home city, I experienced a gradual onset of low back pain that started on Sunday evening and became crippling by Monday morning, just before I was going to go into work. It was so painful, I had to call in. Spent most of yesterday in bed with periodic walks to keep moving. Today, early Tuesday, it’s a tiny bit better. But the pain is considerable. The whole rest of my body feels fine.
I am trying to understand the nature or message of this pain and what I need to do to get through it. I’m pretty sure it'1s TMS, though there is a possibility I may have strained my low back by recruiting it as I’ve been doing leg lifts to strengthen an extremely weak right calf which is still recovering from a surgery last fall. Perhaps the TMS is using that as its opportunity. I don’ t know. I do know that my father’s death is huge in my life, a final statement of his rejection and silence, and that via this TMS work I’m in the midst of daylighting my own buried rage and conflicted feelings on the long road toward healing, letting go, forgiving.
My question for the community is: what are resources to look at or advice you have regarding real-time strategies for recovering from a flare-up of physical pain? I don’t seem to be the “book cure” type. I don’t believe I have physical damage, so how best to proceed with this great pain? My hope is to be done with it, of course, to not linger in pain for weeks. I am applying techniques taught here, checking self-criticism, pressure, fear. Self-soothing. Feeling feelings, which is not easy, I’m finding—and trying not pressure myself to feel, that crazy balancing act. I'm bummed about the new delay in all the exercise I'd been doing, finally making progress. When should I resume "vigorous activity?" I guess I’d just like any leads or advice on things to do when the pain is severe and it’s a challenge to avoid obsessing or feeling overwhelmed, fearful. I really want to do what I need to do to put these encounters with chronic pain behind me so that I can live the active, pain-free life that I believe is possible.
Being gentle on myself is more of a learned response. I have to be conscious about using it. We have all these parts to ourselves--Inner Bully, Inner Child, Id, Superego--however you want to classify them, and they all require different kinds of responses depending on what's happening at the moment. Just recognizing what the energy is, is significant. I get better at this by learning some of the tms fundamentals and then cutting myself some slack and paying attention. Thanks.