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Thank you, Anne, for sharing this. It summarizes so well my own assessment of the causes behind my TMS. I find your posts so illuminating and helpful. I'm so glad to hear that your symptoms have improved significantly.

 

Eskimoeskimo, believing 100 percent that my back pain was caused by TMS and not structural was also hard for me.
I was 82 when the pain began after I lifted something the wrong way (a case of 36 cans of beer!) Reading Dr. Sarno's
Healing Back Pain and learning about TMS I believed in it about 90 percent and still had some back pain. It took
several months of not thinking structural and I finally healed. Believing in TMS 100 percent is not easy for most of us.
Keep working on it.

 

Eskimo.......Achieving 100% belief is not easy, I can tell you that much, especially since the pain is so real. We grow up experiencing real, physical causes for pain.........you fall and skin your knee, you feel pain........you bang your head, you feel pain......someone hits you, you feel pain, etc, etc. We don't grow up thinking that pain can be caused by our brains and not by something physical so it's a hard concept to fully accept. One of the things I did to help me was I tried to tell myself how stupid the pain I was in was. Sometimes, I'd wake up out of the blue with terrible back pain. I'd say to myself, "At the gym, I'm lifting 85lb dumbells off the floor, I'm putting a bar with 240lbs on top of my shoulders and squatting, I'm doing a hyperextension machine for lower back and using the entire weight stack, and I leave there and I'm fine. BUT, I injure my back while laying in bed sleeping????? Come on, what a load of BS!!!" I just try to realize how ridiculous the pain is and that helps me see that it must just be TMS. Laying in bed is not such a strenuous activity that I'd hurt myself doing it!! LOL
Good luck!! You can beat TMS!

 

I think this is my new mantra!

 

Particularly because I'm very active, but my pain is at its worst when sitting down doing computer work.

 

So do you feel like the conscious reminders sink in over time to the unconscious? I'd like to know how people feel about this... do surface level messages and repetition start to turn into belief?

 

Yes, I wonder if it's just a physical manifestation of lots of anxiety, rather than the physical manifestation of something repressed. I'm very aware of the anxiety, but maybe my brain uses the physical outlet when there's more than my floodgates can 'tolerate'

 

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay