TMS round 2

[invincible]

Hi everyone,
Sadly I am back and not for good reasons. Been struggling again pretty badly with a new symptom which is refusing to go away and keeps getting triggered by stress or emotions or just situations in general that overwhelm me and cause my brain to kind of lose it and then it pours all that into my left shoulder and its been a really rough time since February or so of this year.

Lots of the things I did last time aren't really helping me and i went through a lot of pain and inability to use my left arm for a long time. It's gotten a whole lot better now and it actually took me a while to register again that hey this isn't something physical and its TMS again.
But even then, just having that awareness hasn't been able to make the pain go away which has been quite frustrating and sad for me. I haven't been able to do talk therapy either because just getting into my thoughts and using my brain has been so overwhelming and difficult. Once I had a whole pain attack just because I had a session coming up in 30 minutes, and I just got a shot of pain and was thrown into a whole episode just from that.

I've had a tough year since breaking out of my whole back pain tms saga. Everything was great for some time. Then I stopped taking care of myself . I got in and out of 2 relationships in which i couldn't really understand what I was doing. I was giving way too much, couldn't draw any kind of boundaries and lost myself completely and was giving into the other person's emotions completely. I have since decided that this is just not for me right now and it's becoming more of an escape or an ideal thing to have rather than something I want or something I have the capacity for. During this period I had some really bad anxiety, would wake up super anxious but I just couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do or what was even happening.
Exercising became just pushing myself and one fine day I think my body had enough and my left shoulder blew up while doing pullups.
Since then its been really tough. A lot of pain and fear. I faced a lot of it and to top it all of in the last year I did something to hurt an old friend of mine, who's been close to me for a long time. So amid all of this pain it became clear to me that the path I had to take was to come clean to him. He ended up not wanting to continue speaking to me and has not spoken to me since. The whole process was really scary and I had a few tough conversations which were really hard and emotional for me.
Not that I could feel many things, my body and mind went kind of numb.

Anyways I got onto some ayurvedic medicine for a bit and it helped me lower my anxiety levels and its been a lot better. I started a new job at a school and somehow have managed to pull through the first month despite having so many pain attacks and discomfort. I couldn't eat, my appetite was non existent, my stomach would keep going out and i was waking up anxious every day. The new job added to the anxiety and I was and am still finding it tough to grow into my role and get used to so many new things at once. It's been crazy.

It's a whole lot better now. My appetite has come back, I'm eating again and I'm being a lot kinder to myself.
It's crazy. I never thought that all of this could come back again so strongly. It's like my body has its own mind, and its so scared. Any conflict, any tough situation and its on again and the triggers are back.

Just wanted to share. It's really been throwing me into holes again and again and again and im so tired and so exhausted each time it comes and knocks me down. Each week has been better and its been a month of work now but damn in the moment i feel so down and i can feel all this emotion and energy trapped in my body and it can't escape and im so tired of it.
I really want to play again properly and trust my body fully but its been really tough. I've been playing a little bit with the kids in school which helps me cope day to day. Somedays it can make things worse but its nice that I have that. I just miss what I had and I feel like I've learned much more this time around. Super tired though. Trying to be patient with my body and mind and giving it the time it needs to realise its safe and can take the handrake off.

 

[Diana-M]

@invincible
Sorry you’re having new symptoms. So discouraging! But it doesn’t mean you will be trapped like this forever. It just means you have more to learn. And it looks like you have some good ideas what’s needed. Your feelings are numb with the loss of your friend. So painful. I’d definitely explore that until you can unlock those frozen emotions trapped in your body. Journal about the girlfriends. And try to figure out how this all is similar to pain from your childhood.

The primitive brain considers emotional pain to be just as dangerous to your survival as physical danger. Let that soak in. It wants to protect you from emotional pain it thinks you can’t handle. So you can teach it you can handle it one small step at a time.

Then pour on the self soothing for your nervous system. It takes time and consistency to soothe a frazzled nervous system. Don’t give up. Keep at it. Have you tried EFT tapping? I’m getting a lot of mileage from that. It has a direct correlation to quieting your nervous system. https://www.thetappingsolution.com/how-tapping-works.php (How Tapping Works: The Science | The Tapping Solution)

 

[Ella1234]

Hi everyone,
Sadly I am back and not for good reasons. Been struggling again pretty badly with a new symptom which is refusing to go away and keeps getting triggered by stress or emotions or just situations in general that overwhelm me and cause my brain to kind of lose it and then it pours all that into my left shoulder and its been a really rough time since February or so of this year.

Lots of the things I did last time aren't really helping me and i went through a lot of pain and inability to use my left arm for a long time. It's gotten a whole lot better now and it actually took me a while to register again that hey this isn't something physical and its TMS again.
But even then, just having that awareness hasn't been able to make the pain go away which has been quite frustrating and sad for me. I haven't been able to do talk therapy either because just getting into my thoughts and using my brain has been so overwhelming and difficult. Once I had a whole pain attack just because I had a session coming up in 30 minutes, and I just got a shot of pain and was thrown into a whole episode just from that.

I've had a tough year since breaking out of my whole back pain tms saga. Everything was great for some time. Then I stopped taking care of myself . I got in and out of 2 relationships in which i couldn't really understand what I was doing. I was giving way too much, couldn't draw any kind of boundaries and lost myself completely and was giving into the other person's emotions completely. I have since decided that this is just not for me right now and it's becoming more of an escape or an ideal thing to have rather than something I want or something I have the capacity for. During this period I had some really bad anxiety, would wake up super anxious but I just couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do or what was even happening.
Exercising became just pushing myself and one fine day I think my body had enough and my left shoulder blew up while doing pullups.
Since then its been really tough. A lot of pain and fear. I faced a lot of it and to top it all of in the last year I did something to hurt an old friend of mine, who's been close to me for a long time. So amid all of this pain it became clear to me that the path I had to take was to come clean to him. He ended up not wanting to continue speaking to me and has not spoken to me since. The whole process was really scary and I had a few tough conversations which were really hard and emotional for me.
Not that I could feel many things, my body and mind went kind of numb.

Anyways I got onto some ayurvedic medicine for a bit and it helped me lower my anxiety levels and its been a lot better. I started a new job at a school and somehow have managed to pull through the first month despite having so many pain attacks and discomfort. I couldn't eat, my appetite was non existent, my stomach would keep going out and i was waking up anxious every day. The new job added to the anxiety and I was and am still finding it tough to grow into my role and get used to so many new things at once. It's been crazy.

It's a whole lot better now. My appetite has come back, I'm eating again and I'm being a lot kinder to myself.
It's crazy. I never thought that all of this could come back again so strongly. It's like my body has its own mind, and its so scared. Any conflict, any tough situation and its on again and the triggers are back.

Just wanted to share. It's really been throwing me into holes again and again and again and im so tired and so exhausted each time it comes and knocks me down. Each week has been better and its been a month of work now but damn in the moment i feel so down and i can feel all this emotion and energy trapped in my body and it can't escape and im so tired of it.
I really want to play again properly and trust my body fully but its been really tough. I've been playing a little bit with the kids in school which helps me cope day to day. Somedays it can make things worse but its nice that I have that. I just miss what I had and I feel like I've learned much more this time around. Super tired though. Trying to be patient with my body and mind and giving it the time it needs to realise its safe and can take the handrake off.

Hello there, thank you for sharing. I am in a similar situation, I have recovered using TMS a few times, and this time I think it's going a whole new angle in my shoulder... So I'm going back to day 1!

 

[Cactusflower]

@invincible
You are going through it, but I think we sometimes have to go through the things we haven't dealt with to get to the other side. As for your friend, we make mistakes and others have boundaries - and within that realm we need to find forgiveness towards ourselves for simply being human and making mistakes - the we move on. I think many of us were simply not taught some of the emotional skills we need and it's hard to learn them down the line as an adult. As children we blame ourselves less for our fumbles but as we get older, we can get really self-judgy.

Have you tried EMDR?
With the "right" (and I mean trained and skilled therapist with a true understanding of the method) you don't have to do much talking. You do think about your concerns (and sometimes not really, it's a really interesting method) but my therapist took me through three months of gentle work at first so she could sort of witness my pain and how it behaved and how my nervous system reacted - after that time, I did really well even though it didn't treat my pain at all, it surely helped with so many of the mental symptoms and then we could talk about the patterns I found myself drawn into. Once they were more in the forefront of my mind, it's been so much easier to see them for what they are and not engage in them or at least engage in them with an honest awareness.
Before I did EMDR I used tapping methods for about 6 months. You can use this method to run through some thoughts and feelings without having to be too confrontational - truly following the method allows you to be brutally honest with yourself and also sort out some of your beliefs and values and see the conflicting thoughts and then use a sort of "affirmation" (for lack of a better word) to be more truthful about your inner truths - it lessens the conflicts, confronts the self-judgements and softens your reactions to these things so they aren't so visceral. It's very calming. I learned to do this simply by following some folks on youtube and then creating my own scripts. This does use your arms but you can do it with just one arm, that's not a problem.

My great EMDR therapist suggested that for many of her clients, healing is like the peeling of an onion. We have to go through the layers and all the ways these things hide in each crack and crevis before we can really see them for what they are. The other thing she constantly re-assured me of is that "THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU" - that our guilt and shame is a part of our humanity and that we can feel it and then let it go over time.

 

[JanAtheCPA]

Thanks for sharing the update, @invincible. I think that lot of us are struggling in these times, even without the additional stress of relationships and careers. Although being on the other side of those two life stressors typically means that aging and mortality are likely to be on the table

I'm sitting here right now with an attack of sciatica... not one of my usuals, but I also know for sure that it's a classic TMS symptom - perhaps my brain is trying it now because I'm too blase and unimpressed with the old ones. Sigh.

IOW, it appears that it's always f'ing something

But I'm really glad to see that you're addressing your setback with a TMS mindset, and thankfully not getting sucked into medical interventions! You're way ahead of the game there, right?