I wonder if putting a label on this (TMS) is a bad idea.

I've been thinking.
It seems to me like it's not helpful to be saying "I have TMS."
As if I have some medical condition that I'm stuck with.
Doesn't it make more sense to view it more rationally as -- I'm unconsciously tightening my muscles and nerves right now due to some unconscious emotional factors.
That's not a disease or a condition or a syndrome. It's just holding our bodies in a way that produces pain and/or other consequences.

Again I'm reminded of the difference between Alcoholics Anonymous (you are sick for life and you will have to struggle with this forever) and Rational Recovery (your lower part of your brain wants you to drink but you control your hands and if you don't want to drink every again, you can --- simply--- stop.) AA has a very poor success rate. RR has a very excellent success rate. You're not sick. You just chose to drink and now you choose not to. Done!

Because I tighten my muscles that causes pain --- currently for me in my throat --- previously for me in my teeth --- previously to that in my chest.... I don't have a syndrome. I don't have a condition. I just have reallllllllly overly tight muscles and nerves. I'm tightening the hell out of them more than the average person. That's it.

Since I know I'm just tightening -- I can do the work to loosen them up through allowing, accepting and releasing hidden anger, rage, etc.

Isn't that what we are really talking about here?

Your thoughts?

 

Maybe it's not an answer to your question, but I used to have tension headache. (Gone for one month now whoot!)

Before reading about tms I knew it was because of my muscles tensing up, so I tried to relax a lot during the day.

When I read about tms and I read I had to stop all activities that I though would help my pain, I decided I would stop to try to relax all day. Because before I believed the pain couldn't go away if I wasn't able to relax my face.
Now I know no matter how tense my muscles are there doesn't have to be pain. As soon as that was a possibility in my head my pain disappeared.
(For example I was never bothered by the clumps of muscles in my abdomen although a physician told me it could give me severe problems)

Also, my thoughts on the naming thing are if calling it tms gives you the eeck it's not right for you. Maybe you can replace it with sarno's "some mild revirsible oxygen deprivation"?

Hope this helps!
Harriët - fellow tight ball of muscles

P.S. I still do things to relax, but not to stop the pain. Just because i suspect it must be nicer that way.

 

Fair points. I see how naming gives the opportunity to say, "Before I found _____."
Something to hang our hat on so to speak.

I 100% concur that it's not as simple as "my muscles are tight. I'll release them now. That just doesn't work on its own.
Thus the "I'm unconsciously tightening my muscles and nerves right now due to some unconscious emotional factors.
And I guess we would need to add:
...that's causing me to focus on my symptoms which makes it worse.

"I'm unconsciously tightening my muscles and nerves right now due to some unconscious emotional factors that's causing me to focus on my symptoms which is making it worse and sustaining it over time."

I guess if it feels good or right or helpful for people to put a name on it, that's fine.

For me the naming makes it feel like we have something wrong with us. Where I think it's the exact opposite and we don't have anything wrong with us. Which is sort of the point! Once we realize we don't have anything wrong with us -- presto, magico.

Thanks for your thoughts, Jettie.
Pardon the over philosophical. Hope others chime in if they find this at all interesting.

 

Where did you get that stat from...Them ? (LOLOL)

That is the rationale behind all for-profit rehabs. All of them, though I think we need to call it threehab, fourhab, fivehab,etc... because most of the people I know who go to them who are REAL alcoholics, keep going back to them. (Steven Tyler just checked into fourtysevenhab)

I met a guy from the REBT Rational recovery the last time I wanted to quit drinking. He was NOT an alcoholic. I knew he wasn't when he couldn't understand why I kept coming to our meetings drunk at 11am. I Imagine a lot of people who are not real alcoholics might get sober in that....They are discussed in Alcoholics anonymous,..."hard drinker, may have the habit badly enough to impair their health But CAN stop or moderate if an IDEA becomes operative

AA is a BOOK by the way, much like this is a forum of people who have recovered via the same TEXT and share their experience here..... AA , as a GROUP, has become much like a person who might think that peruisn this forum means they are 'working on their TMS' rather than having a first hand experience with the text and ACTION. Ask how far into the 4th step, or making their amends a relapsed drinker was when they drank...oh yeah "I was going to meetings"...good luck. I have been going to pro baseball games my whole life and I am still only an average rec league player...Point;going to meetings is NOT AA. Doing the work in the book IS.

..much like AA has been watered down, this idea sounds like the doctor who tells you 'loosen up...your tense and over worked'

How do I change my personality when it's compulsive and conditioned by years and years of reinforcement? How do I find out what I am in a rage about if it is repressed?

..and I also know no matter how 'loose' I am, or how many of life's responisibilities I shirk in the name of 'relaxing' the pain can come any time enough UNconscious rag ebuilds up...and TMS is a lot shorter than

 

*shrug*
I'm not basing the info on Rational Recovery on any paid program.
There was no money involved. Just a simple freely available PowerPoint presentation. Perhaps an industry has grown up around Rational Recovery but it wasn't when I was familiar with it. And paying for anything not necessary.
My husband was drinking til he was very drunk every day. He came across RR in a fictional novel he was reading and looked it up. Watched the PowerPoint and as he describes it it was like a lightbulb going off -- he simply chose to stop drinking and not listen to his Beast. No pain, no agony, no groveling, no meetings, no sliding back, no 12-steps, no I'm an an alcoholic for life, no it's a disease like diabetes. He made a choice while watching the PowerPoint to not drink again. That's it. He just stopped.
That was about 15 years ago.

I've found the PowerPoint useful in general for other things that the beast (lower thinking part of our brain) encourages us to do. It's useful to know about it and how it works.

EDITED TO ADD:
By the way, I only mentioned it because there are some parallels between my husband's experience with understanding the power of the mind and the role it plays in drinking and the power of the unconscious mind in TMS.

 

Guess you don't like my thesis of not labeling this!
That's OK. It was just a thought.
You make a decent argument that because of the complexity of what's happening underneath the surface, labeling it as a syndrome may be perfectly valid and helpful in working to deal with it.

That said, I'm going to continue to see how it goes for me personally with uncovering deep seated emotions and ignoring the symptoms in favor of examining feelings (that's hard) and see how it goes.
Thanks for your thoughts!

 

You're quite correct about that - and, like substance abuse (often recognized as a form of TMS, but obviously having nothing to do with muscle tension) recovery from TMS symptoms takes a major shift in thinking - as you clearly described your husband experiencing.

The thing is, the "muscle tension" theory (the T and the M of TMS) is actually out of date. Dr. Sarno knew this late in his life when he is reported to have said that TMS might as well stand for The Mindbody Syndrome. The mindbody practitioners who have carried on since his time now work from the neurological aspects of how we are wired.

The oxygen deprivation theory is useful for beginners, and goodness knows that part of the process requires learning how to breathe and calm down, so it's still a good place to start. But to really get somewhere with this work, you have to understand that what we still call TMS (in honor of Dr. Sarno's brilliant initial work) is actually a standard brain mechanism which all humans have, dating from a very primitive time in which our survival depended upon always being on the alert for danger.

Basically, we are wired to be negative, fearful, and always scanning the horizon for trouble. That made sense when we were dealing with a very short list of very real physical threats, and we only had a few years to survive long enough to breed a new generation. It makes NO sense in today's modern world where the majority of us are lucky enough to live in safety and security. Unfortunately, the ancient short list of tangible dangers during very short lives has been replaced by a very long and convoluted list of intangible worries during very long lives. Modern technology and information overload has only made things more difficult, and don't even get me started on the dysfunction of the last several years. It's the perfect storm.

Some individuals are more prone to disabling TMS symptoms than others, especially those who endure abuse or other trauma, especially if the abuse or trauma was in childhood. Others of us were simply raised to be anxious (that's my thing) and we are seeing more and more lifelong anxiety in the younger generations.

~Jan

 

Personally I feel like the "oxygen deprivation" part is a distraction -- almost like an excuse -- "See, there IS something medically wrong with me."
When really that's just the way the body works when there is tension and anxiety.

Yes, so true about some of us wired more for the over alert response-- either through nature or nurture or both. No doubt.

The 2 parts in the Sarno theory that I find interesting and useful -- after a million years of knowing that my body is over reactive, overly alert, overly ready for fight or flight and not being able to do anything about that -- are:

a. the recognition that I don't have to be in charge of my symptoms. I've always felt like it's "my job" to recognize symptoms and "do something about them."
I don't know if it's true or not but I read once that health anxiety can come from the days when parents were told to "let the baby cry it out." It was said that when the parent doesn't come to check on little you, you learn that you have to check on yourself. And then you go on doing that all your life, to the point of health anxiety.

b. That the tension and tightness and pains are trying to distract us from our hidden psychic pain.

I may have everything all wrong I'm just sharing my thoughts out loud.

 

Didn't know that, thanks!
Makes more sense too...

 

This, for sure, is at the heart of Dr. Sarno's theory. I think that our primitive brains give us symptoms in order to stay alert for danger, rather than allow us to wallow in emotions and miss seeing the tiger behind the tree!

 

Keep it up! That's what the forum is for

 

What I find most interesting and useful about Sarno’s theory--because it is so critically important--is that to recover from TMS, one must reject the notion that the cause of his or her pain is “structural,” which includes rejecting the notion that the pain indicates you have damaged or defective body tissue where you hurt. Sarno thought this point was so important that when patients called his office for an appointment, he did a telephone interview with them in an effort to screen out those who would not be able to reject that the cause of their chronic pain was structural and accept that the cause was psychological.

In my view, no amount of probing for hidden psychic pain will stop the physical pain unless one first rejects the notion that the cause is damaged or defective body tissue. This has been my own experience in fully overcoming multiple, decades-long, kinds of TMS pain. Beyond that, a video I recently came across strongly supports what I just said, The video was an interview of Drs. Howard Schubiner and Allan Abbass regarding their book Hidden from View: A Clinician’s Guide to Psychophysiologic Disorders. The term “psychophysiologic disorders” is another name for what Sarno called TMS and its equivalents. Schubiner is a prominent mindbody physician who even spent a little time with Sarno learning from him and who is a leader in the modern approach to mindbody medicine. Abbass is a psychiatrist who specializes in ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy). He wrote a book on ISTDP titled Reaching Through Resistance that was published two years before Sarno died. Sarno endorsed the book, saying it "provides substantial support to the clinician engaged in treating the ever-increasing population of persons with psychosomatic symptoms.”

ISTDP focuses on helping patients uncover their hidden emotions involving interpersonal relationships. It employs unique and powerful therapy techniques to accomplish that. Abbass has a reputation for great skill at these techniques. At some point in middle age, Abbass developed chronic back pain. His pain got so bad that one time when he gave a lecture where one would normally stand up, he had to deliver it from a wheelchair. If anyone would be adept at uncovering his own hidden emotions, it would have to be Abbass. Yet his pain persisted. It persisted until Schubiner persuaded him that there was nothing structurally wrong with his back.

Unlike Sarno, Schubiner does not attempt to screen out prospective patients who would be unable to reject that the cause of their pain is structural. If patients are skeptical when he tells them, after examining them, that that the cause of their pain is not structural, he just asks them to keep an open mind while he works with them. His steadfast goal is to persuade them that the cause of their pain is misfiring neural pathways rather than damaged or defective body tissue. The reason, of course, is that they won’t recover as long as they think the cause of their pain could be structural. Modern mindbody medicine has moved beyond Sarno’s distraction theory to explain why the brain creates chronic pain, but the bedrock principle remains the same: It is essential to reject the notion that the cause of one's pain is damaged or defective body tissue.

 

: It is essential to reject the notion that the cause of one's pain is damaged or defective body tissue.

It's so interesting.
And certainly challenging for most. I imagine because:
1) It seems impossible that severe pain can not be coming from a damaged or defective body part.
2) It makes one feel like it's their fault or that they are crazy if they have that much pain without a damaged or defective body part.

Thanks for sharing.

 

The "tension" in TMS is Sarno's term for stress and mental conflict and doesn't necessarily have to do with muscle tension. I think he was bored with the term "stress" because it doesn't detail the depth of the conflict within the person. Even if it does lead to muscular tension, the key here is still psychological tension.

 

OK.
Well, for me the mental tension causes super strong muscle tension which causes the super pain. So I'm glad he chose that word.
Otherwise I wouldn't have listened. That's the word that resonated with me. Evidently for the wrong reasons.

 

Not wrong, @Booble, just evolving

After all, "Myositis" does refer to muscles in medical terminology.

Ultimately, you don't want to get hung up in terminology. That's just a good way for your brain to keep you stuck.

These days, what we still call TMS is being referred to variously as MBS and PPD by many practitioners, which both reference our minds. (see ppdassociation.org, founded by numerous luminaries in the TMS world).

 

Thank you for saying that, Jan.
I was worried that reading Nick's post might set back my progress, despite knowing that for me that's exactly how it plays out.
(Emotional trauma -------> muscle tension -------> physical symptoms.)
I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I wasn't able to stop the muscle tension by will, but understanding this and working on releasing the emotional trauma has begun to release the muscle tension which has begun to reduce the physical symptoms.
I don't want to think, oh, that's not it. And have my symptoms all come back.

 

YES, I think, well for me, I believe you are spot on, myositis is tension in the muscles, I think this is fundamental to understand what is happening - now comes the harder bit (for me anyhow) to control this automatic response, learnt response, not even know it is happening most of the time, like clenching your fist for 5 minutes then letting go, Ouch pain!

To take control of my body is the key to my success, once I knew the triggers, things in my life that caused heightened arousal in my body to certain events I started to take control almost turning down the pain, not all the time, sometimes it gets there quicker than me, but quick grounding techniques, in the main mindfulness, listening to my body, checking in on my body, asking if I am ok, (actually feeling the tension) i could balance the effects, This is not easy, it is very hard, extremely hard, But try as you may I did find automatic responses to my anxiety, simple things like when I am talking, (tight chest, shallow breathing, this type of stuff) but what I noticed then was I my body automatically started to take deeper breaths, Yes, I consciously started to notice change in my body response.

Two things that help me are 1. mindfulness, you can quickly and easily test yourself on mindfulness, like shut your eyes for 5 minutes and see how many times you mind starts to wander, anything like me loads, that shows you are not in the moment, you mind is a drift, basically I have no control over my body at this time and it is in free fall, for me when I take control of my mind (no interruptions) it empowers me beyond belief, To me it is the most powerful self gratification I own, power over my own thoughts and feelings, No influence from anything or anyone around me, total control. belief.

2. Ditch JUDGEMENT, an environment, the society I live in, the world I live in effects me enormously everyday and I find myself making a JUDGEMENT, then when I make a Judgement, I think, negatively think, ruminate, worry, and the cycle begins, so for me as soon as JUDGEMENT comes into my mind, I kick it straight out.

 

Thank you!
It is remarkable how are body does this. You can consciously let go and then seconds later it consciously comes back.

The two techniques that work well for you (mindfulness and ditching judgement) are terrific. It sure is easy to get in caught in the JUDGMENT zone, especially these days where this is, well, so much to judge (negatively).

When I journal I can feel when things are touching a nerve, so to speak. I'll actually write in parenthesis "throat tightening" when I feel it so that I can mark and go deeper on whatever it is I'm writing about that tightened the throat. Or when I'm on a call for work that gets stressful I recognize the physical feeling so I can understand, accept and let it go.

It sounds dumb but I also draw during my journaling a picture of a balloon or balloons being released and flying upward and away. And a little me at the bottom of the picture who has just let them go. I often end the day's journaling with that. Feels good.

What I have found so surprising about all of this is I never would have guessed I had any anger. I mean, yes, I get frustrated about politics and have that kind of anger but never knew I had childhood type personal anger against others and myself. And yet creating a space for it and accepting it and letting some of it go has done a world of good.

Thanks again for your thoughtful response. I appreciate it!

 

If you're putting the emotions at the beginning of your chain of events, then you're way ahead in the game no matter the terminology. But with the symptom imperative and TMS equivalents there can be symptoms that you can't really relate so easily to muscle tension, which seems to throw off a lot of people (and myself ). I've had physical tension reduce dramatically, but it was only through psychological and emotional exploration like you are describing (as well as setting boundaries, stress reduction, etc.). I think you're doing great actually. Don't like the insinuation that I could hamper someone's progress. Just trying to help.