I have burning skin pain every day, but I find the breathing exercises are very very helpful. It's where you breathe, paying attention to the sensation and sound of just the breathing, then move your focus to the pain for a bit (attend to it), and then go back to the breathing. Then you repeat a couple more times, continuing to check in on the pain. This is such a great exercise because it completely removes fear from the process. Tonight I did that and I noticed that the pain decreased in the particular area that was bothering me, (hurray) but then popped up someplace else! Maybe I'll breathe my way through that one later, lol. But the main thing was that it did work.
I highly recommend a little book that I've had for several years called "Hope and Help for Your Nerves" by Dr. Claire Weeks. She wrote this many years ago before the idea of TMS came into being, but her concepts are right in line with what is being taught here. She explains the fear-adrenaline-fear cycle that we get into and her simple explanation of how adrenaline works and causes symptoms in our bodies helps remove the fear of the symptoms. Since anxiety and fear play such a huge part in our pain experience, I think this book would help anyone dealing with those things. She writes that the key to recovery is to move away from a mood of apprehension to ACCEPTANCE of the symptoms (whatever they are) and that OVER TIME those symptoms will eventually fade. The key here is to accept the symptoms (as opposed to resisting them) and then allow time to pass. A great little book.
