Day 8 Reading the Divided Mind...

Today I was reading The Divided Mind. This is an extract that talked to me a lot, from Adrea Leonard-Segal’s chapter :

« Getting better from TMS is learning how to extract yourself from needing recognition from others and learning to parent yourself in perhaps a kinder, gentler, and more benevolent way than one may have actually experienced during childhood. (…) It is learning that if someone seems upset with you, this feeling is often displaced and you are not in fault. It is learning that it is even okay if someone does get angry with you. It is learning not to be afraid to take care of yourself psychologically, to say « no » when you want and « yes » when you want to. It is about learning that almost all of the time that you feel guilty, it is inapprobriate, in that you cannot be responsible for taking care of everyone’s feeling. »

This is me. I didn’t really find myself in Sarno’s descrition of goodist or perfectionnist (maybe because I feel like I’m never doing enough ?) but this right here, it is me.

And also this :

« The TMS patient is the former child who learned that speaking up might aggravate the frazzled adult in his life, who might get angry : this was scary. »

This is my entiere childhood and teens in one sentence. My dad was (still is) a coleric, sad and tired man. I learned to be very silent, to never disrupt him, to do every thing I could to calm him. Even when I felt he was wrong, even cruel.

Anyway, this give me things to reflect.

A good night to all of you !

 

Hi Sacha O,

I had forgotten this great quote, so explicit in pointing to the common personality view of the average "TMSr"! Thank you. It can't be more clear than that.

I want to respond that just by knowing this, seeing this in ourselves, and attributing our symptoms to these ingrained views and habits to "stay safe" in our childhood --that we still carry on with today, is enough to reduce and eliminate symptoms in my experience. I am saying that our awareness of these patterns, without necessarily changing them, is very potent medicine. Good luck in your journey.

Andy B

 

Andrea's quote is definitely on-target. Thanks, Sacha, for sharing it here. We can only be "our brothers' keeper" to some extent, but people have to relie ont themselves, too. I've had friends who just leaned on me and others, dumping their problems on us to solve for them. I learned to not become so involved with them. A neighbor once told me, the day I moved into the house next to hers, "Don't tell me your problems, and I won't tell you mine." That was good advice and we lived well with it the ten years I was there.

Andy, about our childhoods. Many of us blame our parents for not making our childhood happier, more loved, or stable. I just read that some U.S. Presidents had dysfunctional fathers that were alcoholics, abusive to their wives or children. They included Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Gerald Ford, and Barack Obama. The thing is to forgive our fathers or mothers. They did the best they could and probably had their own TMS pain from repressed emotions that came from their boyhood. I put myself in my parents' shoes and it helped me to understand and appreciate them better, and to forgive them for divorcing when I was seven and leaving me with feelings of abandonment and insecurity I had repressed for years, until I learned about Dr. Sarno and TMS.

 

That is so true about our own parents having TMS pain, repressed emotions, baggage from childhood, and so on! I think that learning about TMS has allowed me to understand and see my mother in a much deeper and compassionate way than ever before.

 

It is about learning that almost all of the time that you feel guilty, it is inapprobriate, in that you cannot be responsible for taking care of everyone’s feeling. I LIKE THIS!!!