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Old: Book group teleconference January 19 at 2 EST

Forest

Forest

Beloved Grand Eagle
Hi everyone. The weekly chats just seem to be getting better and better, and I am really excited about the idea of getting our book group going again. We have such great discussions in our chat room, and I'm eager to give them a try in a teleconference. It seemed to work very well the time we tried it.

This Saturday, January 19th, I'm excited to announce a teleconference based book group. This week we'll be discussing chapters 6-9 of The Great Pain Deception by Steven Ray Ozanich and chapters 1-3 of When the Body Says No, by Gabor Mate. While we will cover the two books, everyone is welcome to join the discussion, whether they have read the books or not. Both books can be read online or downloaded to your computer today by purchasing the Amazon Kindle version. Alternatively, you can get the basics by reading the following three threads:
  1. GPD, chapter 7
  2. GPD, chapter 8
  3. Gabor Mate
Again, though, while the books will be discussed, anyone is very welcome to join. The more the better!

We'll be using Fuze Meeting, the software that we use for webinars. Previously I had announced that the discussion would start at 2:30, but I'm moving it back to 2:20 to give us a bit more time. However, I'll start the software at 2:00 Eastern Sarno Time this Saturday, so people can start downloading and testing the software. Please show up early! In fact, if you haven't participated in a webinar that we've hosted using Fuze meeting before or if you just don't feel comfortable with Fuze meeting yet, I encourage you to download the software today, so that you know that you will be ready by Saturday.

I'm looking forward to chatting with everyone on Saturday. Make sure to bring your best questions and ideas!


How to join our Fuze meetings and webinars

To join our Fuze webinars there are two simple steps: join our regular chat room at tmswiki.org/chat and join the audio call.

The first step is to join our chat room. Just point your browser at tmswiki.org/chat, scroll down, and follow the instructions.

The second step is to join the audio call. You can either do this with your phone or your computer.
  1. To connect with your phone, just dial +16465837415. Enter the pin code 21558901 when prompted.
  2. Connecting with your computer may allow you to see people via webcam, may be a bit more comfortable, and may save you long distance charges. To connect with your computer, please watch the following short video.


The above video has important instructions, so please do not skip it. To follow the instructions, you will need this link. If it asks for a meeting number, the number is 18311499.​

If you have any problems connecting, just ask them below.

Welcome to the webinar!
 
Last night, I woke up at about 3 am and saw this in "Stress and Emotional Competence," chapter 3 of Garbor Mate's When the Body Says No:

"Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence" (p. 28).

And Mate goes on on the next page:

"Physiological stress responses can be evoked when the threat is outside conscious awareness or even when the individual may believe himself to be stressed in a 'good' way."

It certainly seems like Dr. Mate and Dr. Sarno are both on the same page about emotions repressed into the unconscious where they can cause biochemical changes in the patient's brain without the patient even being aware that that process is going on, doesn't it? True, Dr Sarno is dealing with the development of TMS pain symptoms that he believes are controlled by the autonomic nervous system, and Mate is dealing with diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis and scleroderma that he thinks are controlled by the autoimmune system, but both believe that all these conditions and syndromes are related to repressed emotionality in the patient's unconscious mind.

Mate's idea that you can be experiencing tons of stress and not even notice it because you have been conditioned by early childhood trauma to regard stress as somehow normal ('the way it is for you') seems to harmonize quite well with what Dr Sarno says about a typical pattern in the biographies he notices in so many of his TMS patients where they have had a rocky time in childhood - being bullied by peers, ignored by parents, or molested even - that sets them up for pain symptoms when they are confronted with traumatic life events later on as adults.

It sounds as though both Sarno and Mate are moving toward a unified field theory about the etiology of diseases in humans based a systems analysis of how the autonomic nervous system, the autoimmune system, and the biochemistry of the brain all interact to produce healthy and/or diseased states. I would think that even if you crunched all the numbers and did tons of CT brain scans, you still have to return to the individual patient-psychotherapist relationship in order to resolve the underlying emotional problems that lead to pain conditions and autoimmune disorders. In other words you just can't give someone a drug that will cure these conditions. The patient-psychotherapist role must still remain central to the healing process. Otherwise, as Dr. Sarno points out, you are just engaging in symptomatic treatment, which is not a real cure.
 
Beautifully stated, MorComm, that is how I see it as well. I'm reminded of the poem of the blind men and the elephant:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~philclub/Elephant.htm

It's pretty amazing how they can look at different things and still find the same underlying causative psychology.

Psychology is actually the thing that I find most interesting when I read TMS books. I like to know how each author characterizes the tension that leads to the symptoms. Often, I think that their understanding of psychology, since it frequently arises from their own introspection, tells you a lot about the psychology and experience of the writer and perhaps the time period that they were writing in. For example, I'd be curious to know if Freud had a strong attachment to an idealized mother figure and that he feared his father. From that background it would be easy to see how he would come up with the Oedipus Complex.

MorComm said:
Last night, I woke up at about 3 am and saw this in "Stress and Emotional Competence," chapter 3 of Garbor Mate's When the Body Says No:

"Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence" (p. 28).

And Mate goes on on the next page:

"Physiological stress responses can be evoked when the threat is outside conscious awareness or even when the individual may believe himself to be stressed in a 'good' way."
Click to expand...
This reminds me of the idea that the body is the unconscious mind. Consider, for example, the following quote, from p. 2 of Great Pain Deception:
“However, in the 1990s, neuroscientist Candice Pert, PhD, shared her discovery that the body, not the brain, is the subconscious mind, and that it communicates via neuropeptides, which are molecules that are produced by every thought we have. Pert discovered that thoughts have a biochemical component: While thoughts are real, neuropeptides are real, and the brain is real, what we think of as mind, is actually just the ego in disguise.” [Alberto Villoldo: The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers, p. 164]
Click to expand...
 
The concept of the Unconscious as being lodged in the physical body sounds a lot like the Neo-Freudian Marxist revisionist broodings of Norman O. Brown in Love's Body. Reminds me of William Blake's "Human Form Divine" too.
 
MorComm said:
The concept of the Unconscious as being lodged in the physical body sounds a lot like the Neo-Freudian Marxist revisionist broodings of Norman O. Brown in Love's Body. Reminds me of William Blake's "Human Form Divine" too.
Click to expand...
Interesting. At some point I'd love to read Candace Pert's book (the one mentioned in the quote), but I'm even more interested in the Sapolsky book, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." That came up during the chat and I've started looking at it. It looks terrific.

By the way, did you get a chance to make all of the points that you wanted to make during the book discussion? It sounded like you had some interesting points to make.
 
Don't know if I did have any more "points" to make because I didn't really have a set of prompt cards. Just ad libbing on the spur of the moment! Steve sure is amped up on his book!
 
JanAtheCPA said:
I still think this is pretty funny. Are you going to continue with it after March 10?
Click to expand...
I'm not sure. Pretty much everyone just says EST in the summer anyway, right? Usually I say "New York Time," so that people don't get confused between EST and EDT (because of daylight savings time, we switch from EST to EDT on March 10). I suppose that if Dr. Sarno switches from EST to EDT on March 10 (I have no reason to believe he doesn't), then we can still call it EST/Eastern Sarno Time on March 11, even though it refers to Daylight savings time. Aha!

BTW, for anyone else reading this, this thread refers to an old meeting and is out of date. As of today, Feb 8, 2013, the next meeting is on Feb 9. The corresponding thread describing the next meeting is:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/feb-9-discussion-group.1484/
 
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