Physical Therapy was a bust (AKA, you all told me so!!)

Hey guys,

It’s been a while since I wrote here but I wanted to give an update on stuff. I don’t like it myself when ppl say they’re going to try something and then never come back and say how it went, and ya’ll have been so kind and supportive to me so I want to give back lol. Maybe this might help someone else out there. Sorry if this gets long!!


I’ve been going to a physical therapist for about 3 months and have seen little to no improvement. Here in order is what all we did:


-she started by giving me a set of exercises/stretches and told me to do three sets of each. For most I couldn’t even do ONE set without waking up and feeling really sore in my knees, pelvis and/or hips the next day. So I’d do one set of SOME of the exercises for a few days in a row, then get extremely sore and have to stop for a few days before starting over again.


-this confused the PT because these exercises were very basic and should’ve been easy to do ONE round of even if I had never done them before. The next thing she tried having me do was only one or two of those exercises per week, to try not to “muddy the waters” and figure out which ones were ok/not ok. This didn’t work either, because it turned out almost all except 2 of them caused pain (I think she expected it to be 1 or 2 out of like 8 that were bad, not literally almost everything).


-a couple weeks later she felt my knees and said I had a lateral tilt in both which was likely causing the pain. I got an x-ray to try and confirm but realized after I got it done that it wasn’t needed, because my mom (a nurse) pointed out I could literally see and feel exactly what she was referring to just by touching my knees (she has something similar too and showed me on herself).


-there was also the fact that it would always take anywhere from a few mins to hours or a day later for the pain to show up, which made it difficult to show her where it was. I think out of desperation there was even one session where she actually asked me to try doing a few squats to TRY and bring on the pain so I could point exactly to where it was. I did them, and only started feeling pain right as we were wrapping up the session like 10-15 mins later. She was totally puzzled by this and just said “huh…you’re a very delayed kind of person I guess”

-side note: I walked around for about 45 mins in high heels for a picture day last weekend and THAT didn’t hurt my knees that day or the next day but somehow a couple light stretches did.


-the next thing the PT did was have me try two different kinds of knee braces to see if they helped at all. I went on a walk with them on a couple of days where my knees weren’t hurting. They continued to feel okay during the walk (up a fairly steep hill) and never started hurting after the walk. No difference. Then 2 days ago, I woke up and they were hurting for literally no reason (I hadn’t even done the stretches the night before), so I thought aha now’s my chance to try the braces and see what happens. I continued having pain during the whole 30 min walk, and my knees still hurt that night after the walk was over. Then the next day (yesterday) when I woke up, the pain was mostly gone again.


-yesterday when I went to the PT and told her this, she literally just stared into space completely baffled for like 10 seconds. She asked me to show her a couple of the 5 easy exercises I was doing to make sure I was doing them correctly (I was). Again it didn’t hurt at all while showing her. She said we could try a stomach muscle exercise for a few weeks to see if maybe THAT was why I was having so much trouble (weak core strength). She had me do a couple of those and then our session was up so asked me “do you want to come back again or do you want to just keep trying to get stronger?” because at this point it was really the only thing left to try when even the most baby exercises were causing pain. I asked if she had any more suggestions/advice to give and she just said, “no twisting” and asked if I knew the proper way to bend down and pick things up.


So, that’s where I’m at now since that was literally yesterday lol. I almost thought it was funny HOW much my experience was just like a lot of the TMS stories I’ve read. On the plus side, it showed me that the way the pain is working really IS weird/unusual and that I’m not just seeing what I want to see (this lady who works with ppl with knee pain every day gave me tons of suggestions for months and couldn’t figure out what was wrong). The biggest thing imo is that for the things that seem to cause pain, they don’t cause pain EVERY time. I can do an activity one day and it won’t hurt and then do it another day and it will. It’s like sometimes it “registers” and sometimes not.

All this to say that basically, ya’ll were totally right when I first talked about going to PT a few months ago (I mentioned I was going and was warned by a few ppl that it wasn’t going to help and would just make me frustrated).

I’m going to give it ONE more month (4 weeks) where I really try my hardest to do exactly what the PT says, and that way, if I still see no progress (which I don’t think I will), I can show my brain that I did try to solve the problem the conventional way (most ppl in success stories DO try everything and work really really hard to try and get better the “normal” way before being able to accept/commit to mindbody stuff) and that I am right to be thinking outside the box. XD


I have another couple things that are more positive to talk about but I’ll do them in another post since this one’s already a wall of text lol

 

Hey @lucky_li0n_d@wg
Sorry you are still going through the symptom thing, but really, here, we don't worry to much about the details of your success or lack of it with PT. I mean, that's all PHYSICAL talk.
You wrote nothing at all about how things are going with TMS work, thoughts about where you stand with TMS, how you feel about what you've been though with the PT etc.
Until you can begin to reach into those things, you're still on the hamster wheel. Even choosing to do yet ANOTHER week of PT and "TRYING HARD" is being really hard and pressuring yourself to succeed at this without having to do the TMS work. Have you noticed you're avoiding the idea of TMS work like the plague
Most of us here have been there and done that.

What is "thinking outside the box" meaning for you?

 

I agree with Cactus, but at the same time we all get there when we get there. When the student is ready the teacher will appear, so I think this is a solid strategy (even if those of us on the other side may know better). I always encourage people to see out a physical therapy program (if they are pushing to), as the more things that don't work the better position you are in belief wise.

That said, you have to be disciplined with yourself and really be clear that this is it when it comes to physical therapy (if you are comfortable that you've exhausted that option). There's no point in completing this 4 week block. starting TMS work, and then running back to physical therapy the moment you have doubts or it gets difficult (there will be moments like that in the TMS recovery most likely) - as long as this is true then you are moving forward when it comes to this strategy

 

Ok I’m not sure if those questions were meant to be literal or rhetorical lol so I’ll go through them one by one here:

-how things are going with TMS work - the only thing I’ve been doing that could count (but isn’t focused on TMS specifically) is going to mental therapy for a while. It DOES feel good to talk about my feelings about stressful stuff in my life. BUT, I still notice I hold back a lot during those sessions - there are some family things I won’t tell/haven’t told the therapist yet bc they’re pretty intense and the stuff I do talk about, I have a habit of maybe not being as….intense?…as I feel like I should be/want to be when I talk about it. Like when I talk about someone who is a reason for my stress I still downplay and talk as polite as possible as if they were sitting there listening. When really I feel like I could verbally rip into them a lot more if I felt comfortable “letting it out”. EX: my brother and I had a private conversation about a month ago where he DID rip into someone we know and said a lot of things I really WANT to say about them but feel like I can’t/shouldn’t even they’re not around. The way he talked is the way I should be able to when I go to therapy but there’s like a mental barrier there.
The last specifically TMS-related thing I did was back in December, when I tried JournalSpeak for the first time. That’s the only time I really did try to “rip into” the ppl who cause me stress and write out all the worst thoughts I have about them. I ended up hyper focusing on my body that day (almost involuntarily) bc I wanted to see if the journal helped, and ended up having a really really BAD symptom day (that night I went to bed thinking it felt like I had gotten hit by a truck w/how many different parts were hurting lol). Then I got scared by this and never tried it again out of fear that it might not work. It sounds SO dumb writing it out but that was really my thought process.

-where I stand with TMS: I believe that TMS is real, because there are WAY too many success stories for every single one to be a coincidence or someone making things up. I 100% believe that there are people out there who had real physical pain and genuinely healed themselves with mindbody work. I just don’t know yet if it could be MY diagnosis/solution.

-how I feel about the PT - I think my reaction is…a mix of a lot of things?? I didn’t think it was going to fix me going into it, as I already learned about TMS months before trying PT, and I also thought that even if it wasn’t TMS I just had a feeling they wouldn’t be able to help me. In most of the success stories I had read, the ppl had “tried everything” first before finally succeeding with TMS work. So I thought: maybe I need to be like them, maybe I have to show myself that I HAVE “tried everything” before I’ll be willing to take the plunge. One of the things almost all of them tried was physical therapy, so that’s where I got the incentive to do it from. I feel sort of frustrated with my PT, even tho I didn’t expect her to be able to help. She just didn’t seem very understanding of how a 24 year old could have such trouble with such easy exercises. I get the impression that she thinks I’m a little bit crazy and doesn’t look forward to seeing me bc I’m a total mystery case for her.

-what “thinking outside the box” means to me- to me it means being able to see past the “every symptom you have means something is dangerous or wrong and needs a physical solution ASAP” mentality I’ve had taught to me (like most people) my whole life

 

I’m with you, this is exactly it. There’s no success story I’ve read where the person’s FIRST thing they tried was TMS work. Most of them say they got checked out by multiple different doctors, had dozens of tests (I already did that part for the most part), and tried all different methods for months or years to relieve the symptoms. It was only after all that that they became convinced and/or desperate enough to fully commit to TMS work. I just want to make sure I’m not doing something foolish and using process of exhausting all other options seems like a good way to make sure I’m not.

 

@lucky_li0n_d@wg

What do you think you’re suffering from, if it isn’t mind-body/TMS?

 

Well in order for it to NOT be, it would have to mean that somehow I developed many issues in many parts of my body in a row (ears, sacrum/SI joints/low back, knees, elbows/wrists). If I were going to go completely physical and throw TMS out the window, this is the explanation I would let the skeptical/scared side of my brain give it:

-sound sensitivity/nerve pain from certain loud sounds/frequencies: physical nerve damage from a virus (likely covid)

-SI joint/sacrum/upper and lower back pain: either some inflammatory problem with a big scary name OR this other thing that is structural/non inflammatory (it would be more likely to be this, bc we think we saw it on an x-ray and from the dr. Googling I did, the pain doesn’t usually act the way inflammatory conditions would. My labs were all normal too. This is just me being nervous bc I couldn’t get an MRI to look at it bc of the issue w/my ears and sound sensitivity). The fact that it started only six months after my ear issues started, despite never having pain there at ALL before that, was just terrible luck and nothing else.

-knees: the lateral tilt the PT (and my mom) showed me that’s there + me spending a month back in December using only my knees and not my back to bend down out of fear of hurting my back (I don’t think they’re wrong that there’s a tilt - my mom has it too and she showed me with her fingers exactly where it is/what it looks like, they’re easy to see/feel. But as I learned from TMS books, just bc a structural difference is there doesn’t automatically mean it’s causing the pain)

-elbows/wrists: golfer’s elbow. This one even I have a hard time explaining as physical not just bc of how it acts but bc it really DID come on randomly. The ONLY thing I can think of is that a few days before it started, I did 3 sets of 10 of a very easy arm exercise after not having done arm exercises in a pretty long time. If one of them is going to get better by TMS work, this is the one I’m betting on the most.


NOTE: the virus/Covid WAS the thing that seemed to be the “inciting” incident for my ears and then all the other symptoms came on within the year after that, which is actually the biggest piece of info in FAVOR of it being TMS imo

 

Our minds try to make sense, in the way we’ve learned (medical reason) even when a bunch of strange, random and unrelated “problems” plague us, cause worry and obsession.
It’s the worry and obsession that are a big red flag to TMS.

What might you fear if it is only TMS and nothing structural or medical?

 

oh that’s not what I meant, maybe I worded it weirdly. I mean that by the time the ppl on a lot of the success stories found OUT about TMS, they had already tried everything else. Or, they were suggested it in the past by someone at some point but totally disregarded it/didn’t look into it at all bc they thought it sounded dumb. What you said is right, there are a LOT of people who read the books and then immediately stopped physical therapy/whatever other traditional things they were doing to try and get better, and had huge success. I’m sorry that the way I worded it made it seem like I was discounting you or others who are part of the people who did that and were successful!

 

well if it’s NOT TMS then I don’t have anything to fear because the pain doesn’t mean I’m hurting myself. Like I said above tho, it is challenging to do the mental work because it’s a skill that is hard to do, and learning any skill that is hard to do is “scary” to our brains especially if it’s something we’ve never done before/don’t think we can do

 

I'm going to make a big guess here because I don't know you and your previous story.....however, I'm going to guess that YOUR TMS BRAIN IS LOVING THIS. It's working exactly as planned. Create pain to create DISTRACTION. You've just given it 3 months of not having to deal with the emotions it doesn't want you to feel. And "Hurrah!" it is saying right this very second, "I get another 4 weeks reprieve!"

What if, and this totally up to you, instead of doing that 4 weeks of Physical Therapy, you did 4 weeks of TMS work? When I say that, do you get a little uncomfortable? Is there a little part of your brain squirming? Do you hear your "lizard brain" saying, "Noooooooooooo!"
That's the way this stuff works. The lizard brain tries to control you.
The good news?
YOU control your arms and legs and physical body. The lizard can only try to persuade you of something....and it's a convincing Siren for sure.
But ultimately, if you want stop the pain, and if that means finding the emotions and stopping going to physical therapy and instead pick up a pen and paper, you get to control where you go and where you don't go and what you do. It's up to you if you want to choose resolving the TMS even if your lizard is trying every trick in the book to get you not to go there.

Anyway, just some food for thought for you. I wish you well.

 

Exactly!

It’s not a “catch 22” though, and anyone can do it. With mind-body/TMS work you'll gradually show your brain that it’s safe to feel and express emotions—because you’ll be doing it in controlled, safe ways (like journaling or writing unsent letters), while also learning how to self-soothe and calm yourself and therefore your brain.

And you don’t do it all at once—you do it in small, manageable steps. That’s what actually breaks the loop. Each small step reduces the sense of threat, builds confidence, and teaches your system that nothing bad happens when you go there.

That’s the opposite of being stuck. That’s the way out.

 

Oh, sweetheart, the answer is ALL right here.
You got really scared because that is the stuff your TMS brain is trying to stop you from reaching.

Same happened to me the first time I tried. My heart started pounding like crazy, I threw the e-reader I was writing on across the room and said, "I rather feel the pain than this!" But the next day I went back and tried again started with writing, "That was weird........." and kept writing from there. My many months long pain stopped that day while I was finishing up that writing session.