Lessons From Claire Weekes

Balto, Thank you for the explanation! Your daughter is cute, she can speak outloud her feeling!
 
Herbie, a huge thank you for this fantastic post from Claire Weeks. I read it every day because I know it is me fighting my fear and anxiety that is holding on to my TMS.
You have contributed so much to this wonderful website and I find all your posts inspiring.
I hope you are now fully recovered. God Bless you Herbie.
 
Eric "Herbie" Watson said:
Here is a checklist of the most important lessons I learned from Claire's book -- Hope and Help for your Nerves. She has 4 terms that she uses together. Face, Accept, Float and time. Which ones are you not doing?
This works as equally well for Pain as it does for Anxiety.

Dos and Don’ts
1. Do not run away from fear. Analyze it and see it as no more then physical feelings. Feelings are not facts, do not be bluffed.
2. Accept all strange sensations connected with your illness. Do not
fight them. Float past them. Recognize that they are temporary.
3. Let there be no self-pity.
4. Settle your problems as quickly as you can, if not with action, then by glimpsing and accepting a new point of view.
5. Waste no time on “What might have been” and “If only…”
6. Face sorrow and know that time will bring relief.
7. Be occupied. Do not lie in bed brooding. Be occupied calmly , not feverishly trying to forget yourself.
8. Remember that the strength in a muscle may depend on the confidence with which it is used.
9. Accept your obsessions and be prepared to live with them
temporarily. Do not fight them by trying to push them away. Let time do
that.
10. Remember your recovery does not necessarily depend “entirely on
you” as so many people are so ready to tell you. You may need help.
Accept it willingly, without shame.
11. Do not measure your progress day by day. Don’t count the months,
years you have been ill and despair at the thought of them. Once you
are on the right road to recovery, recovery is inevitable, however
protracted your illness may have been.
12. Remember withdrawal is your jailer. Recovery lies on the other side of panic. Recovery lies in places you fear.
13. Do not be discouraged if you cannot make decisions while you are ill. When you are well, decisions will be more easily made.
14. Never accept total defeat. It is never too late to give yourself another chance.
15. Practice don’t test.
16. Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass.
If you do this, you WILL recover.
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Eric, thank you so much for posting this. In the sea of TMS information, advice and guidance (most often helpful but sometimes ambiguous and therefore misleading) your checklist and Dr. Weekes's voice ("you will recover") are a godsend to me. I am forever grateful.

It has been a long journey, full of fears, doubts, setbacks, panick attacks, but also realizations and hope. I am still hopeful and determined. TG
 
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Hi everyone, I had some good success with anxiety and back pain after reading both the divided mind and hope & help for your nerves. I did do a bit of journaling but not a lot and managed to heal, mainly through acceptance and belief.

I recently suffered a relapse in back pain, so I started the Alan Gordon programme. he talks a lot about standing up to the inner bully and soothing the inner child.

It's sort of confused me, as I was treating my inner bully and inner child as symptoms of an over sensitised nervous system (as per Claire weeks). now I'm wondering if I need to address everything differently and some how stand up to my inner bully and soothe my inner child rather than simply accepting the thoughts, floating through them and letting time pass.

Any thoughts or advice?
 
Ferndale, the truth is that each one of us is different from others and is in a different place at any given time in our lives. Both Alan Gordon and Claire Weekes are right and both have been helpful to me. I think they address the same problem from different angles. TMS personalities tend to have very sensitive nervous system, more reactive to the stresses of life. Alan teaches us to be kinder to ourselves and catch ourselves before our inner bully pushes our inner child too much. Understanding of this model helped me a lot to change my behavior in order not to aggravate my already fragile condition. Dr. Weekes teaches me how to get out of the pit I am already in. She is right, each bout of anxiety can only be "cured" through acceptance of it as a natural condition and letting it roll through your system.

When we are sick, it is so tempting to look for one simple linear solution. Unfortunately, a single one often does not exist for TMS. You have to try many approaches before you find one that works for you at this time in your life. Hope this helps.

Good luck!
 
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. that really helps me see that I might have to mix and match approaches. Maybe I can accept and float through the anxiety feelings and pain, stand up to and laugh at my inner critic and say positive affirmations to my inner child.
 
Ferndale37 said:
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. that really helps me see that I might have to mix and match approaches. Maybe I can accept and float through the anxiety feelings and pain, stand up to and laugh at my inner critic and say positive affirmations to my inner child.
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Yep! Flexibility is not what we, TMS-ers are good at, so challenge yourself :=)
 
I'm really buying into the Claire weekes idea and really want to stick at one approach for a while but I find myself questioning whether her methods can work for me cos iv struggled with GAD for so long (since childhood, probably due to having anxious parents at a young age). can her method work no matter how long you've suffered and how persistent or strong the negative thoughts are?
 
Ferndale37 said:
I'm really buying into the Claire weekes idea and really want to stick at one approach for a while but I find myself questioning whether her methods can work for me cos iv struggled with GAD for so long (since childhood, probably due to having anxious parents at a young age). can her method work no matter how long you've suffered and how persistent or strong the negative thoughts are?
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She says it on one of her recordings that no matter how long you have been suffering, you can recover. It just takes longer or more effort. It is all in our mind, whichever way we want to put it to the problem.
 
@Ferndale37......myself and others on here have previously recommended Paul David's At Last a Life. If Claire Weeks doesn't work for you, it's a good read. As a GAD sufferer, Paul David's book helped me put things into perspective when I had my first full blown mental breakdown. Gotta love good ole' GAD.
 
Thanks for that, I'm actually just reading at last a life e book at the moment. im actually making good progress in that I no longer worry about anxiety harming my health. but I seem to have moved on to worrying if I'll always have these constant negative thoughts. I know they're a symptom of anxiety and it's the anxiety trick at work, but still so hard to just accept them and be patient with feeling like this
 
braden101 said:
Thankyou for the post Eric,

There has been alot on anxiety posted on the forums in the last week and I can't begin to explain how much it is helping me,

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around a few things though,

Is anxiety just another symptom of TMS? Or is it a separate entity, that often co-exists with TMS?

I have had anxiety issues for aslong as I can remember, when I started to teach myself to "swim" through those feelings, they improved or at least became manageable in day to day life, not long after, the physical symptoms increased.

So which came first? Have I had TMS all my life and anxiety was just the first symptom or did fighting through anxious feelings and not dealing with them in the correct way, cause TMS?

Maybe I am completely overthinking the whole process but I just feel that to start addressing my core issues, I need to know whether I should be focusing on treating the anxiety or completely disregarding it and treat it as any other symptom.

I'm sorry if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I'm at a messy part of the process. I'm having massive ups and downs, symptoms are appearing and disappearing at lightning speed and anxiety levels are all over the place.
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I've been thinking about this too. I'm not a psychologist or medical professional so I really can't say that I'm definitely right, but the way I think of it is that TMS is one way anxiety manifests. I can get mental/emotional anxiety, and I can get physical bodily anxiety. And I've noticed a very interesting cycle: when I am feeling the most anxious mentally, I don't get so much pain in my body. When I'm really really working to repress my feelings, I get the pain. So it's like my anxiety flip-flops: I either feel it emotionally, or physically. When I'm feeling it physically, it means it's time to dig into the emotions and see what's going on. When I start *feeling it emotionally*, and I investigate the feelings, and really sit with them and feel whatever it is, no matter how horrible, without fighting against the feelings, everything gets better. (Meditation is so helpful for practicing this!) In the past few months I've really shifted my thinking away from "dealing with TMS" to "dealing with anxiety". Somehow that has made it seem much more manageable. Anxiety is hard, but there are so many techniques for working on it. It's less mysterious than TMS can feel. It's possible that this approach could help you? Maybe give it a try.
 
Thank you for your post bennet. I like many others have had GAD all my life (and believe me it's been a pretty long one!) I was really interested in your way of thinking and thought I would add to this by saying that my psychologist has said anxiety is really the same as fear. My worst time of the day is early morning when I awake and I start noticing my sensations, I then start the fear/anxiety cycle. This in turn causes me more intense sensations (I don't use the p word any more!). I do know that for me it is my anxietyfear which causes the tension and the sensations which in turn make me more anxious and I end up being anxious about my anxiety. Vicious cycle.
I read a post recently by Alan Gordon, it was about how in his opinion when we have the initial trauma (as it was in my case) the brain receives the fear message and a 'switch is flipped' to 'fight or flight', in some cases (like ours) the switch remains on until we lose the fear of the sensations. I will look up his post and try to forward it on. It really is an interesting read as Dr Schubiner appears to agree with him.
 
The above mentioned post by Allan Gordon is under Ask a therapist called 'how does TMS cause tightness'
 
The above mentioned post by Allan Gordon. Here it is (Yeah success)

  1. walllc643New Member
    This question was submitted via our Ask A TMS therapist program. To submit your question, click here.


    Question
    What is the relationship between chronic muscle tightness and muscular pain within the TMS framework?

    My pain is confined to the back, Hip and Leg muscles on the right side of my body. I've noticed unsurprisingly that the muscles throughout my right side are permanently tense. However, when I move or stretch or even just adjust my sitting position, the pain will disappear for.a moment. As soon as I stop moving, the muscles tense up and the pain returns.

    Is this chronic tightness likely a consequence of constant TMS pain transmission? Or is it possible that the tightness is actually a direct manifestation of TMS, which then in turn causes pain?

    walllc643, Jan 31, 2015ReportBookmark
    #1LikeReply
    North Star likes this.

  2. Alan Gordon LCSWTMS Therapist
    Answer
    This is an interesting question, and one I've thought a lot about. I recently spoke with Dr. Schechter and Dr. Schubiner about this, and I have a theory which is by no means conclusive.

    There's a lot of evidence that TMS pain is a function of learned neural pathways in the brain. This is not new, TMS physicians have been talking about this for years.

    So the pain is in the brain, we get that. But how does that account for the physical tension that some TMSers have - physical tension that can be so profound, other people, such as massage therapists, can even feel it? This physical tension seems to indicate that in some cases the pain is more than just an interpretation of neurons in the brain.

    I believe that neural pathways in the brain can flip a switch, generating physical tension in the body. The way one responds at the onset of the pain determines whether the tension perpetuates, or whether the switch flips off.

    This is where the idea of outcome independence comes in.

    If you buy in to the pain and generate fear, it sends signals to the brain and the switch stays flipped. You're in a fight or flight state, the tension and pain remain, as their psychological purpose is being fulfilled.

    If on the other hand, you don't buy in to the fear, the switch eventually flips off. The pain and tension subside, as their psychological purpose (fear, preoccupation) is not being served.

    An example: One of the many manifestations of TMS I had was Heel pain. It came on one day out of nowhere. I don't remember banging it or anything, but even the slightest pressure was enormously painful. It felt like what it feels like when you have a bruise. There was clearly a lot of physical tension in that area.

    For two days I limped, trying to figure out whether it was TMS or an actual injury. Then, I got a magical piece of evidence that changed everything. I woke up at 4 AM and had to go to the bathroom. Groggily, (is that a word?) I walked to the bathroom and back to bed. I was so out of it that I forgot to limp. But I didn't have any pain!

    That was all I needed to know that for sure, definitively, it was TMS. The next day I forced myself to walk without a limp, reaffirming my evidence, standing up to the fear, and not caring whether or not it hurt. My goal was not to get rid of the pain, rather it was to hone a level of authentic indifference about whether or not I had pain.

    It was hard. All those websites that I looked up days before saying you can develop long-term heel pain if you don't rest a bruise flashed through my mind. But I kept on repeating the evidence:

    "It didn't hurt at all when I mindlessly walked on it barefoot at 4 AM."

    Of course my fear brain would counter:

    "What if it hurt but you were just too groggy to realize it?"

    Me: That doesn't make any sense.

    Fear brain: What if it didn't hurt because you'd been sleeping beforehand and it was rested a little?

    Me: No, Schubiner said if it was a real bruise, it'd hurt even more after inactivity, not less...

    I knew it was TMS.

    By the end of the day, the pain and the physical tension were gone. I'm sure that if I had bought in to the fear and continued treating it like a structural injury, the pain and tension would have persisted. I believe that by interrupting the fear cycle, the neural pathways that were sending signals to generate tension in my heel were effectively switched off.

    The muscular tension is real, but the source of the tension is the brain, and the way to ultimately relieve it is not through a physical intervention, but a psychological one.
 
Abbo said:
Thank you for your post bennet. I like many others have had GAD all my life (and believe me it's been a pretty long one!) I was really interested in your way of thinking and thought I would add to this by saying that my psychologist has said anxiety is really the same as fear. My worst time of the day is early morning when I awake and I start noticing my sensations, I then start the fear/anxiety cycle. This in turn causes me more intense sensations (I don't use the p word any more!). I do know that for me it is my anxietyfear which causes the tension and the sensations which in turn make me more anxious and I end up being anxious about my anxiety. Vicious cycle.
I read a post recently by Alan Gordon, it was about how in his opinion when we have the initial trauma (as it was in my case) the brain receives the fear message and a 'switch is flipped' to 'fight or flight', in some cases (like ours) the switch remains on until we lose the fear of the sensations. I will look up his post and try to forward it on. It really is an interesting read as Dr Schubiner appears to agree with him.
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Hi Abbo! You're welcome. And yes, I am so familiar with that cycle. You feel an initial fear, and then you add fear of that fear. It's gotten so much easier for me now that I practice meditation to help me recognize fear/pain and really sit with it and let it be. That allows it to pass. REALLY difficult at first, and still is when I'm very stressed, but with practice it becomes a quick response. You got this! <3
 
Yes, I am finally enjoying my meditation sessions (three quarters hour twice a day) and beginning to feel that at last I may be benefitting from them. Research has shown that this can calm the Amygdalah and I am all up for that.They do say that we all find a key to healing in some shape or form and I do believe it is meditation for me. I have also been practicing 'outcome independence' for the past week. I was getting really fed up with my usual 'safe' walks around the area that we live in, even though it is coastal and very pretty. I have visited many different places and even had a bus ride to a nearby town. Big deal for me. I am practising what Claire Weeks and many others say 'recovery is on the other side of fear' going everywhere that I dreaded going. We shall see what happens, 'watch this space!'
Warm wishes to you all.
 
Abbo said:
Yes, I am finally enjoying my meditation sessions (three quarters hour twice a day) and beginning to feel that at last I may be benefitting from them. Research has shown that this can calm the Amygdalah and I am all up for that.They do say that we all find a key to healing in some shape or form and I do believe it is meditation for me. I have also been practicing 'outcome independence' for the past week. I was getting really fed up with my usual 'safe' walks around the area that we live in, even though it is coastal and very pretty. I have visited many different places and even had a bus ride to a nearby town. Big deal for me. I am practising what Claire Weeks and many others say 'recovery is on the other side of fear' going everywhere that I dreaded going. We shall see what happens, 'watch this space!'
Warm wishes to you all.
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My favourite post of the week! I'm so chuffed for you. These victories are deeply healing and empowering and I thank you for sharing them.

God Bless my darling. xxx
 
Hi All - This is a great thread. I've found both the Divided Mind and Claire Weekes Hope and Help for your Nerves to be the most influential in helping me heal my anxiety. I recently read "Self Compassion" by Kristin Nuff which I found useful as well. Panic Away relies on the teachings of Claire Weekes and I personally found the notion of acceptance useful. I have found that a strong B complex and the "Calm" brand of magnesium have helped me too. I haven't quite conquered the night time anxiety (I still wake up multiple times with my heart pounding). Sometimes when I reread my journal entries, I am able to calm my mind and get back to sleep. It used to bother me so much to read about the pain. When it reread it now, it feels like a form of acceptance and it is not so scary. Anyway, it continues to be a journey but I do feel about 85% recovered. I thought I would share in case it was useful to you. I did get a lot of my ideas for different things to try from this forum. With compassion - AC45
 
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