TMS is Lingering

Hi All
I first posted months ago and went through the SEP.
What's been happening to me is almost surreal.
I used to be in pain (sciatica) and burning down my leg all the time no matter where I was or what I was doing. Over the last several months, I have noticed that when I am away traveling for business I have zero pain. When I return hone within 24 hours I have pain again. This is classical TMS, I suppose.
At home I an under a tremendous amount of stress, my wife just lost her father and she is depressed. I lost ny dad in November.
In addition out of nowhere today I am having some knee pain.
Can anyone offer suggestions on how to rid myself of this when I am home in town?
I get very happy when I am away and have no pain and then have a tremendous let down when I return home.

Thanks
Steve

 

Hi Steve,
I'm a bit behind you in that I'm still doing the SEP program, so obviously no authority on this. It's almost a good thing that the pain is only hitting you when you're in certain environments, it at least confirms that it's psychological in nature, and not physical, though you probably already knew that, right?
I'm wondering, is the pain only there when you're in the house, or is it when you're living at home but not necessarily in the home?
It sounds like there's a lot of emotional stress that you and your wife are going through.
This may sound really trite, but what if you were to try and take both you and your wife out of that environment, do something nice for yourselves - even make a bargain with each other that for the next few hours or days when we do this indulgent thing, we're entitled to forget all our troubles and pain just for this time, and then when it's over we can come back to them.
I imagine that there might be a bit of guilt associated with feeling pleasure when you're grieving - I've only done a certain amount of it, and I know I feel that sort of guilt. So if you did this thing and the pain lessened, maybe that would give you more ideas to gradually move past the grief without disrespecting it, and hopefully allowing your body or your inner kid who's probably not coping with all this additional baggage, to express itself without guilt.
Hope that helps, and I'm glad you've gone through SEP and can get to zero pain days! I'm finding that hard to conceive of, but who knows, that may even be me one day (-: