Alan G. fear thoughts

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Question

am i right in thinking that anxiety can be both prim brain percieving a threat and getting us ready for flight / flight (everyone can get this) but that it can also be a tms equivalent if we are scared and preoccupied by anxiety and that actually it can also be a symptom imperative in that the mind can try to hook us with another symptom so it doesnt lose it's means of protecting us ? The reason for my thinking is that just as the mind can hijack pain signals to scare / distract us i guess it can also hijack the nervous system and create feelings of anxiety .
And as not all pain is tms, not all anxiety is a symtpom imperative, sometimes it is just our prim brain perceving a threat and getting ready for flight / flight . Does that make sense?

and im guessing that the appraoch to anxiety whether symptom imperative or prim brain perceiving a threat, i treat it the same ?

one last thing, when you ask people if new symptoms keep cropping up to get underneath it and find out what feelings and emotions are there do you mean as in how am i treating myself ? im i scaring , pressuring, being aggressive to self perhaps also to notice if any feelings of sadness or anger or fear were there just before pain , rather than looking for something deep and dark in the unsconscious ? i have a tendancy to fear that there is something bad there ! when really i think its day to day things that are coming up - the reason i say this is i had three months pain free so surely if there was an unconscious deep dark threat i would not have had those pain free months

and is this still ok ?
ive been viewing anxiety as whats underneath the pain as it were, that once the pain looses its ability to scare and preoccupy us , the prim brain is still scared, still viewing things as 'threats' and so we feel anxious .

sorry feel like ive gone on but really appreciate your time.

 

[Alan Gordon LCSW]

Answer

To answer your first question, yes. Anything that can be a source of preoccupation is a symptom imperative.

I'm not going to answer your second question. You know why? Because the way to get better from TMS is to work on teaching the primitive brain that it's safe. When you ask me a question, the question itself doesn't matter so much, you're asking me to make your primitive brain feel safe. That doesn't help you, and the answer itself only provides brief relief until some new fear grips you.

The best way you can help yourself is when you have a new fear thought come up (any of the previous questions you asked me), your fear brain says, "Uh oh... I need to find out the answer to this or else!!!" And you anxiously try to get an answer from me or someone else on the forum.

Instead, when you hear that fear thought come up, and the subsequent, "Oh oh...I need to find out the answer to this or else!!! That's a great opportunity for you to intervene on your own behalf, calm yourself down, and say, "It's okay, you don't need to find out the answer to that question to get better. It's okay, you're safe, that silly question is just a vessel of fear.

I mean it, this exercise over and over is the true way to work toward healing the primitive brain.

Alan

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[Philippe1982]

I like this answer! I overthink everything so much. I understand now that i just must to be calm when i feel pain or fear and to tell myself that i’m ok. And all this questions in my head (do i do it right? Is it ok like this? How i must to do that?) they are not so important, it are typically questions that i see coming up in many parts off my life because i’m an overthinker. I want to do it all perfect, typically for a perfectionist. Sometimes you just must to do things and not questions Yourself so much how to do them. We must to tell our brain that it’s ok, that we are ok and after Some practice the pain and/or fear Will go away.