Day 23 Hanging in there

I took a little break from the SEP because I took a vacation trip with my family. I had been so nervous about the trip, but I was so much better during! My symptoms were not gone, but they were at least 50% better, and I was able to sleep every night with no problem, in spite of an uncomfortable bed.

Then the second I got home, my symptoms came whooshing back, including not being able to sleep in my own much more comfortable bed. Sigh.

Still, my anxiety was mostly at bay until last night, when I knew the kids were going to have to go back to school and I'd need to wake up early. So today I was a bit of a mess.

My therapist thinks I have a lot of repressed anger. I am a total people pleaser and if someone does something to really upset me... like, for example, failing to follow through on something they promised to do for me, my first instinct is to apologize for bothering them. I spend a lot of time apologizing. I don't FEEL angry, but I guess that's the point of repressed anger. My therapist also feels I'm repressing grief over the death of my father (one year anniversary recently came without me shedding a tear) and she instructed me to set aside time to grieve every day for the next several days, so I cried my heart out today.

One thing that's hard for me is that I can't 100% push away the thought that there MUST be something medical wrong with me, and the only answer is to find a doctor to fix me. I have like 95% pushed it away, but it keeps cropping up, and then I go down the horrible google pathway. I know this is not helpful and is impeding my recovery. I keep reminding myself of the fact that this happened to me twice before and modern medicine never solved it. It just... went away.

I have an appointment with a psychiatrist tomorrow to consider meds for anxiety. I've been trying to avoid this because I had a bad experience in the past, but I worry that if I can't tamp down the panic, I won't be able to conquer this.

 

That is amazing that you went on vacation and felt better. That's one huge sign it's TMS. Make sure that goes on your evidence list as proof that you can get better. This is a hard journey. And it can be discouraging at times. That's how I felt yesterday when I had symptoms and I was constantly telling my brain I was fine. Cause I didn't feel fine-I wanted to give up.
I heard some good advice yesterday from Thought by Thought podcast with Forest being the guest. (Thanks @JanAtheCPA !) TMS is tricky because if the drs don't find anything wrong, we think they missed something. If the drs find something wrong and diagnose us, then it's hard to accept the TMS diagnosis. In both instances it's a road block to our healing.

Here is the link to that thread:
https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/a-new-resource-and-an-interview-with-forest.29570/#post-156835 (a new resource and an interview with Forest!)

We can do this!! As Dr. Clarke says-all people with TMS are strong and brave!

 

I definitely wanted to give up yesterday! I'm glad we both hung in there!

Thank you for that link! I think my biggest piece of evidence is still that I went through these exact symptoms before, went to all the doctors, and failed all their treatments... and eventually it just sort of faded out on its own. I need to just keep reminding myself of this.