Tailbone pain?

Hello all, I was wondering if anyone has experience with tailbone pain? Just yesterday I was stretching my left split when I felt a slight pain in my tailbone. It was really nothing, but I felt myself getting attached to the pain and it gradually worsened. Today I am in much more pain and hoping to stop this as soon as I can! I think the issue is that, I was recently shown a scoliosis x-ray I had taken a few years ago, and I noticed that my tailbone is very crooked. I've been thinking about it I lot whenever I sit because it feels like I have to sit more on one side to avoid sitting straight on the bone (gross, I know). There is a chance that I bruised my tailbone yesterday while I was dancing in my room, but I don't remember this happening, so I'm not sure. I was wondering if a bruise could cause the pain to radiate all around the area of my tailbone? My guess is that it's probably TMS, because my hip pain i have been dealing with seemed to go away with it! I started school this week so perhaps it's just the change....

It's always helpful to me to hear stories of people who relate, so if you have had pain in this area, please let me know!

 

This is what happened to me and my tailbone pain as I describe it in my book:

Conditioning
Reading page 21 of Healing Back Pain was the turning point in my long chronic illness. There it was the heading of the section-Conditioning!

This section explains how we can be conditioned to feel pain not because there is a physical problem with our bodies, but rather because at some point we experienced pain doing certain activities or being in certain positions, and we had come to expect pain during those activities. Dr. Sarno described how at the start of the back pain, an individual may feel pain after sitting for a while; then his or her brain makes the association between sitting and feeling pain in the back. From that point on, whenever the individual sits for a certain period of time, there is a reduction of blood flow to back muscles and the pain begins.

Similarly, because of what people hear from others or are told by the medical establishment, people are conditioned to believe that certain positions or movements put stress on their backs. This belief, of course, programs back-pain patients to expect pain during those activities or in certain positions; therefore, they feel pain. This exact thing had happened to me. I remember a few times when I sneezed at work and was told by my coworkers that sneezing must really hurt. At first, it didn’t. But after hearing people tell me that it must, I became conditioned to expect pain upon sneezing. Pretty soon every time I sneezed my back hurt too, and I thought my condition was getting worse!

For more than a year I had not been able to sit comfortably longer than twenty minutes at a time, and even at that, I need to sit on a four-inch foam cushion. My right piriformis muscle was so sensitive that if I ignored this time limit, the muscle would go into spasm and initiate sciatica in my right leg. And sometimes if I ignored this time limit and sat longer, my back began to hurt.

In my first year of college psychology, I had learned that we are conditioned from childhood to feel and behave in certain ways and that by using what are called behavior modification techniques we can gradually change those conditioned responses into whatever we want. Using those techniques, I had been able to act as my own psychotherapist and trainer and gradually overcome many of my fears (such as my fear of public speaking) and begin new habits (such as regular exercise).

I also knew that a conditioned response can lose its intensity and eventually be eliminated if no reward is given. Physiologist Ivan Pavlov used to ring a bell each time he fed a group of dogs. After repeating this procedure a few times, the dogs automatically salivated each time the bell rang, even when no food was provided.[1] However, in such a case, if the bell is rung continuously and no food (reward) is provided, the dogs eventually stop salivating.

Thus, as soon as I realized that my body had been conditioned to feel pain when I sat down for more than twenty minutes, I continued to sit as I read on with no worry that I was doing myself physical harm. By ignoring the pain, I deprived my subconscious of the reward it wanted; when it became convinced I would no longer give it the reward of my attention, it would eventually stop causing pain...By this time I had sat reading Dr. Sarno’s book for about an hour and a half. My piriformis muscle was not hurting much anymore, but my lower back, especially my tailbone, was killing me. If I had not just learned about TMS, I probably would have lay down and used ice to ease the pain. As this pain could not make me get up, it shifted to my right knee, and later to the front of my neck, where I had never experienced pain before. It became clear to me that as real as the pain felt, it was indeed a trick that my subconscious was playing on me. It was reducing blood flow to my back, knee, and neck to cause pain in order to keep me occupied with physical symptoms.

This phenomenon is not strange to those with chronic pain. In fact, they are quite familiar with pain moving from one part of their bodies to another. This phenomenon used to cause me a great deal of worry, as I believed it meant that my condition was getting worse. However, now that I knew the pain was due to the reduction of blood flow, movement of pain from one part of my body to another was no longer a source of worry and anxiety.

If you like to learn more about my Rapid Recovery plan you can download the Rapid Recovery from Back and Neck Pain podcast at this thread. It willl give you additional tools for dealing with TMS.

http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/free-podcast-rapid-recovery-from-back-and-neck-pain.16972/ (Free Podcast: Rapid Recovery from Back and Neck Pain)