Is all the pain due to TMS? Please see if my thinking is right

I'm posting for the 1st time. However, I have had pelvic pain from 2007 to 2009 due to which I was bedridden and now neck pain from January 2015 until now. I have been aware of Dr Sarno's work since 2008.

During that time, I was going through a divorce and I really adhered to Dr Sarno's philosophy because I thought that I would be having repressed emotions. However, journalling did not seem to have any correlation with the improvement in pain. In fact, the improvement seems to have come by resting in taking some alternative medication but I'm really not sure.

Now I have again restarted journalling since February 2015. From September 2015 till January 2015 I had been taking physiotherapy also physiotherapy seems to have helped me at least get back on the computer and type using voice recognition.

But the pain persists. So with all of this history, this is my query: is it possible that individuals may experience pain partly due to TMS and partly due to weak muscles or inappropriate posture. I do feel better when I am using the variety of aids for example, I'm using voice recognition to type this long message. All said and done, sitting for long hours and typing does cause exhaustion and fatigue so I kind of understand that philosophy also.

At the same time, the fact that there are lots of people with were posture of their but do not have disabling pain like I do means that there is something extra apart from the poor posture

Once again, I do believe in TMS and I see that 12 reminders daily. At the same time, I wonder if I should discard all the ergonomic aids that people have researched and developed after looking at our body postures

Please let me know your views. Thank you for your time.

 

Hi, browndogisinthehoosue. I love your web name and can picture one or more chocolate labs in your house. I have a black lab I adore.

I want to encourage you to believe 100 percent that your pain is from TMS emotions and stop thinking it is in any way structural.

I had withheld about 10 percent doubt when I had severe back pain. I was 82 and thought it had to be from aged discs or something, but as Dr. Sarno says, aches and pains in seniors is just "gray hairs of the spine." They don't hurt. I journaled to discover I had been repressing years of anger and other feelings when my parents divorced when I was seven. I felt abandoned and insecure.

I don't think you have to keep trying to discover a specific emotion... just tell yourself over and over again that you believe in your pain being from y our emotions. That could be enough to heal.

 

And I'll add to what Walt said. Do challenge yourself little by little to get rid of all the posture aids. As you get better, get rid of the stuff. Or do it the other way around. Rid yourself of one thing at time, and stay active. This sends a signal that you're not buying into the physical causes of your pain.

 

Which is the bad posture?

 

Thank you for your responses. Yes I do understand that the posture aids need to be removed. But then sometimes I think, that had voice recognition being invented before the keyboard, we would not be talking about switching from voice recognition back to keyboard and therefore it was not clear to me if I really need to stop using voice recognition.

For the question about bad posture, the forward neck posture is bad. Of course, doing yoga in different postures for several minutes at a time is quite okay. It is only when we maintain the same posture for hours, weeks and years that it becomes bad

 

Dr. Sarno teaches that the body is tough--much tougher then TMS'ers can fathom. It takes a great trauma to "break" it. Otherwise homo-sapien sapien would have died out millions of years ago--there was no 24 Hour Urgent Care in the cave. They did have medicine men who found some natural pain killers like willow bark (aspirin) and alcohol to kill germs and pain. Shamans were using their charismatic mystical powers to also "cure" the TMS/psychosomatic factor. Many people ambulate with crooked, misshapen bodies due to congenital defects and are not in pain. TMS is the volume control for the pain. Atrophy from non use also plays a role but muscle tone can be quickly regained with a couple of weeks of use.

Dr. Sarno cites that at the turn of the 20th century, thousands banged away on manual typewriters in secretarial pools, from morning to night and there was no epidemic of carpal tunnel syndrome. The modern day computer can't damage one unless the CPU was dropped on one's wrists from a high elevation. TMS is doing it's job of distraction, focusing the attention on a physical part. Watch any episode of X-Games or a gymnastics competition to see what extremes the human anatomy is capable of enduring --we all have the same number of bones--within one or two.