This really resonated with me as well, I forgot to mention. It is as if self-scrutinizing TMS, and always finding the symptoms there, has become my comfort zone.
On a related note, it made a lot of sense to see that Alan emphasized hyper-vigilance as a strong factor in the development of TMS. I have such a strong urge to examine TMS, to check what it's doing, like holding in my hand and looking at every angle. And I know that I've always been hyper-vigilant, about everything. The past year suddenly I've developed this concern about clothes moths getting to my woolens, despite having never once seen a clothes moth in my apartment, nor having discovered any damage to my clothes. A normal person might take a few precautions, but I've waged a completely over the top war on moths. I've checked my clothes over and over again, checked the screens in my windows over and over again, gone through boxes of moth balls, shined a flashlight in the dark corners of my closets every day ... Jeeze, this even sounds crazy to me. I have all sorts of examples of things like this going back long before pain. I just need to check things over and over again, to make sure they're right, and no amount of checking ever resolves my anxiety. So yea, vigilance. I know I do this with my neck.
A "labyrinth of pain, doubt, fear, self-loathing" is precisely how I would describe it as well. I'm 'glad' that you mentioned self-loathing in there (though of course not glad you experienced it), because more and more I'm realizing how prominent this is for me. The constant self-loathing is searing. And I also notice a dramatic drop off in pain symptoms if somehow the stars align and I feel somehow more confident in the midst of a conversation.
My dear eskimo, this is a brave post and I am half surprised, half not surprised that it hasn't garnered more responses. I think this maybe because it is too close to the bone and this can be unnerving, however this is the very vulnerability that I find so human, so beautiful and so truly redemptive.
God alone knows I have lost myself in the examination of my tms-inducing minutiae. I pass through phases when I am seduced by it again, which I follow with a searing rejection. These are the inner conflicts from which tms is born. Mostly I rest in a peaceful state of ambivalence with them but every now and then something, someone sparks against me and the battle, the self-loathing, the whole shebang is as visceral and cruel as it ever was.
This is perplexing but it does dramatically highlight for me the
self-destructive chinks through which tms insinuates itself. This madness thrives on self-criticism and whether it has us hunting for moths or engaging in equally bizarre or fruitless ventures (of which everyone here can stake a claim), it is nothing more than the machinery of perfection. We can call it vigilence, anxiety, control, pain, that huge catalogue of woes we all know so well but it remains the same; brutal, uncompromising, unkind, crushing and indefatigable.
For me these emotional storms come less and less. They are triggered by stress, mostly malevolent stress directed our way by my in laws, but also by those rare people who are able to stoke dreams and desires that we all do our best to lay peacefully to rest. Unmet dreams, especially those we vested huge belief and energy into have their own cycles of recurrance and poignancy as we age, and they possess an uncanny ability to appear as real and vital as they once did. It is these losses, heartbreaks and betrayals that derail us and generate the various coping strategies that eventually devolve into tms.
The way out is to begin to recognise that our lives possess seasons and that we honour ourselves and others by living each season well, by lending a tender appreciation to the age, the time, the season we are living in right now. I am in my late Summer (middle-age), haunted sometimes by the loss of Spring yet enchanted by the beauty of the coming Autumn. TMS comes when I unmoor from my place in Nature and want life to be anything that it is not (comparison being the thief of joy). It recedes when I remember there is a time and a season for everything. No more fighting, only flowing. That is the 'somehow' behind the stars that align, they are in harmony, letting life be lived like a poem.
I've said before that you are an artistic soul. You just need to care for this sensitive part of yourself and no longer let it lead you down bruising avenues of pain and torment. The how is different for each of us, but essentially it entails seeing those moments of ease and embracing them, while denying the moments of madness. And we keep doing this until it becomes ingrained as the new way of being.
