Hi Everyone,
Just discovered this site, what a relieve and really great that so much knowledge and experiences are being shared here! Good to recognize I am not going crazy ;-)
I am from Holland, and here TMS is not so much of a 'thing', people look at me as if I am crazy when I tell them about it.
I want to share an experience with you and wonder if anyone with the same experience or an opinion about it.
I stopped smoking in January '20. After 13 years of smoking. The first couple of weeks were surprisingly easy.
After two weeks I started getting depressed an anxious. Fine, I expected this already as an effect of nicotine withdrawal. However, I started to get a lot of physical symptoms simultaneously (which was the same when my attempt to stop smoking failed 2 years ago, which was the reason I started again...).
And when I say a lot of symptoms, I mean a lot; abdominal pain (stabbing pain), pain in my testicles, pain in all my stomach, leg cramps, pain in my leg which I thought was an injury, but never went away, tinnitus, heart palpations, high blood pressure, headaches, RSI (pain in both arms and fingers), skin disease (psoriasis), itching hand and feet, sore throat, chest pain/cramps, feeling of being choked, pain in stomach, and so on...
Note: I was always really healthy, I sport a lot and never had real health issues..
On top of this I developed health anxiety, which I discovered thanks to you guys on this forum is also a TMS symptom. Health anxiety makes everything 10x worse. I was losing my mind.
Then I realized that this just couldn't be. It couldn't be that I was always healthy and suddenly, just when I should be healthier because I stopped smoking, I get all these symptoms, one after the other. Because I was aware of the TMS concept I started reading into it and I am pretty sure that this could be nothing else than TMS. I did some exercises to see if I can pull some repressed emotions out. While I didn't succeed fully yet, at least I succeeded partially (discovered a couple of things - bad childhood etc.) and while I was in that process, I developed new symptoms. Painful and twitching fingers. Scared to death for MS or MND.. Of course. Perfect distraction for the emotions I try to get out of there.
However, I realized that smoking was a tool for my unconsciousness to cope with the repressed emotions.
Imagine you smoke 15 cigarettes a day, that are 15 times 10 minutes of distraction a day. Every time you are not busy with work or your kids, you go smoking.
Every time you smoke, and you deal with your emotions, you are dealing with your emotions while you are giving your brain a dopamine kick from smoking. So you teach your brain to associate bad emotions with a dopamine kick (not sure, but this is my theory). It not so bad to deal with sh*t when you are high on dopamine all day...
So my hypotheses:
1. Smoking is another tool of the unconsciousness to cover up for repressed emotions
2. Just like any other drugs or bad habits, this could be for a lot of people the reason they actually smoke..?
3. If you stop smoking without replacing for an alternative distraction, you will develop physical symptoms (or get an emotional outburst).
Apologies for this long text. I am really curious what you think about all of this.
Thanks!
Just discovered this site, what a relieve and really great that so much knowledge and experiences are being shared here! Good to recognize I am not going crazy ;-)
I am from Holland, and here TMS is not so much of a 'thing', people look at me as if I am crazy when I tell them about it.
I want to share an experience with you and wonder if anyone with the same experience or an opinion about it.
I stopped smoking in January '20. After 13 years of smoking. The first couple of weeks were surprisingly easy.
After two weeks I started getting depressed an anxious. Fine, I expected this already as an effect of nicotine withdrawal. However, I started to get a lot of physical symptoms simultaneously (which was the same when my attempt to stop smoking failed 2 years ago, which was the reason I started again...).
And when I say a lot of symptoms, I mean a lot; abdominal pain (stabbing pain), pain in my testicles, pain in all my stomach, leg cramps, pain in my leg which I thought was an injury, but never went away, tinnitus, heart palpations, high blood pressure, headaches, RSI (pain in both arms and fingers), skin disease (psoriasis), itching hand and feet, sore throat, chest pain/cramps, feeling of being choked, pain in stomach, and so on...
Note: I was always really healthy, I sport a lot and never had real health issues..
On top of this I developed health anxiety, which I discovered thanks to you guys on this forum is also a TMS symptom. Health anxiety makes everything 10x worse. I was losing my mind.
Then I realized that this just couldn't be. It couldn't be that I was always healthy and suddenly, just when I should be healthier because I stopped smoking, I get all these symptoms, one after the other. Because I was aware of the TMS concept I started reading into it and I am pretty sure that this could be nothing else than TMS. I did some exercises to see if I can pull some repressed emotions out. While I didn't succeed fully yet, at least I succeeded partially (discovered a couple of things - bad childhood etc.) and while I was in that process, I developed new symptoms. Painful and twitching fingers. Scared to death for MS or MND.. Of course. Perfect distraction for the emotions I try to get out of there.
However, I realized that smoking was a tool for my unconsciousness to cope with the repressed emotions.
Imagine you smoke 15 cigarettes a day, that are 15 times 10 minutes of distraction a day. Every time you are not busy with work or your kids, you go smoking.
Every time you smoke, and you deal with your emotions, you are dealing with your emotions while you are giving your brain a dopamine kick from smoking. So you teach your brain to associate bad emotions with a dopamine kick (not sure, but this is my theory). It not so bad to deal with sh*t when you are high on dopamine all day...
So my hypotheses:
1. Smoking is another tool of the unconsciousness to cover up for repressed emotions
2. Just like any other drugs or bad habits, this could be for a lot of people the reason they actually smoke..?
3. If you stop smoking without replacing for an alternative distraction, you will develop physical symptoms (or get an emotional outburst).
Apologies for this long text. I am really curious what you think about all of this.
Thanks!
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