Three Pronged Life Style Approach

[Forest]

I recently made a video on the idea of working too hard to overcome TMS. One of Monte's runningpain.com updates addressed similar ideas, so I thought I would post it here. Monte has given the wiki permission to post his updates. He has several interesting ideas and I would love to hear everyone's take on it.

Hello Everyone,

The 3-Pronged Lifestyle Approach to Living with TMS

What if I were to tell you that you are going to live with TMS for the rest of your life—would you be able to accept that or would you fight it?

It is truth that you are living with this chronic disorder that produces pain and other symptoms today and it will continue to live with you every day for the rest of your life. Accepting this truth provides a psychological improvement and significant shift in how you choose to reverse the symptoms in this disorder. It allows you to begin living your life versus treating a disorder to become symptom-free so that you can start living your life. Get that truth, digest this and let it sink into your consciousness.

It doesn’t mean however that pain and other symptoms are going to be a part of your daily life. You are living with tms because you generate inner tension (energy). This tension energy is communicated to your nervous system and your nervous system automatically produces pain and other symptoms. (The nervous system process is happening outside of your control, automatically, so don’t worry about it).

Our job, our work is to change the quality of energy that is communicated to our nervous system. We are always communicating to our nervous system, this is never going to stop, but the quality of the energy that gets communicated to our nervous system we can deliberately, consciously and unconsciously work with and change.

We are communicating:

closed-off-ness --holding-in feelings, stuffing down fear
un-flexible-ness --controlling & always needing to be right
tightness – anger, guilt & resentment,
un-balanced-ness --striving, pleasing/impressing, perfection
scattered-ness -- worry & self-consciousness

Or we can communicate open, allowing, aligned, flexible and balanced energy to our nervous system.

How can I be in this fearful situation & be in a more open behavior?
What is a more flexible attitude I can bring to this problem?
Is there a more balanced or aligned way to think about this?
Where could I be more allowing in my actions?

In either case, our nervous system takes what we give it and produces effects in our body that replicate the energy we communicate! This is simple cause and effect.

Since we are living with this disorder we need a practice that allows us to live pain and symptom free. Ideally this practice needs to become a lifestyle that helps us communicate consciously and subconsciously to our nervous system, energy that is open, flexible, allowing, balanced and aligned on a daily basis.

Again, this is our job. Our work is communicating this open quality of energy to our nervous system…period! This work is much more efficient and effective when it is a way of being, a lifestyle and not looked upon as a temporary treatment to fix a problem.

The Three-Pronged Lifestyle Approach is an attitudinal change in your treatment philosophy and it is a multifaceted approach to reversing this disorder for efficiency, effectiveness and permanency.

1. Think Psychological – You must start here and it cannot be a casual awareness approach. This is acceptance, confidence and complete trust. When you communicate with conviction these qualities to this disorder you will defeat the subconscious distraction strategy. When you don’t, you are living in TMS hell. You are allowing the strategy to exist!

2. Think Clean - Identify how you are generating inner tension and repressing emotional energy with your thoughts and behaviors! Learning how to stop repressing emotions with your behaviors and thoughts and instead begin experiencing this energy is the transforming therapy that changes this disorder--This is how you reverse TMS symptoms! Chronic overweight people eat to repress emotions. Behaving and thinking in worry, perfection, controlling, striving, pleasing and holding stuff in is how TMS people repress emotional energy! Remember, having the awareness that you are generating inner tension doesn't change the fact you are generating inner tension and it doesn’t change the autonomic nervous systems process of producing the symptom effects! Reversing TMS is not a passive, intellectual event…it is an active, change therapy!

3. Alternative Activity - Journaling, guided imagery, daily waking-working mindfulness, root lock, hypnosis, yoga, and spiritual practice. Engage in something or someone to help bring openness, balance, alignment, hope, and guidance into your life. These activities supplement and compliment your Think Psychological and Think Clean practices.

The key is to engage in all three of these practices as a way of living and not as a treatment. All of these practices are communication to your nervous system that creates positive transformation within this disorder. Again this is big huge to understand. When you take a casual approach to reversing TMS you get casual results. When you make the decision to change your inner communication on an on-going "this is the way I live my life" basis and not as a temporary treatment, you have shifted the whole healing dynamic within this disorder.

I hope that you are inspired to live with TMS and live free of symptoms! This is a choice that you can make right now. Incorporating the 3-pronged treatment approach into your life is the efficient, effective and the most permanent means of reversing your symptoms and living symptom free

Stay the Course,

Monte Hueftle

 

[Forest]

One thing that I really like about this, and other Monte posts, is that it is all about actively treating your TMS. As long as we are alive, our body will continue to be affected by the connection between our mind and body. Therefore we need to understand our personality and emotional triggers behind our TMS and learn how to accept these emotions. In my own case, I do have the occasional symptom that pops up, but I understand that it is just TMS and I use it as a sign to examine my emotions. By actively changing how I view my symptoms, they go away almost immediately. My focus is not on the symptom itself, and therefore it has no reason to exist. The way I see, I can't help when TMS symptoms pop up, but I can help how I handle these situations. This is what I think Monte is talking about. I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this, as I am still developing my understanding of his three-pronged strategy.

Btw if anyone wants to read more of Monte's updates check out Archive of Monte's Hueftle's Runningpain.com Updates.

 

[dabatross]

i like the idea monte has about using these strategies as a way of living and not a treatment. i think that is a key thing because if you use them as just a treatment you are expecting results.. and when you're expecting the results to happen i think i would inevitably calendar watch to see how much progress ive been making. monte also mentions that if you're the type of person that constantly reads about TMS, tries to learn everything about it, etc etc that you aren't expressing your emotional energy but are repressing it. this is kind of what i did when i stopped investigating physical causes for my pain. i found out about TMS and then I started reading all about that, kept buying books even though I hadn't read the ones I already had, it has become an addiction as well. i think its key to make it a lifestyle change rather than a short term treatment just to get rid of the symptoms. everything monte suggests in his writings are good for your lifestyle anyway.. positive thinking, changing the way you express emotion, etc.

 

[BruceMC]

I understand what you and Monte mean: When I first time read Dr Sarno's HBP three years ago, I read it again and again and annotated it, then went on to read all of his books using heavy underlining and notes in the margins. But nothing happened. I had just become obsessed with another project to distract me from whatever TMS is trying to distract me from - repressed unpleasant emotions like sorrow, anxiety and rage. I had become a TMS "junkie" full of all the cliches and stereotypes. However, my TMS only started to get better when I started doing the Structured Program and felt my repressed unconscious emotions surfacing in my conscious mind as anxiety and fear. That's how I could tell the biochemistry of my brain was really changing. Before that, it was all neat theory, but without the hard-earned practice that really gets rid of TMS. But you also have to go out and really challenge TMS by engaging in rigorous physical activities, no matter how much you're afraid of what might happen. I suspect that it's only through really rigorous activities that the programmed pain pathways are deconstructed and re-routed. Of course, it may be possible to just stop repressing when you understand the TMS process, but that certainly wasn't the way that "getting better" happened to me.

 

[BruceMC]

Actually, now that I look back, my sciatica and lower back pain did start to improve slowly and gradually after reading and re-reading Sarno, but doing the Structured Program definitely sped up the process. So, having all that theory packed in my noggin did make it easier for me to do The Work in the SP.