I remember when I used to let my perfectionist tendencies run a mock when I was involved in some climbing project. Screaming and yelling at my partners, trying to make everything turn out just the way I wanted it to; in other words, to achieve a willed act of perfection. Really mad as hell all the time because everything wasn't happening the way I imagined it should. But . . . and this is a big 'but' . . . . I never had TMS pain back then. It was only after the death of my parents, in particular my mother, that I started having TMS pain, first in the form of a herniated disk, and then later during my relapse, as chronic sciatica. How can they not be related? My herniated disk was in my lower left lumber region, probably L3/L4, and my sciatica likewise is in my left leg, hip and lower lumbar region. This is also the same side where I broke my heel back in 1989/90. And a broken heel, in case you don't know, really, really hurts. Sounds to me as if I alway had strong perfectionist traits based on my conflicted relationship with my conflicted parents, but as long as they were alive, my emotionally repressive "angry" coping style helped me maintain a psychic equilibrium. However, once mom died, the old Oedipal structure no longer worked, so the anger I'd repressed for too many years, started coming out. To avoid dealing with it, my TMS developed, as Dr Sarno would put it, as a way to distract me from emotions that were too antisocial or threatening for me to deal with directly. I must have been mad as heck at my controlling, selfish parents, deep inside, for many, many years, but had successfully repressed those feelings by trying to be perfect and a good son. Yes, we'll have to chat sometime!
