Day 9 Sleep update; also, not quitting the SEP

Hi everyone,

First, I wanted to share that my sleep has improved in the past several nights despite being awoken by sick kids many times and being sick myself. I think this is because I am really dealing with my emotions during the day. I'm also more at peace with not sleeping as much as I'd like to. Before I go to sleep, I say to my brain, "Do whatever you need to do in the night, and process whatever you need to process. But there's not need to scare me awake, because these things aren't dangerous and we can talk about them in the daytime, long after the birds have awakened." (That last part is because I am hoping that sometime soon my brain will sleep past the birds, who start chirping just before dawn!)

I also just saw an old post by @JanAtheCPA mentioning that people often quit the SEP at around Day 10 (today's Day 9 for me!) because their TMS brains are really throwing the symptoms/resistance at them hard at this point. Definitely the case for me with the symptoms! Yesterday a whole bunch of facial pain and sinus and ear symptoms came back in full force.

Jan, you stopped my temptation to stop the SEP in its tracks with that comment. Thanks!

Hard journaling today about a bad boyfriend.

Having trouble accepting what is apparently normal sight, but feels blurry/unsafe to me at distance. I guess I'm used to straining my eyes to constantly scan the horizon for danger. Which is apparently not normal visual behavior. It's really hard not to do that.

Does anybody else have this experience? I'm actually straining my eyes by trying to see crystal clear way far away. Trying to "float" a la Claire Weekes.

 

I went to get glasses. The Optometrist was curious. He said most people my age (59) with my slight astigmatism wouldn't necessarily want glasses or Contacts.
I told him I have to be able to distinguish a Fast ball from a Curveball...most guys my age don't have to do that. I got quite obsessed with my vision and had a lot of issues getting to the 20/15 vision I wanted versus the 20/25 I had. I would spend long times trying to see stuff 500 feet away....Your experience reminded me how obsessed i was with it.

I noticed cleaning the bathroom this weekend I haven't worn them in months, because I don't like leaving my dog alone on any day good enough to play ball.. The small amount of blur I have doesn't keep me from doing anything at work which includes fine finish ...I occasionally need some mild readers for uber small stuff, but otherwise...nothing.

TMS is a form of OCD..it is just OCD of the Body. It sounds like you and I both went through fixations of visual stuff, which I am sure, like any other system is an easily transferred object of obsession

https://thealterlife.com/article/emotional-causes-of-disease-by-louise-hay/ (Emotional causes of disease by Louise Hay)

That is a catalogue compiled by Louise Hay... it's pretty accurate. She was a therapist and started associating specific emotional problems with specific symptoms. Sarno disagreed with this idea, but I have found her to be correct a lot of the time. I would have laughed at this and called it Hippy bullshit....until I found out how much I wasn't understanding. I tried to paste a direct link, but if you scroll down to 'E' for 'Eyes' , there are quite a few with vision.

I never did the affirmations, but I used her catalogue as a cheat sheet to find repressed anger quicker....sort of like a questionnaire. It's helped a lot. It might give you a good nudge? It's certainly helped me in multiple TMS episodes

peace

 

Thank you! This is super helpful. Yes, I agree that it is a form of OCD which is also TMS. Claire Weekes calls it sensitization...you and I have had the experience of being way more attuned to our sense of vision and the sensations it brings than most people. This makes a lot of sense to me in my case, because I have CPTSD, and when you are constantly on alert for danger, the sense of sight is crucially important. Thus I don't feel safe when I don't have superhuman vision.

So, getting used to and accepting merely "human" vision is hard. But I'm working on it!

Hay's catalog seems spot on with the eyes!

 

So many of the things on her list are well known colloquial expressions.
"he's got me under his THUMB"
"Can't wrap my HEAD around it"
"Can't SEE my way through this"
"Get off my BACK"...etc. They aren't all like that, but enough of them are to make guessing the source of anger into sort of a game. I usually know when I'm on the right track because the "whatever" starts to melt away

 

@Baseball65 I'm slowly getting used to normal-person vision (as opposed to hypervigilant vision) and it's like living in a different world. Not constantly straining to see the horizon. Just looking at what I'm actually doing and letting the rest fade into the background.
It's scary, too.
And sometimes tolerating blur? What you resist persists...I'm trying to allow whatever. Definitely got only about 3 hours of broken sleep last night so there's that, too, affecting vision. Just...onward...whatever...
I'm kind of wondering if my near vision has been strained primarily because I'm working so hard at seeing at all distances at all times. If I can kick this part of the TMS I bet I'll be able ot read comfortably again!