younglazlo
New Member
Hi everyone, this is my first post. It might be a long one, but I would really appreciate your input!
My symptoms (stomach, chest, and throat pain) first arose in connection to a stressful job I had (of course, there were other factors involved – personality, past stressors etc., but the job was the catalyst for full-blown TMS). I was an editor for an academic journal. At the time I didn’t think of myself as stressed, but looking back at it, it was all tight deadlines, high workloads, and I constantly felt like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, like I wasn’t going to get things done on time, and my work was never good enough. I was putting tons of pressure on myself. In the early days, I would only get the symptoms while working, but as TMS progressed and I started to believe there was something wrong with my body, they started happening at other times too.
Since learning about TMS and beginning my recovery, I’ve left that job. I still do freelance editing, but for different clients and in a far more relaxed way than before. I take on as much or as little as I want to, I give myself plenty of time, and I feel fairly confident in my abilities. I actually enjoy it.
The thing is, my TMS still reacts intensely to working. It’s not the only time that I have pain, but it seems to be the biggest trigger. I have successfully broken other conditioned responses – e.g., pain associated with exercise and with lying down – but I have had basically no success with this one. I have persisted a long time with this, literally years, but the pain gets so severe that it just gets harder and harder to concentrate on the work, and the more I try to concentrate through the pain, the worse the pain gets. It’s at the point now where it’s really interfering with my ability to make a living – which obviously introduces more stress, as I’m financially not in a great position.
I don’t know what to make of this – whether there is still something inherently stressful about this job that I am not seeing (though I don’t think this is the case, I’ve journaled it to death), whether my subconscious just hasn't got the message yet that work is not a threat, or whether it’s something to do with the mental processing and intense concentration that’s involved. I mean, editing is a hilariously fitting job for a recovering perfectionist: you’re combing through the text, looking for tiny details and errors, and trying to ‘fix’ it and make it as ‘perfect’ as possible. But even in that sense, I’ve tried to relax my mindset towards the work, telling myself that it doesn't actually have to be (and can’t be) perfect, lowering the stakes, etc. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
I am a bookish, wordy kind of person, and a lot of the things I love doing – reading and writing (particularly on the computer), doing crosswords – seem to intensify the pain. Conversely, when I'm doing physical and active things, outside and/or interacting with people, the symptoms tend to go down or disappear. Obviously I am trying to do more of the latter type activities, but it is upsetting that things related to reading and thinking etc. seem to trigger my symptoms, and I don’t really get it. I would love to keep progressing as a freelance editor and one day go into writing as well, but the symptoms are just so intense while I’m doing these things that it doesn’t feel possible, and it doesn’t seem like something I should just ignore.
Sometimes I think I should just look for a completely different job, at least for the time being, but I don’t want to do that. I want to be able to carry on in my profession.
I would be so grateful and interested to hear anybody’s take on this. Thanks.
My symptoms (stomach, chest, and throat pain) first arose in connection to a stressful job I had (of course, there were other factors involved – personality, past stressors etc., but the job was the catalyst for full-blown TMS). I was an editor for an academic journal. At the time I didn’t think of myself as stressed, but looking back at it, it was all tight deadlines, high workloads, and I constantly felt like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, like I wasn’t going to get things done on time, and my work was never good enough. I was putting tons of pressure on myself. In the early days, I would only get the symptoms while working, but as TMS progressed and I started to believe there was something wrong with my body, they started happening at other times too.
Since learning about TMS and beginning my recovery, I’ve left that job. I still do freelance editing, but for different clients and in a far more relaxed way than before. I take on as much or as little as I want to, I give myself plenty of time, and I feel fairly confident in my abilities. I actually enjoy it.
The thing is, my TMS still reacts intensely to working. It’s not the only time that I have pain, but it seems to be the biggest trigger. I have successfully broken other conditioned responses – e.g., pain associated with exercise and with lying down – but I have had basically no success with this one. I have persisted a long time with this, literally years, but the pain gets so severe that it just gets harder and harder to concentrate on the work, and the more I try to concentrate through the pain, the worse the pain gets. It’s at the point now where it’s really interfering with my ability to make a living – which obviously introduces more stress, as I’m financially not in a great position.
I don’t know what to make of this – whether there is still something inherently stressful about this job that I am not seeing (though I don’t think this is the case, I’ve journaled it to death), whether my subconscious just hasn't got the message yet that work is not a threat, or whether it’s something to do with the mental processing and intense concentration that’s involved. I mean, editing is a hilariously fitting job for a recovering perfectionist: you’re combing through the text, looking for tiny details and errors, and trying to ‘fix’ it and make it as ‘perfect’ as possible. But even in that sense, I’ve tried to relax my mindset towards the work, telling myself that it doesn't actually have to be (and can’t be) perfect, lowering the stakes, etc. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
I am a bookish, wordy kind of person, and a lot of the things I love doing – reading and writing (particularly on the computer), doing crosswords – seem to intensify the pain. Conversely, when I'm doing physical and active things, outside and/or interacting with people, the symptoms tend to go down or disappear. Obviously I am trying to do more of the latter type activities, but it is upsetting that things related to reading and thinking etc. seem to trigger my symptoms, and I don’t really get it. I would love to keep progressing as a freelance editor and one day go into writing as well, but the symptoms are just so intense while I’m doing these things that it doesn’t feel possible, and it doesn’t seem like something I should just ignore.
Sometimes I think I should just look for a completely different job, at least for the time being, but I don’t want to do that. I want to be able to carry on in my profession.
I would be so grateful and interested to hear anybody’s take on this. Thanks.
