How can someone have mild arthritis changes and be in so much pain and someone is very disabled by deformities and no pain.
Ah - the answer to that is because all pain originates in the brain, and our brains create the level of pain they think is needed under the circumstances. Pain (or any other physical sensation) is NOT generated from the location of the injury, illness, or other condition - the pain is generated by the brain in response to nerve signals from those areas, but the pain type and level is totally controlled by the brain. Not only that, but our brains are completely capable of creating physical sensations without any message from an injured body part, but in response to fear, or to our brain's perception that we need to be fearful and on the alert for danger. As Dr. Sarno explains, this is why we blush (a real physiological response to 100% emotional input) and why stage fright causes stomach upset.
This is a very primitive survival mechanism, and I'm not convinced it was a all that great during primitive times. It's definitely not helpful for those of us who are lucky enough to live safely in the modern world. Unfortunately, we have to deal with it - which means learning to live with it and ultimately take control over it.
Anyway, the fact that all pain is generated in the brain explains why we have phantom limb pain, for example: the pain is real, and it still exists even after the body part that "caused" the pain is removed. This is because the pain related to the injury was always generated by the brain, and the brain, for whatever reason, such as conditioning and expectation, continues to produce the pain sensation in the location where there is no longer a limb. Phantom limb pain, not surprisingly, is often combined with PTSD, which means that there will be a TMS component.
This all explains my experience when I ended up in the ER in 2008 after a bike crash, with pain in my hip that felt like an 8 to me - and I was freaking out over the thought of being totally disabled for 6 or 8 weeks. When the ER doc came back with my x-rays and said it was a simple fracture in the neck of my femur, and that they could pin it up and have me on crutches in two days, my pain level immediately plummeted. They asked if I wanted drugs, and I said that some ibuprofen would be fine, and that's all I ever took. After the surgery they kept coming by to ask about my pain level, to which I finally said "I've had cramps worse than this, you really can stop asking". Knowing what was wrong, what they could do, and what I needed to do to heal quickly, was more important than the pain at that point. I had not had surgery since my tonsils were removed at age 5, but I decided there was no reason to fear it. I utterly failed to catastrophize the situation once I knew the prognosis, and it's like the pain was optional. It was there to remind me what not to do (obviously) while recovering, but that's it. This happened three years "before Sarno" for me, by the way. I've had anxiety all my life, but this situation provided me with a lot of certainty, and a clear plan of action in which I had faith, and which I was happy to follow to the letter.
Another example of the power of our minds: my ex is on a number of medications for health conditions, including a chemo drug to kill off excess (although not cancerous) blood platelets that caused a stroke about four or five years ago. He also went through treatment for prostate cancer a few years ago, and he has A-fib. He suffered extreme fatigue during radiation, but when I asked him about all the meds, he said he doesn't think he's ever had any side effects from them. He's still fit and active at age 70, working part time, working on his house (and mine), volunteering at a tool library, and riding his bicycle all over Seattle (electric-assisted - we have a lot of hills). I told him that he must not believe in side effects, and he laughed and said that's actually true, although he'd never thought about it consciously.
Obviously there are meds with known side effects that must be monitored and taken seriously. But then there's that other list - the "possible" side effects that are generally not considered serious and typically don't last too long. Have you ever noticed that headaches, GI distress, and dizziness are usually at the top of that list?
Question: what are three of the major physical symptoms of anxiety?
Follow-up Question: what is a major side effect of being diagnosed with something that needs medication?
Speaking of anxiety, in spite of my positive experience in 2008, a lifetime of anxiety and (I realized later) various TMS symptoms coming and going over decades, I ended up with a growing storm of multiple TMS symptoms that came to a crisis point in 2011, the year I turned 60. Aging did have a lot to do with it. But unlike the broken hip, the problem with TMS is that "they" can't find anything wrong, there is no certainty, and they can't provide a definitive plan of action.
Which is where you are at. What you do have is a clear connection to the anniversary of your father's death, which your fearful survival brain does not want you to contemplate for some reason. In order to keep you on the alert and in fear, it's giving you a symptom absolutely custom-designed just for you due to the disability in your other hand - a symptom designed to scare the living daylights out of you. Is it rational? Not at all, but the whole premise of Sarno's revamped Freudian theory is that there is nothing rational about our repressed unconscious fearful brains, which are still connected to our childish and self-centered egos.
Some of the emotional work asks us to connect to our very young selves. It's our very youngest selves that need to be comforted and given compassion, especially when we lose a parent. It feels very risky to go there, but it's worth it.
You can do this, Mina - keep us posted!
~Jan
