TMS and other psychological disorders

Hello,
I have a TMS (muscle tension of unconscious emotional origin), I progress to cure but some questions remain unanswered.
I would like to know if the TMS is completely independent of any other psychological disorder. That is to say that healing is possible without having to solve our other psychological disorders (non-TMS)?
Depressive disorder, phobia, etc.
Including if these disorders are the deeper/older causes of TMS (not the direct cause).
Thank you in advance,
Nicolas.

 

Nicholas, your questions are big ones - and deep ones. Most of us here are not medical or therapeutic professionals, but I can say one thing, which isn't going to help you in any specific way - and that is to tell you that without a doubt, our minds and our bodies are inextricably connected.

There is probably no one answer for everyone, because everyone's early childhood experiences are all so different. Anyone who suffered from abuse or neglect of some sort during childhood will have emotional and mental and therefore also physical problems.

There are some mental diseases which clearly have a genetic component. But they will be made worse in the child if the parent suffers from the same disease without treatment, and inflicts their own illness upon the child. I got to know a girl in foster care who suffered from intellectual brain damage due to her mother's alcohol consumption during pregnancy. But the mother suffered from the same brain damage due to HER mother's drinking - and the whole family had bi-polar disorder, which is why the mother and the grandmother both drank. The girl I knew started taking modern medication in her teens and did not become an alcoholic (she is now approaching 40) but she was always physically frail with many complaints. Her two children do not have the alcohol brain damage - but because she does not function normally, either intellectually or emotionally, her children are emotionally damaged due to her brain damage and bipolar disorder. As they approach their teen years, the chances that one or both will have the bipolar themselves is very high, but they have both shown many signs of physical TMS symptoms, along with anxiety, most of their young lives. It's absolutely tragic.

Having said all this, I guess I can tell you one thing definitively - which is that the physical symptoms that we label TMS, are not distinct from, and can not be treated separately from, a person's mental and emotional disorders.

 

@JanAtheCPA ...Yeah,What she said (LOL)

That being said, we don't have to SOLVE all of those problems for resolution of our symptoms...for the pain to go away. If we did, we'd be screwed. However, as @JanAtheCPA explained, the whole point of our raised awareess that comes from doing this work cannot ignore those type of issues. I didn't even know I had certain issues UNTIL I started doing this work. A lot of them I thought I'd 'outgrown' or 'gotten over' and found out that though they no longer troubled me, per se, they had merely been replaced by pain

 

Really great point, @Baseball65 - solving is not necessary. We just need to become aware of the deeply repressed emotions, acknowledge them, and accept that they exist. Once we do that, our fearful primitive brains can let go of the need to keep repressing them.

YES YES YES!!!!

 

Interesting discussion here! It speaks well to a movie I just watched, Three Identical Strangers- did anyone else see it? Basically, three identical triplets were separated at birth for a highly unethical study in the 1960s...it's a lot about nature and nurture with mental illness. Clearly, all 3 triplets had a predisposition to major depression and/or bipolar disorder, but the varying environments they were raised in had a lot to do with how they turned out in adulthood and how they coped. The triplet who was raised in the warmest, more supportive environment was best able to cope when he had bouts of depression or when difficult things happened in his life. I won't spoil more details in case anyone sees it.

I think that our mental state and likelihood of having mental illness (or as I've been saying more recently, being neurodivergent), is in part influenced by our neurobiology we inherit...but is even more so by our environment. I know that my mom and I both tend towards anxiety, but I believe that I cope more effectively with it because her and my dad were much more supportive than her parents were. Interestingly, i've also been much more able to treat my TMS effectively than she has (she's been trying to get rid of migraines for a long time with minimal success).

I think it's best not to think of these things in such distinct categories. TMS really does happen to everyone to one degree or another. Not everyone has mental illness, but we all have difficult mental states at times. They are obviously linked, but I wouldn't say that mental illness is the "cause" of TMS. The brain is complex and areas are linked in complicated ways we don't even understand!