New here, Day 1 - lower back

Hello - I'm 49 years old, pretty healthy, and have had occasional severe back pain over the past 15 years, brought on by muscle spasms. The debilitating pain usually lasts 3 days to a week after spasms stop. About 1 1/2 years ago, I had an episode of muscle spasm pain that was severe, with spasms over 4 days...but after the spasms stopped, the lower back pain hung around and has been chronic ever since, even without spasms. I have been afraid that the spasms damaged something. I do have disc degeneration, but even my doctors at Mayo didn't think the degeneration was severe enough to cause this kind of pain. I found this site a few days ago. I was on a 7 hour drive alone in my car, and my lower back had been screaming at me by hour 3 (not unusual). At a rest stop, I looked for a podcast on back pain and found one that introduced me to TMS. After listening to the podcast and thinking about whether there was anything going on in my life 1 1/2 years ago that was very emotionally painful, I hit on something very specific that happened that exact time and could have been a trigger. I thought about that and talked myself through it for the next two hours -- realizing that I was still very upset about it -- and after I'd worked myself up into crying about it, realized that the pain was gone in my back. Soooooo...I'm all-in with regard to this journey of seeing if I can get control over this pain. My back started hurting pretty badly half-way through my workday today, so I signed up for this wiki over lunch and watched the intro videos with John Stossel. That's my intro - nice to find this and meet you, and onward and upward.

 

Welcome pepper, great that you already found evidence of how the mind and body can interact. Building evidence is an important aspect of getting better.