Mind/Body Book Excerpt That Convinced Me I Have TMS

This is the first "Questions to Ponder" answer that I'm sharing with the forum. I don't share most of them because who really wants to read about a happy memory from my childhood, the last time I exercised or something of that nature? I certainly believe they're worth me exploring but I'm just not sure how much interest it is to the rest of the forum. That being said I thought I would share this because when I read this passage it really hit home with me. I think it may hit home with many others as well.

You always read where people say things about Dr. Sarno's books like, "I saw myself on every page". Well I don't see myself on every page. I see a lot I can relate to but when I read this passage it was as if the author was writing about me. It's from "The Divided Mind" . There are those chapters toward the end of the book where Dr. Sarno invites other physicians who treat (and some are recovered from) TMS. This was from the chapter written by Dr.Andrea Leonard-Segal. She is a Rheumatologist so she works with many patients with painful crippling inflammatory and auto-immune diseases as well as TMS patients. This is how she described the mind-set of a TMS patient vs the other patients she sees:

Even though there is no life-threatening problem or objective measure of illness, people think of themselves as fragile or unwell. They are obsessed with their symptoms, often aware of their pain or their body at some level 100 percent of the day. They are terribly fearful. They are very fearful of “injury” and that they will be permanently disabled. T hey are afraid to engage in many normal physical activities, even during periods when the pain may have abated. They often think that they are easily injured. Fear drives the way they do or do not engage in physical activities. Some patients are so afraid that it drives the way they do or do not engage in physical activities. Some patients are so afraid that they essentially stop doing everything physical and are consciously aware of virtually every physical motion they make and how their body parts are aligned with respect to one another. They feel out of control because they expect the pain to occur as a consequence of what they do or do not do. By contrast, this degree of fear and obsession with physical symptoms is not typical, in my experience, even among patients with serious, deforming arthritic conditions like gout or rheumatoid arthritis.

When I read that I knew it was true. That was me. I live with that fear and obsession and as an orthopedic physical therapist I've seen so many people with crippling, disabling diseases who, just like Dr. Leonard-Segal says, do not have this fear. And I see people with "the fear" . Now I've come to use the presence of "the fear" as a diagnostic tool of sorts in my own practice. I read it to a woman I've treated for probably 15 years for horrible back pain (unsuccessfully I might add) and she began crying.

 

Your patients are very blessed to have a physical therapist who believes in TMS!

 

Hi Reddog,
I am very happy that you found something that resonated so deeply, in Dr. Sarno's work. To me, this is an important part of the path: find things which make sense to you personally, that resonate deeply, that seem to make connections, or which are irrefutable in your experience. In my experience it only takes a few of these connections to really allow the process to work. It is part of "eliminating doubts" on a deep level.
Andy B

 

I've been talking TMS for about 6 months now and I've gotten two or three people to buy a book. I usually recommend "Mind Body Prescription". But I've not had anybody report becoming pain-free because of it.