Amy W. Feeling Safe About A Symptom Versus Feeling Safe as a Foundation

This question was submitted via our Ask a TMS Therapist program. To submit your question, click here.

Question

Hi thanks for helping! I am a longtime TMS sufferer. My father had terrible back pain when I was a child and it went away after reading "Mind over back pain" in the 80s So. Whenever I had pain my father would give me Dr. Sarno's books to read and it would go away. However it would always come back sooner or later. Now after psychodynamic psychotherapy for 8 years it has largely gone away. My question is, how can a person with seriously repressed emotions and a history of trauma find relief by just reading a book? That doesn't resolve his repressed emotions. He may now understand that its all in the mind and not physical, but he still has overwhelming repressed emotions threatening to surface. Shouldn't it require at least 6 months of therapy? And if reading the books works, why does it always come back? By the way I am a therapist and I do a little work with mindbody disorders. Thanks Joseph

 

Try to think of your repressed emotion like a snake. They both are unpleasant and they create fear. That fear trigger your body to produce psychosomatic symptoms. By reading the "books" many people understand the theory. They believe in the diagnosis and they loose their fear. When we no longer think the snake is dangerous. When we think snake are incapable to hurt us if we're just be careful, then we don't fear snake anymore. When fear disappear danger signal also disappear. We don't need to get rid of the snake or the repressed emotions. We just need to get rid of our fear in order to get rid of our symptoms. Negative repressed emotion is still there, but it is no longer "negative".

It doesn't come back. You brought it back. We brought the negative emotion into our mind. We let it scare the hell out of us and we got pain. Not only repressed negative emotion caused tms. There are a whole host of things that can cause tms:
- There are tons of repressed negative emotions inside our brain would you think? The longer we live the more emotions we repressed.
- What about current everyday stress about love, finance, job, politic, natural disasters, war....? Check out Tennis Tom's often posted "the Rage Holme list". Life changing circumstances are more than capable of creating tms symptoms.
- Doctor Weekes said we often got psychosomatic illness because we became more "sensitive". Many other expert said we created Neural pathways in our brain. Our brain "remember" the situations that caused us pain. When similar "situation" occur again, we get pain again.
- how about conditioning. As a therapist you probably know more about conditioning than I do. Yes, conditioning are often bring on symptoms. Many would call it "relapse".

Whatever the cause is who care. We can always get well by getting rid of our fear. See Alan's newest Recovery program: http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/painrecovery/ (Pain Recovery Program)