Day 15 Pain moving around

[Rajput21]

During the past two weeks has your pain been moving around? How has this affected your belief in the diagnosis?
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During my internship there was a lot of sitting around, so the pain was firmly rooted in my back. But going back to July 4th, when I had a few days off I noticed the pain did move around. I wasn't sitting much and there was one day, after a very long walk, that I had hip pain that resulted in a limp. At first I thought it was just because of my leg length disparity (a past problem) but it persisted at a level that didn't make sense. I remembered reading that the pain does jump around, so I took it as a positive sign that I was winning. It went away in a few days.

During that weekend I also got a really had headache. I've noticed that happening in the past when I also wasn't sitting. Another good sign I think.

This moving of the pain has reinforced the idea that this is TMS. These kinds of things are in my evidence list and they do reinforce my belief in this system. However since I know I will be doing a lot of sitting and a lot of legal work, I don't expect the pain to keep jumping around. It's firmly rooted in these activities so I expect to feel more back pain, at least until I get past some of this conditioning.

I expect this to take some time because I've spent the last three years obsessing over physical causes of my pain. I don't even know how many hours I've logged working on my body, reading about different exercises and techniques, watched youtube videos, read books and articles, etc. As a result I am a lot more flexible, considerably stronger, and have lost a lot of weight. This is great but it hasn't helped with the pain.

**As an aside, I think a lot of my issues stem from repeated failures with weight loss. So perhaps losing some more weight will make it easier to have a more healthy body image. I've tried to work on my perception of my body but that is so heavily ingrained in me and reinforced by the world around me, that I think it will be hard to really convince myself that I'm okay with my body.

 

[Forest]

DI expect this to take some time because I've spent the last three years obsessing over physical causes of my pain. I don't even know how many hours I've logged working on my body, reading about different exercises and techniques, watched youtube videos, read books and articles, etc.

And this is how TMS distracts us from our emotions. It is so easy for any symptom to create a long list of fear and anxiety in us. Knowing that our symptoms can move around with TMS has helped me reduce my stress response towards new symptoms. Some of them can still worry me, but I don't google my symptoms any more .

One of the factors behind TMS is that we have competing wants. We want to be successful in our careers, but we also do not want to have to deal with the pressure and work all of the time. We want to have the perfect body, but also don't want to have to work out and be on a diet. For me, recovering did not involve truly reconciling my competing wants. Instead all I needed to do was to understand that I had multiple desires and the anger I generated by pressuring myself to succeed.

A lot of my symptoms were generated by the fact that I was not as successful as I wanted to be. I used to beat myself up for not achieving enough and for not being successful. When I recovered I never really reconciled these feelings. I simply understood that my career generated a tremendous amount of rage and anger in me, and my symptoms began to fade away. Over time I have gained introspection into why having a successful career was so important to me and where these feelings were generated in my past. I think this has helped me grow as a person, but it was not needed in order for me to recover from my symptoms. It was enough to simply understand that I had unconscious anger and rage.

 

[Rajput21]

For me, recovering did not involve truly reconciling my competing wants. Instead all I needed to do was to understand that I had multiple desires and the anger I generated by pressuring myself to succeed.

A lot of my symptoms were generated by the fact that I was not as successful as I wanted to be. I used to beat myself up for not achieving enough and for not being successful. When I recovered I never really reconciled these feelings. I simply understood that my career generated a tremendous amount of rage and anger in me, and my symptoms began to fade away. Over time I have gained introspection into why having a successful career was so important to me and where these feelings were generated in my past. I think this has helped me grow as a person, but it was not needed in order for me to recover from my symptoms. It was enough to simply understand that I had unconscious anger and rage.

This idea that we don't have to reconcile our issues but instead gain awareness into them, is one that I'm still confused on. Hopefully you can shed some more light on the disconnect I'm having:

For some of us the healing process takes time. If we just have to understand that we are having certain feelings, shouldn't that process be relatively quick? What is taking us so much time? Do we journal to set into motion conditioning that heals? Does it take time to truly believe in our diagnosis? To change our inner voice and thought patterns?

I'll offer my body image example again. If I've felt negatively about my body since I was 7, then it seems to make sense that simply being aware that this occurs is one thought that stands against years of conditioning. It makes sense to me that it would take some time for this idea to really take hold in my mind. This is why affirmations and journaling are important. Is this right?