The real TMS distraction

[Forest]

To emphasize, your TMS symptoms themselves aren’t serving as a distraction from painful unconscious emotions, it’s the fear and preoccupation around the pain that is serving as this distraction. That’s the purpose of the pain in most cases, to generate fear.

I come across a lot of forum posts where people mention how they are trying to make the pain go away, but, as Alan points out, recovery is not about doing something about the symptoms. The symptoms are benign and do not need fixing. Your focus instead, needs to be on addressing our fear and preoccupation of the pain.

This is what, I believe, the people who had the book cures were able to achieve. They were able to recognize that their symptoms were benign, and they no longer had to fear them. Yes, it can take some time to reach this level of acceptance, but that is why education is so important. The more you read and reread Sarno’s books, the more you communicate to your unconscious that your symptoms are benign and there is nothing to fear in them. If you continue to work on no longer being preoccupied with your symptoms, they will have no choice but to fade away. As Dr. Sarno said in Healing Back Pain, If I can convince the conscious mind that TMS is not serious and not worthy of its attention, better yet that it is a phony, a charade, and that rather than fear it one should ridicule it...We will have made the TMS useless; it will no longer have the ability to attract the attention of the conscious mind; the defense is a failure (the cover is blown; the camouflage is removed).

 

[Eric "Herbie" Watson]

This is an awesome set of quotes forest
I remember when my mind started fading from the structural
I was so consumed with the recovery stories and how they did it.

It took some time for this to integrate but as day and day went by
id think less and less of the pain and more on the emotional issues.

In time after I gained the knowledge therapy
it was Whistling Dixie as I got better and better
till I healed

 

[Emily]

If you continue to work on no longer being preoccupied with your symptoms, they will have no choice but to fade away.

Thanks for posting this, Rob. It is such an important part of TMS recovery, and I actually think it is one of the hardest. It is human nature (especially for certain TMS personalities... such as perfectionists) to fixate on accomplishments. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is actually much more difficult to not care. For example, "I ran 2 miles without pain today!" is something people may celebrate, but by celebrating a lack of pain it continues to give pain power. It is harder, but important, to remember to celebrate "I didn't even care when pain developed early on in my run!"