Hi WantToBelieve,
Your follow-up question poignantly articulates the main dilemma most people face in TMS recovery. I'd like to lay out a plan that I think will give you a good chance of success.
First off, even if you believe intellectually that your pain is TMS, on a gut level, you absolutely believe that standing causes the pain. It's impossible not to given the fact that your pain intensifies the longer you stand. So the first step would be working to override this gut-level conclusion.
It's a tricky thing, it requires belief in the TMS diagnosis to gather evidence, yet it often requires evidence to solidify that belief.
I have a former patient who had the same condition you have for 17 years and is now recovered. I'd like to link you up with him. Sometimes speaking with someone who recovered from the same symptom you have can help with the belief piece.
From there it's a matter of telling yourself over and over, "I know there's nothing wrong with my feet, this is a conditioned response, my brain is wired to send me pain signals when I stand, but it isn't the actual standing that's causing the pain."
It's important to emphasize this repeatedly until it becomes part of you. You are not trying to get rid of the pain with this behavior and should not expect to, you are simply trying to override the evolutionary instinct of associating pain with structural damage.
The more you emphasize that, the more you come to believe it,
that is success.
From there you work to try and tease out your preoccupation with the pain. This is no easy task, I can see from your posts that it has a deep hold on you.
I work with a therapist who's pretty great at helping patients break conditioned responses and symptom-preoccupation. If you like, I can hook you up with him as well.
Your neural pathways are deeply set, it goes like this: standing -> pain -> frustration/despair/fear. This stimuli/response/feeling state is deeply ingrained, but it's not who you are, it's just what you do. And it isn't set in stone.
You can change your neural pathways, it just takes time, effort, and patience. This backward bicycle youtube clip articulates the difficulty of altering our most deeply set neural pathways, as well as our potential triumph:
Alan
