How do you let go of diagnoses?

D

dlane2530

Well known member
Hi everyone,

I have trouble letting go of the diagnosis that my old optometrist gave me. Well, actually he didn't have clear diagnoses -- they were all "nonspecified vision disorder" and stuff like that, but years before he had given me more specific ones -- but he was clear that my vision would never stabilize unless we did a couple of years of two very expensive therapies, glasses that clearly hurt my head/vision, etc. He also told me, as I've mentioned before, not to leave the house, not to go anywhere, etc. (Very damaging.)

Newer opthamologist and optometrist deny these diagnoses and say there is nothing wrong with my vision.

They have checked, rechecked, and rechecked again.

But of course some of my worst symptoms conform to the ways the first guy scared me.

Can you help me figure out how to let go of the niggling fear that the first guy was right, and I'm doomed?? It is what keeps me from fully accepting that my symptoms are mind-body based and will resolve.

Thanks!
 
You don’t need to fully accept its mind body, you just need enough belief to start the work and then as evidence comes in that it’s working the results speak for themselves. I don’t think it’s necessary to get rid of the fear completely, especially early in the game. And if there was switch or easy way to do so, I’d guess a lot of us would recover much quicker, as chronic pain is very rooted in fear. Fear is a part of this whole human experience, but we need to be able to live with fear and not let our nervous system run amok so that we’re in perpetual panic.

doctors are fallible, despite the pedestal that our society has put them on, they can be extremely wrong. You’ve been checked out subsequently by other doctors that have gone against the initial diagnosis, trust them.

anyone who tells you not to leave the house for an extended period of time is a flat out QUACK.

there will always be another doctor to run to, the medical merry go round never stops.

Eventually we need to be our heroes and look towards ourselves for belief and optimism, there’s no long term healing in this space if we can’t rely on ourselves, and the evidence we’ve accumulated that it is working.
 
Rabscuttle said:
Eventually we need to be our heroes and look towards ourselves for belief and optimism, there’s no long term healing in this space if we can’t rely on ourselves, and the evidence we’ve accumulated that it is working.
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Listen to what my brother says here! Absolutely! You kind of have to be a rebel. You don’t need an “authority” figure for this. YOU are your authority figure. You’ve named some amazing discoveries that have screamed you have TMS. Your symptoms went away on your trip?!!! Why!!!??? How???!!! You know you have TMS. I KNOW you know!

In my opinion two things make people second guess their TMS. #1: they’re just tired and wish they’d get better faster. (I feel you!) But mind/body healing is squirrelly. It doesn’t play easy to get. There’s no silver bullet; so stop hoping for one. #2 People (aka family, friends) are giving you pressure to hurry up and get better. Or, they think you’re nuts to believe in something that isn’t mainstream (yet). Well, not long ago they used to bleed people to heal them. Drain blood into a bucket. That was modern medicine. Really?!

It has taken me a year to OWN my diagnosis. It’s my body. I know I have TMS. I know how to heal it. Now back off, people. You don’t have to believe. I do. (Maybe I needed this confidence in life all along! Thank you, TMS).

You got this! You got us. We are front runners. Rebels. And, we’re not stupid. We are basing our hypotheses on thousands upon thousands of success stories—and millions of evidence incidents, collectively.

The body includes the MIND. It’s literally crazy not to believe that. Yet most doctors believe that the mind has nothing to do with our bodies. (Don’t even get me started on the corruption that feeds that denial of the obvious.)

You won’t believe 100%. But you can refuse to go there, where doubt lurks. I have a firewall up. I just refuse those thoughts. It’s called commitment. I’m committed to what I’m doing. And it requires no waffling. I’ll go to my grave with that opinion that I have TMS. And I don’t even care if my grown kids, husband, extended family or friends are on board. It’s my body. Love me or leave me.

Don’t give up! Don’t let setbacks make you throw everything you’ve learned out the window.
 
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Rabscuttle said:
anyone who tells you not to leave the house for an extended period of time is a flat out QUACK.
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Seriously!! It was incredibly destructive that this optometrist said this. I honestly praise God for my PCP whom I saw two weeks later and who said to me, "It does not matter what it does to your eyes, you absolutely MUST leave the house." Even just those two weeks of agoraphobia took me MONTHS to get over. I shudder to think what would have happened had I not seen my PCP.

My PCP also told me to stop saying "I can't," as in, "I can't drive." He's a smart and compassionate doctor!
 
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Diana-M said:
Don’t give up! Don’t let setbacks make you throw everything you’ve learned out the window.
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Thank you so much, Diana. I will keep going!

You are so consistently encouraging and have such wise and frank words that help so much. You are a gift!

Diana-M said:
You’ve named some amazing discoveries that have screamed you have TMS. Your symptoms went away on your trip?!!! Why!!!??? How???!!! You know you have TMS. I KNOW you know!
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I keep saying to myself, "A person who can walk 15 miles per day six days in a row is *not* in poor health!" I just can't be. And my eyes just CAN'T be devastatingly incapable if they could see while I did it.

My brain says things to me like, "Welllll...you also weren't driving or using the computer while you were there. That's probably why you could see." But I know that when you are anxious, if you look for a problem, you will always find one. Reading, computer, driving...they're all conditioned responses.

Will continue working on it all...and eating ice cream every day and trying to find that little bit of fun!!
 
What @Rabscuttle says!
Think of all the other things you may have thought about yourself that through TMS work you've found to be untrue? I bet there are a lot of things, like Santa Clause you find that you might LIKE to be true, because it simply "makes life easier".
It makes life a lot easier when it isn't your responsibility to face your difficult emotions and discover that you aren't the perfect image of the person you thought you were.
It's easier to hand it all off to someone else.
It is way easier to be angry at an optometrist than say, your mother or father or children.
I STILL get some doubts. I mean they are more like quick jab with a sharp stick now, but instead of focusing on NOT thinking about them, I focus on feeling the emotions around it (see above), and what it relates to in my life in the past (eg. easier to be angry at the practitioner you don't care about than it is about your family who you do...) and then turn my mind to better things in life. If I have 500 thoughts a day about anything better than the ruminations, the one or two times I might ruminate mean nothing. I stopped attaching meaning to it. It takes time and patience to do this.
Meditation has been my main way to teach my brain that there are a lot of junky thoughts that float around in the either of my mind. They are meaningless and simply the "thing" that the mind does. It thinks.
Doesn't mean the thoughts are true.
It also doesn't mean other people's thoughts are true.
I've had doctors tell me some pretty horrible things, but now I see how much junk that was quire a few weren't seeing my pain or my anxiety. Many of them saw my desperation and the $$$ attached to that. One even landed in jail for a 2nd time because his clinic was an insurance scam. We all had TMS - every person there had TMS. He was an opportunist who felt free to impart terrible news with a smile on his face. Over time I've tossed every word he said in the garbage disposal. All I can remember is that smirk and fake "sympathies". I had another "alternative" practitioner get really angry at me when I quit going and told me that my quitting took food from his babies mouths!

I had a few other practitioners who had the best of intentions but didn't really understand what was going on, and quite quickly and kindly told me there wasn't anything they could do for me.

I'm not relying on the advice of others, the decisions of others. I'm tired of throwing my power away. When I made the firm decision (which I wrote down in my notebook like 100 times in a row) two years ago to follow this path and take control of my own personal power, it became SO much easier. I didn't have 100% belief in anything except for the fact that I was taking back my power, and that's all it took.
 
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