Hello from Australia

Hi @lesterknight008 and welcome.

Central sensitization is a mindbody condition, so yes, it's a form of what Doctor Sarno called TMS. It's also equivalent to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and other conditions whose names are simply descriptions of what the individual is experiencing, which is pain and fatigue, without an obvious physiological cause that the medical industry is able to "fix".

Have you read one of Dr Sarno's books yet? If not, that's where you need to start! Our main wiki has everything you need to find his books and other resources to start changing your mental and emotional connection with your body.

 

No, sorry - we don't pay attention to the details of physical conditions here. The concept of TMS covers many many different types of chronic physical symptoms - but TMS psychology can also be used to recover better and faster from actual injuries or illnesses.

What we call TMS is a condition of the mind which has been proven to create chronic pain and other symptoms for emotional reasons having to do with our primitive brains and ancient survival techniques. The awareness of this phenomenon is not new in human medicine and psychiatry, but Dr. John Sarno, MD, was the one who came at it from a different angle in the 1980s, and coined his own phrase for it: Tension Myositis Syndrome - and made the concepts extremely accessible to the average pain sufferer, in three books: Healing Back Pain, The MindBody Prescription, and The Divided Mind.

We still refer to it as TMS on this web site which was founded in honor of Dr. Sarno - but as the truth of TMS becomes more widely accepted by the medical and psychiatric communities, it goes by a number of other names incorporating the concept of the connection between the mind and the body.

If you want to order a book, I suggest Dr Sarno's last one, The Divided Mind, which includes chapters by five other MDs and a therapist. If you aren't ready to commit to that yet, start here:
https://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/So_You_Think_You_Might_Have_TMS (So You Think You Might Have TMS) and read everything on the page. Then watch the 20/20 segment (from a US television documentary news series) profiling Dr. Sarno. It's pretty old, so the quality is not great: http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/the-classic-20-20-segment-with-dr-sarno.69/ (The Classic 20/20 Segment with Dr. Sarno)

Also check out Australian psychologist James Alexander https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/members/dr-james-alexander.543/ (Dr James Alexander)
His book is The Hidden Psychology of Pain: The Use of Understanding to Heal Chronic Pain

 

You also can't go wrong by going to our Success Stories subforum - and start reading.

 

Feel free to read my profile story, and then read some Success Stories - you will find an enormous variation in experiences and stories leading up to what is almost always a self-diagnosis of TMS.

Look, I'll be honest - I was doing really well for a number of years, but it's been tough the last four, and 2020 has been an absolute bitch, with a shutdown-related volunteer job that took over my life in the spring (edit: which I allowed to take over my life) and not in a good way. I managed to work myself into a case of sudden-onset RA, which is a real condition with obvious test results, and now I have to be a good patient and take it very seriously, which is hard for me to accept, because I want my symptoms to be pure TMS. I blame emotional stress and distress 100% - if not a certain level of despair as well. Which means I'm blaming myself, and that's a vicious cycle. So I'm taking the meds, but also doing my best to to apply TMS techniques, and working with a TMS therapist for the first time. The disaster that is 2020 makes this immensely harder.

As an obvious TMSer, you're on the search for a solution, and you want to do it in the most perfect way possible, thus your repeated questions about when and how, as well as the lengthy recitation of physical details (this is very common amongst newcomers, and I didn't actually read any of it, sorry - I've become skilled at skimming right past those to get the to real issues).

Obsessing about physical details and tests and results and specialists, constantly asking yourself what to try next when the current ones fail to produce a result - these are all distractions. I mean, do you see how it looks when it's said like that? These activities are designed by your primitive fearful brain to distract you and keep you in a state of hyper-vigilance in a world in which you are anxious and nervous - but in which, most likely, you are lucky enough to be physically quite safe, right? Your primitive brain doesn't know this. It thinks that your anxiety must mean that you are in imminent danger of dying from some wilderness threat, so it ramps up the fear and anxiety more and more. Until you make yourself sick and suffer symptoms.

If you truly believe there is something physically wrong with you, then you are in the wrong place. But if you're ready to get off the diagnostic merry-go-round, and try something completely different - then welcome. We have a ton of resources. But you must find your way to making a 180-degree change in the relationship you currently have with your body and your mind.

What we advocate here is getting in touch with your repressed emotions, and with facing your fears,. You must become mindful of how your primitive nervous system keeps you in a state of hyper-vigilance, worrying constantly about danger, in order to supposedly keep you safe. It doesn't care if you're comfortable or happy - it just needs you to stay alive long enough to breed the next generation - that's the goal of all life, right? This survival mechanism was fine when we lived in a primitive world with a very few, very tangible dangers - dangers which we rarely survived past age 25 or so. But this mechanism is completely wrong for the lengthy lives we live in the modern world, with its inexhaustible supply of intangible anxieties, past, present, and future, to say nothing of recent technologies which allow us to be bombarded with information 24/7.

So if you want to not just live, but also enjoy the longer life that modern medicine has given us, you have to be willing to make some radical changes in the way you relate to the not-so-wonderful aspects of modern life - starting, most likely, with facing your anxiety. That's where I had to start (see my profile and book list).

~Jan