Tailbone, glutes, pelvic floor, lots of doubt

[Nessie]

Hello! I'm not sure if this is the right way to do this, but here goes

Disclaimer: since discovering Sarno's work in August and also Steve Ozanich's and all the amazing content on here, I have become much more comfortable with spasms in my ribs, hip pain, even SI joint pain which plagued me for over 10 years and drove me from doctor to doctor to physio to doctor etc... Neck pain, severe shoulder and lumbar pain etc. Now they come and go pretty fast, mostly, I'm really trying to trust that these are just mindbody sensations and I'm focusing more on the emotional and nervous system work. Started doing somatic experiencing to get my body to move out of trauma, all wonderful.

But..... I find that there is one pain I have that just won't let go and it haunts me. Haven't been able to sit without pain in 14 months. And I have such mixed messages in my brain that I need help... Sorry for the long post.

So, the story is, I had a terrible fall on my tailbone about 8 years ago, I became dizzy with agonizing pain. Unfortunately I was quite drunk and for some reason didn't tell anyone that night that I was in agony. I kind of repressed it immediately, didn't even go to the doctor to check if I had broken something... I can see the negligence now.
Anyway it must have healed in the following weeks, even though I can't even recall those days. Never thought of it again.

But this excruciating pain came back a year ago (I knowww... classic neuroplastic pain) when I was at an absolutely desperate point in my life after years of going to the doctor with the other back pains (SI joint, lower back, a bunch of fancy spinal diagnosis that I have come to accept are not the source of my pain even though they still hurt). At this point the doctors advice was to just start taking pregabalin, which I never did, so I gave up on doctors in February 2024 and started seeing this supposedly very experienced osteopath who was very generous with me and saw me pro bono during the following months because he could tell I was kind of losing it... This is where it gets tricky for me.

He told me immediately that a lot of my pain came from my tailbone, without me ever having told him I had ever fallen. Especially because I had completely forgotten about it. Like, completely forgotten, hadn't even mentioned it to all the doctors I had seen over the years. This made me believe him 100%, because how could he guess? And this probably really cemented my subconscious belief that that area is terribly damaged. He said it was completely bent inwards and encased in inflammation... During the next 7 months I went maybe 40/50 times to see him and even though he really helped me get out of this terror state, he also worked a lot on that whole area, pelvic floor, tailbone ligaments, sacrum etc etc he worked on my whole body for months. I had whole weeks stuck in bed, in absolute misery. I didn't want to live anymore.
Later he told me I had a very swollen internal ligament near the tailbone, on the only time he did a manual internal adjustment to the tailbone. Needless to say this even reinforced my panic more. I'm getting nervous just writing this haha it was HELL!

So.... this pain never got better, it became this whole monster in my life. And because of this I ended up staying in a terrified state for almost the whole of last year.
I found Sarno's work in late August and then TMS Wiki and to my enormous surprise, slowly the message started to sink that all my horrible pains were probably somatic. Trauma and fear. And bad information.
I stopped going to see him! I felt very brave. And then I started doing somatic experiencing because my nervous system was obviously totally totally terrified, even after all those months of "treatment".

Suddenly I started thinking, wait a minute... I rode bycicles in the years after falling. Wouldn't that have hurt? I sat for hours. But at the same time I 100% bought into the idea that my body had defended itself with layers of fibrotic tissue. I don't know, O sound mad!

So I've had a lot of progress except for sitting. Sometimes it feels like I fell a few days ago, not 8 years ago. On a really bad day my whole butt is on fire, it morphs sometimes to anal pain, then the whole pelvic floor (which could happen if it were structural). I've been having a really tough time getting over that pain. Can't get a job without being able to sit. Can't do so much! It hurts so, so much that it burns sometimes. Everytime it hurts it sends a jolt of fear to my stomach... Any suggestions?

Thank you for reading and thank you everyone for all your stories keep strong!

 

[JanAtheCPA]

Hi there @Nessie, and welcome to the forum!

This is a really interesting story, especially with your awareness of the
TMS mechanism and success with other symptoms and different techniques.

I never bothered to learn about somatic experiencing when it started being talked about on the forum about ten(?) years ago or so, but that's because I learned many years prior from a massage therapist to practice what might be my own version of it, which is to breathe into any uncomfortable sensation, whether it's pain or queasiness or dizziness, and keep breathing while letting go of muscle tension in the area. I did this kind of thing randomly for years until I discovered Dr Sarno in 2011 and did the Structured Educational Program on our wiki. That's when I learned about the missing piece of the puzzle, which is all about the inner negative chatter in our brains. I added some constructive internal back-talk along with the breathing and letting go, and that's been quite effective. I have also had success in visualization, where I might contemplate the possibility that a pain on one side, for example my right shoulder, can simply become non-painful like the left shoulder.

Anyway, I've always thought of this as similar to the old concept of biofeedback, and I wonder if it's a technique you could learn to employ for this particular tailbone pain. Basic Brain Rewiring 101.

 

[Nessie]

Hi there @Nessie, and welcome to the forum!

This is a really interesting story, especially with your awareness of the
TMS mechanism and success with other symptoms and different techniques.

I never bothered to learn about somatic experiencing when it started being talked about on the forum about ten(?) years ago or so, but that's because I learned many years prior from a massage therapist to practice what might be my own version of it, which is to breathe into any uncomfortable sensation, whether it's pain or queasiness or dizziness, and keep breathing while letting go of muscle tension in the area. I did this kind of thing randomly for years until I discovered Dr Sarno in 2011 and did the Structured Educational Program on our wiki. That's when I learned about the missing piece of the puzzle, which is all about the inner negative chatter in our brains. I added some constructive internal back-talk along with the breathing and letting go, and that's been quite effective. I have also had success in visualization, where I might contemplate the possibility that a pain on one side, for example my right shoulder, can simply become non-painful like the left shoulder.

Anyway, I've always thought of this as similar to the old concept of biofeedback, and I wonder if it's a technique you could learn to employ for this particular tailbone pain. Basic Brain Rewiring 101.

Hello! Thankyou so much for your reply

Somatic experiencing for me has been a game changer because it helped realize how completely out of my body I have lived for most of my life. Even after maybe 10 years of psychotherapy that helped me immensely I now can see how it is possible to do talk therapy and still live in a sort of dissociated high functioning state. Until of course you can't and it all crashes like it did for me, having taken my body way over any sort of reasonable limit. SE made it much easier for me to really understand what Doctor Sarno meant. Repressed emotions really are poisonous.

Anyway! I love visualization, yeah! Should really try and do it every single day. I also love deep breathing and listening to Nisargadatta's meditations on "I AM".