My TMS got crazy...please help

Hi to all
Since 2-3 weeks i am reflecting back on my childhood, questioning everything about it, reading books on inner child, trying to understand my relationship then with momand dad. And since Couple of days my pain everywhere on my back got worse(upper and lower), i got urinary infection(i keep having it every year since i am 15 and had 2 operations to open the contracted urethra)...
Is it TMS doing all these at the same time due to my questioning and digging my subconcious or is it just a coincidence these happening at the same time with all my questioning my past!??

Thank you all

Emre

 

Thank you very much Foster
So you mean 'dont over analyze your past and stay in the moment' kind of approach right?

Have you totally overcome your pain and how long did it take?
Emre

ou

 

Extinction burst is a really interesting concept.
SteveO's suggestion is great, to stop digging in the past and let go and bask in the light.
Thinking positive and happy are like sunshine on a gray day.

 

Forest, a good exchange of posts with you and Emre. Interesting how you healed.

 

Forest says, "my recovery really involved accepting the TMS diagnosis and becoming active again." I'm a digger but that won't work unless you, at the same time, accept the diagnosis AND get on with your life--all of it. TMS wants to be your excuse for giving in to your fears. Don't let it happen.

 

Thank you all
I did accept the diagnosis!
I did stop physical therapy!
I did start jogging and yoga
I did accept that i have repressed anger(didnt figure out what they are totally-but according to Sarno accepting that i have them is enoguh!)
Then why is it that i still have pain in my upper back and tension headache couple of times a week!?? That i dont understand??
Emre

 

Just want to share my experience conquering my pain.

In my experience, working with childhood memories doesn't help me at all. Reliving those childhood memories only brought back sadness, anger, and more pain. One of my observation also made me doubt that my childhood have anything to do with my symptoms. I saw that my dad and many of his friends never have tms/anxiety. They've been through hell. They lost many of their family members, the survived countless hardship and wars. They were practically slaves under the Japanese and the French. They were torture physically and mentally, they were always hungry.... long story short, their life is the kind of life you pray you never have. And yet, they never have back pain, sciatica, tinnitus,... That made me thought, if Freud was right then they would all be paralyzed with pain and anxiety forever. Their life is doom. The same would be for millions of those people all over the world in Somalia, India, Cambodia, North Korea... It doesn't make sense isn't it? tms rarely happen to them. Then why we blamed it on our childhood?
I know many people suffered from tms for 10, 20, even 30 or more years. If our mind is smart enough to create these pain symptoms to distract us from some painful thought in our unconscious mind about something happened long ago when we were 6 years old, why it is not smart enough to stop the pain like, say after 5 or 10 days? What keep this distraction in place for 20 years? Why can our unconscious mind switch from that painful thought to some other more pleasant thought? Why did it has to get stuck on that one stupid painful thought? This doesn't make sense to me.

Another observation, if you think about it, all those "programs" that dealt with mindbody health out there have a few things in common, when we use them to treat our tms/anxiety, they all have the same goal: which is try to help us shift our focus away from our pain, our symptoms and onto something else. Programs from Dr Sarno or Dr Claire Weeke. Programs like yoga, meditation, positive selftalk,... They all do that, help us not focusing on our pain/anxiety. Help us not FEAR it. Help us not allow the symptoms to over taken our mind, our thoughts.

When your symptoms became insignificant, when it no longer the center of your thought, it just died out. For the pain symptoms to last months and years, we have to get stuck in a pain - fear - pain - fear loop. What better at holding our attention, our focus than fear? Pain created fear. Fear made all these changes to our body's chemistry which produced more pain, more fear, more pain, more fear, more.... you get the picture. Now if we can just remove one of those 2 components, our problem will be solve. Remove the pain there will be no more fear. Remove the fear, no more pain. If there is a drug that would completely remove all pain from our neck, our back, our legs... would we still be here discussing about tms? Well, we don't have that drug yet so the only thing we can do now is to remove component: Fear. We have to think of our pain/anxiety like a rubber snake. It look scary until you realize it is not real. If we can accept that the pain/anxiety is not real, it is not harmless or permanent, we're on way to a pain free life.

So my formula to conquer my pain/anxiety is:
- Remove my fear of my symptoms.
- Work on de-conditioning my body to rid myself of that left over 10% pain.
- Remove as much stress and negative thoughts from everyday living as possible to prevent tms/anxiety from coming back.

I truly think Fear is the biggest source of fuel for our tms fire. If we can elliminate fear from our thoughts, our mind, we will cure ourself of many disease. I know many people believe in what I said, but their problem is they don't know how to remove fear from their mind. For me, I just made up my mind and refuse to fear. I refuse to let fear run my life no matter what happen. Here is the 10 great willpower quotes and I hope one of them produce the motivation you need to reach your own seemingly impossible aim: removing fear from your mind.

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“To assert your willpower is simply to make up your mind that you want something, and then refuse to be put off. In short, think about what you want and hold to that thought. Believe in it as a reality, regardless of what may appear to be true. This is willpower in action, and anyone can do it.” – Phillip Cooper

“The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” – Bobby Knight

“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.” – James Gordon

“The will is the keystone in the arch of human achievement. It is the culmination of our complex mental faculties. It is the power that rules minds, men and nations.” – Thomas Parker Boyd

“If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower.” – Adolf Hitler

“Willpower is essential to the accomplishment of anything worthwhile.” – Brian Tracey

“Great souls have wills…..feeble ones have only wishes.” – Chinese Proverb

“Willpower is the key to success. Successful people strive no matter what they feel by applying their will to overcome apathy, doubt or fear.” – Dan Millman

“I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” – Pearl S. Buck

Hope this help a bit. Good luck to you Emre.

 

Hi Balto
Thank you very much for your detailed and informative reply)
I did read it 4 times !
Can i ask you couple of questions regarding your answer:
1. Is not fearing pain a decision one can make? And if you make that decision does it mean that you dont fear pain anymore?
2. Or do you still have instances where you have severe pain and then you practice willpower not to fear it?
3. How do you de-condition your body to rid yourself of that leftover pain? What do you do?
4. Sarno says in his book that the anger that you are aware of is never responsible for your pain. It is the anger repressed(the ones we are unaware of) in unconcious that gives us pain. So then how is it that your working on your everyday stresses (of which you are aware of) helps you prevent your tms coming back? So can everyday's angers that we are totally aware of also cause us pain?

Thank you very much Balto
My best wishes to you
Emre

 

Hi Emre,
Good questions. I learned about TMS around 10 months ago, and since that time have eliminated about 80-90% of my pain and other symptoms. But like you I still have a low-level, lingering pain in my shoulders, neck, and spine, as well as a few other TMS symptoms (but at much reduced frequency and intensity). And I believe I have accepted that all of my symptoms are 100% due to TMS, so I'm also struggling with trying to understand why I have some residual symptoms.

I'm currently re-reading Sarno's the Divided Mind. I think it's important to note that Sarno worked with a group of psychotherapists whom he referred patients to who did not completely respond to just the educational therapy (reading his books and attending his lectures). He recognized that it wasn't enough for all of his patients to simply know that their symptoms were due to repressed emotions, but that some people required understanding of what those repressed emotions are. Now, what is the difference between knowing and understanding, and why do some of us require a more in depth examination of our repressed emotions in order to heal than others? This I am still struggling to grasp.

But as to the question of why one would still have TMS after accepting the diagnosis 100%, I can only surmise that it is because there is still a need in the unconscious mind to distract us from repressed emotions. Until that need is removed, our unconscious will continue to protect us from feeling our emotions. It is a sign to me that I have more work to do.

 

balto and emry, I agree with Ellen. Whatever remaining pain we have is because our unconscious mind still believes
there are unresolved issues there. If so, we have to keep working to discover them, and they may not all in our childhood.
They may be current stressors (there are probably a lot of them in all our lives). Just this long, cold, snowy winter can be
enough to give us pain. We need to keep thinking sunny, happy thoughts, and not spend a lot of time wondering or
worrying why some of our pain has left us but some still remains. Move fearful thoughts into the background and push
affirmations into the foreground.

 

TMS has everything to do with your childhood, that's where we become ourselves in adulthood. But you can be "born again," to borrow a phrase. How we reacted in childhood, or how we didn't react, or how we learned to express, or not to express ourselves, becomes the way we behave as adults. The childhood is the corrupt prism that we screen our adult-events through. Bob Scaer,MD, refers to it as "corrupted memory." TMS has its deepest roots in childhood, ie, childhood is the main factor, but there are other factors involved too, especially if there is trauma somewhere or continued abuse.

Accepting TMS at the conscious level means nothing, other than you're at least willing to try at a cursory level. That's why I cited Jung, "The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams." The conscious mind can accept the information fast but the unconscious does not, for seemingly illogical reasons (it's all about shame). Your unconscious may take a long time to change depending on several obvious factors. Remember the Millay poem Dr. Sarno quoted?

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.​

TMS emanates from the deep unconscious, which is also where healing occurs. So you can talk about believing TMS at the conscious level but that doesn't mean anything regarding healing, other than, the conscious "portal" is where the new information enters the deeper unconscious. You have to believe it at the unconscious level. The deeper aspects of the brain must "accept" it for change to occur.

When I see people say they've been at this for weeks it makes me smile. After my first year of understanding TMS and having read the good doctor's work hundreds of times, I was still in pain, although heading in the right direction. From what I've seen it takes about 6 months to 2 years to heal (Dr. Sopher felt it was slightly shorter, but we both agreed that the presence of a physician expedited things). In addition, if you place time-frames and more pressures to heal faster, you paradoxically prolong your suffering. It's only when you stop looking for answers, stop trying to heal, that you finally heal. As Dr. Sarno wrote in HBP, "As long as he is in any way preoccupied with what his body is doing, the pain will continue."

I would confidently say that you never have to know what you are repressing to heal: only that you ARE repressing. The story of Helen may be the best example that.

So--the idea is to gather all the information, then stop. Stop "trying" ...and go live without worries and let your symptoms fade into light. Get involved with deep meaning and purpose in your life. Switch your obsession from body and healing to giving back and helping people. So the entire healing process is about shifting awareness from self to other.

As long as you "care" about what your body is going through, with worry and focus and monitoring, your pain will stay with you. Render pain irrelevant by not caring any more, on good days and bad days.

Steve

 

Thanks, Steve. A wonderful explanation of repressing.

You and Herbie and Forest and some others are the masters of Doctor Sarno and TMS.
I learn so much from all of you.

I'm saving your post today and would like to put it in the book Herbie and I are writing.
It could help so many people who don't think their pain is linked to their childhood.

But I'd like you to explain: We can tell our conscious mind that we believe repressed emotions cause our pain,
but how do we convince our unconscious mind we believe it? Maybe that is why some people still don't heal 100 percent.

 

Thanks, Steve. I love hearing that I don't need to work so hard on understanding my TMS and healing. There's so much better stuff to be doing!

 

Hi Walt,
thank you
Why is long cold winter giving us pain? ısnt that a conditioning in itself that cold gives pain? ıt shouldnt be that way right?

 

Great question! How do we convince our unconscious mind we believe it?

 

THank you Steve for this great great reply
So when do we know that we gathered all the informaiton we need and we should stop?

So what you are recommending is:
1. You dont have to know what you are repressing at all to heal, just know that you are repressing "sometings"
2. stop collecting info about TMS, reading and watching about TMS, go out there and live your life to the fullest by giving other people
3. believe it at the unconcious level that you have TMS and nothing else. BUT HOW DO I BELIEVE AT THE UNCONCIOUS LEVEL?

 

Emre, there are different mind body "theories" about what caused our symptoms. It could be repressed emotion/memories like Sarno and Steve said, it could be a combination of stress, trauma, sensitivity, "bewilder" like doctor Weekes taught, I could be because we are conditioned to always be in a "rush" like Ace1 said at http://www.tmshelp.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=7765 , it could be chronic stress and trauma like doctor Abraham Low said, http://www.tmshelp.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8947 ... who care what it is that caused our ill, they all said we need to live our life as if we are well and happy and confident. The truth is there is nothing wrong with our body, our body just reacted to our emotion (repressed or not) just like it react to temperature. We feel hot when the air outside is 100 F and if we stay out side for too long we may suffer from heat related symptoms. When it is under 0 degree or under we may get frost bite if we don't have enough clothes on. When our negative emotions are allowed to become chronic or traumatic, we will suffer from tms symptoms.
Happy, contented, confident, and fearless people don't get tms. Your goal is to achieve that. Have that mindset and your body will comply. You are what you think, all day long.

about the unconscious mind, I am just like you, I don't really understand it. I have a problem believing in something I can not see, or measure. I don't know where it stay, what it is made of. I guess it is just like our soul, you either believe it exist or you don't. But I know one thing for sure. You don't need to know it or understand it to get rid of your symptoms. All you have to do is do exactly like Steve said above, just forget yourself and live for "other", that's all there is to it.

 

Note to self: Read this and apply. Liberally.

Balto, once again….THANKS!