You know, whenever i talk about how terrible my life has been so far, i kind of feel guilty. I mean, my parents werent divorced, i had a sister that tried to love me in her own way and some friends. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that me as a person with my characteristics was always destined to have a hard ass life. A lot of these problems as you might notice exist only within my head, but they feel real to me, really real. I shouldve gotten help way earlier, but i didnt, because i didnt speak, because i didnt feel safe. I was just in my room having ocd attacks when trying to sleep.
Oh my gosh! This is a perfect description of how we come into the forum. I was so terrified that I would never get better. Now that I've been doing this for about 9 months and have experienced time with no pain and seen my nervous system do crazy things, I 100% know this is TMS. Time is a big factor in this-also consistency with the work!
It is! I’ve come to see this whole journey as a process of surrendering to the process itself. It’s like we’re all bucking broncos that need to be tamed. Eventually the bucking eases off, and you realise the process was teaching you how to relax all along.
Ditto
but she told me my aNice one!
As you already know, Sarno said to talk to our brain. The trick is to experiment and find exactly what our particular individual brain will respond to, and you've done exactly that. With you it's a song from Barney and for me my brain responds to me telling it that it's 'being ridiculous'.
I wonder about both of those things too, but I figure if I get to the point where I can knock the symptoms for a while, and keep successfully being able to knock them, then eventually they won’t scare me anymore because I’ll know what they are and how to make them stop quicker.
I already saw this happen with one of my symptoms last month, the first symptom to appear AFTER I had learned what TMS was. Basically all the muscles in my hands and forearms twisted and tensed up at the same time out of nowhere, and instead of panicking, I tried treating it like it was TMS and started talking out loud to it, that time and any other time I felt it pop up. I went “nooooo, stop it”/“no biting!!” like I was talking to a pet dog, “heyyy hey hey, it’s cool, we’re good” etc. like I was talking to a little kid, and one time I even (this sounds so stupid I’m almost mad that it worked but bear with me here) walked around the kitchen singing to it the chorus of my favorite song from Barney when I was six (I’m glad no one else was around to hear it lol):
Every time I did this, that symptom went away a little faster, and it also stopped happening as frequently until now in the present it rarely happens
I love this description, Ellen! The idea of the work percolating through the psyche feels so true — it really does happen slowly and naturally. People feel like they should be able to just jet-blast “the work” straight into their brains, but, of course, it doesn’t work like that. It’s more of a gentle percolation — maybe even a bit of filtration too — where things gradually seep through, the good stuff settles in, and the old patterns and fears slowly get filtered out.
I take great consolation in this wisdom coming from the two of you, great veterans of healing.
It's the "doing" and "not-doing" of TMS recovery.
I know you definitely truly get this now... your posting the other day about 'time' being the common denominator in the process showed it.
Ha! Takes a while to get it!