Hello
@Blue Oleander, and welcome.
The answer to your question is that you have to turn it around 180 degrees. In fact, one of the keys to doing this work is to change your entire way of thinking around - a full 180 degrees.
TMS, in all of its many manifestations, including TN, is not an illness to be cured. Our chronic physical suffering is the result of an unconscious brain mechanism that prepares the body for fight or flight in times of danger. This mechanism needs to be managed when it is constantly being engaged and wearing out our physiological processes and structures.
We still call this TMS in honor of Dr. Sarno, but the reality is that the manifestations go far beyond the simple muscle tension and oxygen deprivation that he theorized decades ago. The science has come a long way since then, as he acknowledged himself in his later years.
In any case, your mind shift needs to understand that this is a very old, very primitive mechanism which exists in all human brains (and I suspect animal brains as well) and that it was designed to keep us alive in the primitive world. This was a world in which we only lived a few decades at the most, in which there were only a few tangible sources of real physical danger and stress to worry about, and in which our only job was to survive long enough to breed and raise the next generation of humans.
It's a mechanism which worked pretty well for millenia when life and survival were simple. Unfortunately for us, it works for shit in the modern world with our long lives, constant focus on the future, and the seemingly infinite number of intangible things that we stress about all of the time. The problem is that our brains haven't caught up - these modern stressors are still interpreted by our primitive TMS brains as physical danger, but they are CONSTANT - which means we are constantly in survival mode.
We also can't ignore the fact that our intangible modern stressors have become even more numerous and out of control in the last two decades, never mind the the last five+ years.
How can we know we have conquered it, and are not just in the lull between the crises?
So what is the 180-degree opposite of this question? What you are doing here is giving all of the power to the crises, and living in fear during the lulls.
Your mind shift requires acknowledging and always visualizing the lulls as your norm - and being willing to know that you have the power to get back to that state, no matter how long it lasts. And, perhaps even more importantly, to accept that any crises you experience are temporary setbacks - they are not a failure to "conquer".
Your goal is not to "conquer" TN. That will only lead to frustration. Your goal is to go far deeper, examining your emotional motivations for living in fear and anxiety, and ultimately learning to
manage your personal manifestations of the TMS mechanism. It is learning to approach each setback with curiousity, and a willingness to examine, without judgement, what is going on right now. Asking yourself what are the stressors that you are (consciously or unconsciously) avoiding dealing with. It's learning to live with mindful awareness of your mental state of mind, and to accept that sometimes mindfulness will fall through the cracks, but to remember that it can be recovered, along with your equanimity.
If you need TN-specific information, follow this advice:
Search for Plum and read her story and posts, she is a wonderful comfort to anyone, but her success story is recovery from TN.
plum's story is here with lots of great resources:
plum | TMS Forum (The Mindbody Syndrome) (tmswiki.org)
