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Numbness and Burning Neck Pain

MyTMSJourney

Newcomer
For the past 6 weeks I keep getting this numbness and burning in my neck. It sits at the top of my back and up into my neck. Ok It can be extremely painful and lasts for days. Goes away and a week later it comes back. It has to be TMS, there isn’t any other explanation. Anyone else ever have those sensations with TMS?
 
Hmm. Okay, so welcome to the forum, @MyTMSJourney. I noticed that nobody has responded, which is probably because you are looking for a response from someone with the same specific symptoms. This is a common request by newcomers, but it is actually antithetical to what is required for recovery from TMS.

To join the discussion, try the following:

Briefly describe your symptoms in the most general way possible. Symptom details are irrelevant because everyone's symptoms are too different. The universality of our TMS symptoms comes from the emotional reasons for their expression.

It's important to tell us two things :
- that you've been medically examined to rule out a serious condition requiring immediate medical intervention
- what resources from the
TMS/mindbody world have you encountered and how they led you here.
Another way to describe this is to concentrate on the reasons you're posting on this forum rather than a typical chronic pain forum.

Ask your questions within the framework of TMS knowledge and education. The fewer physical details the better.

We can't diagnose, after all. We can not definitively tell you that you have TMS, we can only relate our own experiences. Symptom details really don't matter if it's TMS at the heart of them, because your neck pain is inherently the same as someone else's IBS or plantar fasciitis.

Good luck!
 
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Thank you for that information! Sorry if I didn’t explain correctly, I thought I did. I have have seen a doctor and there is no structural damage. I have had other instances of TMS that I’ve worked through but this just seems very different. I found this website through research on Sarno and TMS which let me to Dr Shubert and then to this forum. I’m so amazed at how many people know about TMS!
 
Okay, that's great. So... what can we do to help?

What we call "reassurance seeking", which is searching for others with the same symptoms, is okay, IF you acknowledge that this is what you're doing, but in our experience it's not very effective, due to the tricky ability of our TMS brains to reject other people's experiences as "not close enough to my exact symptoms". It's more efficient to just let it go.

I don't know your age or how long ago you successfully recovered from previous bouts of TMS, but your fear surrounding "it feels different" neglects to take into consideration the changes in our bodies and our psyches that naturally take place over time. We ain't none of us getting any younger, for one thing, and the inevitability of mortality becomes more influential in our unconscious thoughts as the years go by. Let's also not forget that the last 10 years has been kind of a s*** show, and the years before then were already stressful due to technology and information overload.

So it's bound to be different!

Did you ever "do the work" as we say around here? We've got two free programs; the one I always recommend is the Structured Educational Program on the main TMSWiki.org site. No cost, and no signup required. You'll probably have to put it up with our server problems for another few weeks, which founder Forest is working on even now (the top post over at the General Discussion subforum explains what's going on).
 
I have found numbness and burning to be very common symptoms in TMS. Since you have seen a doctor and ruled out any serious conditions I'd say it's safe to say you are dealing with TMS. Now I guess you need just apply the principles. I usually start with asking the question, what's going on in my life.
 
I agree. I have been going to therapy as well as working through the process. I'm currently reading "Unlearn Your Pain" by Howard Shubiner which has a full 28 day program to get you through TMS. It's been a rough road and this neck burn doesn't want to let up so there must be something very subconsious going on. This has been an ongoing journey and has taken me about 5 years to accept that some of the pain I've been experiencing is in fact TMS.
 
It's been a rough road and this neck burn doesn't want to let up so there must be something very subconsious going on. This has been an ongoing journey and has taken me about 5 years to accept that some of the pain I've been experiencing is in fact TMS.

5 well invested years. The fact you are not only aware but believe that something subconscious is going on shows that you’ve really taught your brain and mind the knowledge!
Myself, I have sort of found two arms or branches of this method: the belief/knowlege to mind/brain and the other component is mind/brain to body. That too can take repetition and time (as Dr. Schubiner kindly points out to “unlearn”). For some it all happens simultaneously. For myself it has been more of a jigsaw puzzle “assembly” or “alignment”. It sounds like you are on your way through this journey.
 
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