Good comments, everyone. Just a few thoughts.
First to respond to Walt. It sounds to me like you are sensible to be living a very peaceful life and it really shows. We really need to be aware of the things in life that we can change to help us live happier and more peacefully. That is something I have not worked at hard enough yet. One problem I have is that my husband, a retired physician, likes to watch Fox News. In the past, I only found it mildly annoying and some of the stuff is interesting. NOW, however, with the war drums beating ever louder and the constant talk of Ebola, it has been freaking me out and I am prone to fear anyway. So we recently, after much discussion during which time I managed to convince him that most assuredly my TMS would get much worse, we agreed that he gets only 1 hour per night. I just don't see how the commentators on that station can sleep at night. They are probably thinking about how much money they will make if the world turns to shit.
I also liked Steve's post. It helps me to read about therapist's experiences with TMSers. I can easily relate to how the fear just keeps reinventing itself. To illustrate how I can relate what Steve is saying, I want to give a brief account of my recent experience. About 3 weeks ago, I was thinking about writing my recovery story. It is a good thing I did not. (I do think I am mostly recovered or at least have learned how to be recovered). Before that I had, for about a year and a half, rapidly cycling symptoms that I was usually able to handle. However, this time, all hell broke loose. I suddenly had probably the worst back and sciatic pain I had ever had. I could hardly even sit in a chair. It really took me by surprise. But I got my act together and the pain just as suddenly mostly went away. The very next day, I had lower left, intermittent stomach pain that hurt after I ate. This really took me by surprise because I had not had a problem with my stomach in over 6 years. To give some background, I was diagnosed with diverticulosis 6 years ago on an X-ray after having the same stomach pains, only worse, but I was also going through one of the most stressful periods in my life. The medical report said that I had the condition of diverticulosis (which is the fact of having diverticula, which is usually a painless condition), but that I may have had a mild episode of diverticulitis (which is the painful and possibly life-threatening condition when the diverticula in one's colon become infected), thus accounting for my symptoms. The vast majority of people with diverticulosis never develop diverticulitis. I have always suspected that this episode had a large dollop of TMS associated with it. Anyway, my doctor husband, who is painfully aware that 98% of my constant physical complaints are TMS, usually does not want me to see a doctor because he is well aware of how this practice of constantly running to doctors can lead to unnecessary and often risky medical procedures that can REALLY damage a person's health. But this time, he wanted me to go to a Gastrointestinal specialist just to be sure I was not developing the potentially serious condition called diverticulitis. In other words, he wanted me to get checked for signs of infection. So I went and the specialist thought I was ok and gave me some medicine which has helped a lot and I am better. But he reminded me about the importance of eating a diet rich in fiber to prevent this sort of problem. I had been eating a lot of sweets and processed food which I don't normally do. Although I do believe the recently bad diet and the presence of diverticula helped trigger my symptoms, I do believe there is a lot of TMS, fueled by fear of something bad happening. My husband believes that, even when there is some physical basis for my symptoms, TMS/hypochondria is always at work making everything more of a problem that it needs to be. But it can be difficult because we all need to be wary of serious physical illness developing.
In fact, I have given up the idea of immediately thinking mental when a symptom develops. It is better just to stop thinking, because when I become aware of what I have been thinking about, I also become aware of why the symptom has occurred. Most of the time, most of us are lost in thought, having almost no awareness of what our mind has been doing. Our thoughts can quickly become dangerous to our mental and physical health. Then, BANG, this darkness shows up in our body as a symptom and most of us make no connection between our "out-of-control thoughts" and our unpleasant symptoms. We literally have no idea what has happened. More fear sets in, the symptoms worsen, causing even more fear. Each feeds on the other and still, we have no idea what has happened. Then resistance sets in toward both the fear and the pain, creating an even tighter feedback loop. I am learning, through mindfulness meditation, and to a lesser extent, somatic experiencing, to break this loop or sometimes even to stop it before it happens. I do this by taking back my attention for my own and controlling my own mind so that it doesn't get away with terrorizing me. Mindfulness works for the attention and awareness issues and somatic experiencing works well for the resistance issues that drive the fear. However, although I understand this very well in an intellectual sense, I still have not fully internalized the understanding so that it becomes an automatic reaction. This takes a long, long time because I have spent most of my life NOT understanding my own mind and how it defeats me.
