fibromylgia

[cherrybomb]

Hello guys, if this has been discussed before i'd love a link to it.

Ok so i think im struggling to fully believe the tms stuff because of how i was told / thought fm worked. I believed that my brain had sort of blown a fuse because of virus and stress. I know now that the virus was just a trigger as i was under alot of stress and change at the time. But i thought my brain had kind of stopped working properly, that it now amplified any/ all sensation and interpreated them as painful . Is this not true? im confused! is my brains wiring fine? x

 

[JanAtheCPA]

Actually, that's a great question, CB, and I'm going to take a stab at addressing it.

I've been listening to an audio program from Sounds True, by psychologist Rick Hanson & neuroscientist Richard Mendius, MD, called "Meditations to Change Your Brain". In addition to the meditations, they explain the neuroscience behind the ability for our brain patterns to change - our "wiring" in fact. I'm only one-third of the through, but I'm finding it very helpful for learning how to meditate effectively, as well as being very informative, and very calming.

Even with the little I've learned so far, I suspect that the answer to your last question is perhaps, No, your wiring is not fine - at the moment - but it can be fine again if you're willing to work at changing it - because it can be changed, and perhaps changed to be even better than ever!

To answer the question right before that - whether it's true that your brain is amplifying sensations and interpreting them as painful - I think that's a great description of TMS! The wonderful Claire Weekes wrote in 1969 (you weren't even born, I was just graduating high school, and Dr. Sarno was still years away from publishing his first book) that our nervous systems can in fact become over-sensitized to input. She has a great line about how anxious or obsessive brooding can create a hyper-sensitive nervous system - but she also firmly believed that this process could be reversed.

So everything you were told was true, up to a point. If you were also told that you can't do anything about it, that's the falsehood, because the neuroscientists are discovering more and more evidence that the brain is plastic, and it can change and grow and heal and even improve.

Cheers,

Jan

PS - I see now where you got your screen name

 

[cherrybomb]

thanks alot Jan! that makes alot of sense. Yes i'm just trying, as i guess we all are, to undo years of false information that i took as gospel. Eg. i must listen to my body, i must rest , i must not overdo things, i must pace and grade every single activity, i must learn to live with the pain and no i will not recover. All of that and the most terrible pain and severe fatigue has put the fear in me BIG time. But i know i am going to recover!xxx

cherrybomb - i love that song!

 

[Birdie]

Hi Cherrybomb,
exactly, viruses can act as triggers and cause - via an "alarmed amygdala"- syndromes like fibro and even CFS. A guy named Ashok Gupta wrote a lot of interesting facts about it, his amygdala retraining is very compatible to the TMS-approach. Nearly everything can act as a trigger and condition the amygdala in the very wrong way so that it reacts to harmless stimuli as if they were dangerous things! But the stimuli only get negative triggers when combined with negative thinking patterns! Once this viscous cycle is stopped the negative triggers become neutral again (I am far away from this but several people were very succesful with that!).

 

[gailnyc]

thanks alot Jan! that makes alot of sense. Yes i'm just trying, as i guess we all are, to undo years of false information that i took as gospel. Eg. i must listen to my body, i must rest , i must not overdo things, i must pace and grade every single activity, i must learn to live with the pain and no i will not recover. All of that and the most terrible pain and severe fatigue has put the fear in me BIG time. But i know i am going to recover!xxx

Yes, I heard a lot of the same from doctors last summer about my foot. They put a lot of fear into you, which is a hard cycle to break out of. But yes, you will, and I will!

 

[JanAtheCPA]

Nearly everything can act as a trigger and condition the amygdala in the very wrong way so that it reacts to harmless stimuli as if they were dangerous things!

In Meditations to Change Your Brain, the authors say that our brains (specifically the amygdala) are still wired to constantly scan the horizon for threats - "still", because this negative pattern is a primitive survival technique. And that yes, this can be retrained.

It needs to be retrained, because such negativity is not healthy in today's world, especially given our very long lifespans!

Jan