Hi BloodMoon - sorry to respond to an old post, but I found it while searching for posts about doubt/belief. I was wondering what kind of work you did to turn that "Intellectual" belief in TMS into the kind of deep knowing that penetrates doubt? I'm in a similar situation where I believe in TMS, I can logically argue why I have TMS, I can point at my FIT criteria scores and etc etc... but my automatic thoughts are still rooted in the physical, and I think that doubt is what holds me back.
Hi
@tag24.
Noting the inconsistencies with regard to symptoms has helped me a lot with this.
I decided to write down all of the symptoms that I have experienced over the years, symptoms that came, stayed for a little while or for a long time and then went away again, either not to return or to rear their ugly head at a later date. There have been so many over the years, and with the majority of them the medical profession either couldn't suggest or prove what caused them (so I also noted down that that is very indicative of TMS).
Some of my symptoms (only a few) were put down to something physical/structural by doctors I consulted, e.g. narrowed discs in my lumbar spine, and possible de Quervain tenosynovitis of my right wrist and thumb. With the latter the symptoms didn't go away until I started to fear that I would need surgery on my hand... so that was indicative of TMS too (the fearful brain).
And when I looked at all of my symptoms in my list, I saw that it was just ridiculous how many there were, with none of them fitting into any particular disease pattern. They therefore had to be TMS, so I noted that down too.
In Alan Gordon's book called 'The Way Out', he talks about looking for other inconsistencies in relations to symptoms, e.g. symptoms that happen at certain times of the day but not at other times of the day etc, so reading his book was a big help.
Something else I've been doing is that when I experience a symptom, I pay it attention - not exactly like Somatic Tracking - but nevertheless placing my attention on it with what I believe Buddhists call 'equanimity'... that is, not recoiling from it (or welcoming it either) and then moving on with my day, despite the pain or whatever the symptom might be. Then, 'magically', the symptom often lessens in intensity and/or I notice it has disappeared, sometimes by the next day. If the symptoms weren't TMS they wouldn't be 'magicked' away like that by me merely treating them with 'equanimity'. Paying attention to symptoms ties in with the maxim "what you resist persists".
Viscerally believing that my symptoms are TMS has been about persistence... I read my list of symptoms with my notes about their inconsistencies every day for many months; now I do it two or three times a week. With the practising of 'equanimity', I do it every single day. It's all slowly paying off and I'm gradually feeling a lot better and I know that that's because my immediate thought with regard to any new symptom or the return of an old symptom is that it's 'just' my brain TMSing; I don't try and work out what perhaps I did physically (bending, reaching, sitting or whatever) to cause the symptom or make an old symptom return, whereas I was always doing that before.
