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wanting to change

B

blackdog

Peer Supporter
Hello everyone,

I am brand new to the forum and this is my first post (I only learned of TMS about 2 months ago). I am very much a question asker, so will be very glad for any support that I receive. I think that it is great that there is a forum for people who are trying to expand their lives in such a powerful way. I am wondering about the nature of wanting to change. For about 7 years I have been involved in counseling and and have finally started to see light in life, that it is not all negative and that there are reasons for joy. This is a momentous shift for me. My counselor has told me that in such a shift, there is often a period of greater struggle than one has normally felt, as they are open to being more vulnerable without yet having the requisite skills to deal fully with it. My physical symptoms have increased dramatically through the last 4 or 5 months to the point that I have filed for disability. They include constant and sometimes exquisite headaches, dizziness, visual disturbance, pain in many areas of my body, anxiety/depression, insomnia, etc. (I did see a TMS doc and was told that these are all quite likely TMS). I feel desperate to live and grow, yet feel like I am being dragged under my symptoms. Part of me is aware that this could be caused by a desire by the frightened and tired part of myself to give up, as I have been worn out by the way that I have lived my life so far. Steven Ozanich stated "...anyone can heal if that is what they unconsciously desire." I feel like in my heart I do want this, but am still frightened of trying to chart a course for my life and whether I can truly succeed. Has anyone else overcome a past such as this to grow into a more contented, functional person without TMS? I guess part of me feels that most successful survivors probably were happy before their pain, but logically this must not be so. Just hoping that others can share some inspiration. Thank you,
Andrew
 
Hi, Andrew. I'm so glad you found us. Most of us who healed from TMS needed to learn about why our repressed emotions
and perfectionist and "goodist" personalities caused us pain. Dr. Sarno has been life-changing for us, as I am sure
it will be for you.

I always thought I was a happy person but learned there was also a lot repressed anger in me, from my boyhood.
I learned what the anger was by journaling and it led me to better understanding and forgiving.

Your symptoms are typical for those with TMS and they will go away the more you work on your TMS causes.
Herbie made a terrific new video about TMS which I hope you will look at:

http://tmswiki.org/forum/threads/what-to-know-to-heal-from-pain-pt-1.5482/
 
What are people's thoughts on Steven Ozanich's statement that "anyone can heal if that is what they unconsciously desire"? I remember seeing in one post that Herbie stated we can heal once we give up the need to stop hurting ourselves. I am not sure if the components of this for me are all TMS or not, but I know that inside myself there is a crossroads. I am standing at a point where when I have fleeting glimpses inside my heart I feel that I want to finally start to live, yet I know that my shadow side wants to bring me down and keep me stifled, because it is afraid (and it is visible much more consistently). And being a type D person (though I try to be aware of this and not let it dictate my relationships with others - I don't always succeed), I feel there is an extra bump in my road. Not to mention that I am kind of in crisis mode with not having a job or feeling like I can work in my current condition, feeling lost without a vocation to even strive towards, having just lost my girlfriend of 11 years a few weeks ago and not knowing where I will be living. How does one know whether they can overcome and even whether they truly have the unconscious desire to? Thanks all,

Andrew
 
I can take a stab at what Steve meant. The best health book I've ever read was The Will To Live. He got all this stuff back in the 1950s. You can't define will, nor can you overestimate it.

Will = Light = Hope= Potentials of Possibilities

You are at a crossroads. But then everyone I've ever spoken to about TMS is at a crossroads. That's why they/we all have TMS.

The Divided Mind = Conflict = TMS = Unpleasant Symptoms = Diversions = Anxiety Alleviaters

All change occurs at the limina, where all transformation begins. We never grow until we are pushed, pain is a pusher, pain comes from fear, and fear is the greatest motivator of action.

Inside all of us is light. And that light desires to be connected to "outer" truth/light. If we have symptoms we're not in harmony, or on the path that our deeper self wants. Groddeck called it "the It" But to me it's just the spirit. Light beckons for light, but it gets shadowed by false images, and attempts to cover shame. So ego certainly has a role since it shields wider awareness. Ego may have the largest role in suffering, and in healing.

The idea in healing is to be on a path that your deeper self desires, and that path can only be true when you're helping others. I called this "adding value" in my pamphlet. We fill alive when we're giving back, true to our deeper purpose.

You lost a close relationship, you don't know what steps to take, and you're apprehensive that you can work in this condition. No wonder you have TMS, anyone would in that current state.

But your question is, "can anyone overcome this"..and does anyone know if they have the desire to?" The first answer is yes, they overcome far greater obstacles than that, the answer to your second part is tricky. Robin Williams didn't have the desire, but the fact that you're here asking questions is proof that you want to heal.

You alone control your future. You can decide to heal, and you will. But remember, I mean at the unconscious level. So the key is always motivation which happens from deeper within. Why do you want to heal? Or why do you not want to heal? That's where the direction is determined.

Over the years I've seen a complex host of reasons as to why people don't want to heal. It all comes down to need. Will you pull more people to you by healing, or by not healing? That's where your deeper self ultimately decides, but there also has to be a conscious effort at first.

Steve
Most of the people were not happy before they overcame TMS. Many have never known happiness until they healed. They lived lives untrue to themselves, and they were miserable wretches. This is why Dr. Sarno is so beloved. He freed us.
 
Hi Black Dog and Steve and others,

I haven't posted on either forum in months (years?).

In my own life journey and also my deep counseling/energy work with 1000s of people ––oh… for just 33 years–– (I'm now 63 and that photo is 3 years old), I've seen that there is a deep decision towards life that takes a lot of courage for me and many souls. You're either choosing life or death. Doesn't mean you shouldn't let go and die, if it's your time. But it probable isn't, and if it isn't, any illness will resolve itself if you don't attach your identity to it. (If it is your time to go, not identifying with your illness would still be the best choice).

Many TMS sufferers, including myself (although I'm 80% "cured" now) have experienced various kinds of symptoms that feel almost unbearable. I know my pain, fibromyalgia, fatigue and probably a dozen other TMS manifestations, including cancer, were quite agonizing. For more than 30 years.

Yet somehow, choosing life and freedom and a kind of rebirth rather than a "healing" has involved another kind of pain, almost like dying. I have had to die to a whole identity structure that really, really seemed to be "me" in order to heal. A sad person, an "it's not fair why is this happening to me" person. A panicking person: he/she/they have left and I am alone in the universe with this terrifying condition. And then choosing to let go of each of these juicy identities or selves that somehow make me feel real and "right" ... and come back to the center, where God/Goddess/Self/Pure Awareness await to embrace me.

Scary stuff. I had to be really, really, really, really, really tired of being "sick" to forge this path through the dark places within myself.

And not just once but hundreds of times, involving hundreds of choices to actually feel what I might call the "existential" pain of staying present emotionally, in my heart, in my body, when life seemed intolerable, cruel, desolate; when I felt (and literally was) betrayed, attacked, abandoned, sued, and so on. And finding a great Love and healing power at the center beyond all these "guards at the gate" of my real self. The Will To Live (and that is one of my favorite books too––i have 3 ancient copies) is another way of saying The Will to Wake Up Spiritually to who we really are, beyond our identities of pain and suffering.

It is so easy to buy into the miserable story that pain and illness are inevitable: that they are caused by bending over in the wrong way; by little rogue beasties like Lymes or Yeasties; by age; by this and that. It's soothing to distract oneself with all the various doctors and treatments and snake oil approaches out there––all really a cry for attention as well as a brilliant distraction, as Sarno says. I tried every possible approach for 30+ years with these symptoms. Try naming something I haven't tried! How did that work for me? The only physical things that really helped were a few hormones, ldn and coffee enemas (wonderful!). But really what works is what Sarno says works.

And choosing to live as a spiritual practice. I'm choosing to download a new body and consciousness every day, every moment, instead of believing that my body today, my experience today are a result of some imaginary past. As one who was raised by physicists and became a mad mystic, I've found that theory that "the past creates the present" is untrue in terms of physics and in terms of mystical experience.

Yes, I have a past, with a lot of pain in it, and it has been important to work through it. Yet only to bring me up to date into now, where I can experience what a body really is: a mysterious collection of nonlinear energies appearing as living matter, surging forth from life force again and again in each successive now, outpicturing the consciousness behind or beneath the bodily dimension. The solid sicko body with all its memories is really just a special effect, like Gollum's moving hair in the Ring movies, which cost a million bucks to perfect. Our subconscious has perfected the special effect of symptoms that move all over our bodies to distract us from the deep feeling we have in our hearts that something is wrong (because we are separated from our deepest selves). It seems so much easier to believe it is just some physical, outer problem.

How's that "physical problem" hypothesis working for you? Didn't work for me. Not at all. I wasted half my life on it. But giving it all up, gradually stopping and interrupting my belief in this body as a victim of circumstance, rather than a joyous expression of a mysterious source, is working incredibly well. I look and mostly feel better than I felt when I was 30. I still go through rounds that feel like the last old stuff coming up and out, but I no longer panic about them and mostly ignore them, go to ballet and aerial yoga, swim and lift weights and do my work of loving people and feel grateful to no longer think of myself as a victim of a some alleged illnesses.

Hope this helps. xxx
 
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HI KATIE! Wow, funny I was just wondering where you'd been a day ago and you suddenly appear! I think you'll like it over here, Forest does a great job of keeping things lively. I'm passing through Shasta on my way up to Oregon. I could have sworn I saw you up here passing by in a car a few years back, was that you?

Lot's of action in the hood these days, first Robin and then a murder/suicide in the housing behind the Strawberry Safeway AND then the long shaker--maybe God is trying to tell us something. I wasn't peeing but I was wide awake between my BBC segmented sleeps. I've been through a lot of earthquakes but that was the longest. Maybe you could put a link to your website in your bio page here.

Cheers,
tt
 
Thank you Steve and Katie, I appreciate your support. Thank you so much Katie for sharing yourself so intimately with me. I see myself in so many of the things that you wrote in such a short space.

Are there actually people that have more people pulled to them out of their illness? It seems that everyone would find more connection through becoming whole. So maybe it's a matter of seeing and believing this? I think I do, I put on my list that one of the things making me angry is my fear of burning other people out before I find my center or heal. And when I have small moments of connection to my environment I am surprised by how pleasant and comforting it is. But maybe some people are more invested in hurting themselves and shutting themselves off than they are in connecting (even though they want to connect very badly)? I know that there is a part of myself that wants to hurt myself in order to gain attention for my difficulties. It is perhaps a touch of what psychology might call borderline personality tendencies. I see it, I don't deny it and I want to change it, but I fear whether I can. Focusing on this is another form of self-abuse and feeds the loop.

Does everyone want to help others as their true path? I wonder if even in my center I will be more comfortable working with ideas or maybe animals. I have a lot of paranoia and am very self-conscious around people, which is another form of pain. At the same time, I am starting a class in a clinical psych graduate program tonight - feeling very ambivalent, confused and afraid. I tend to think that I need to take people in small doses or I get overwhelmed. So, why am I going into psychology?

I see it said over and over (from other modalities and perspectives and for many decades - Claire Weeks for example) that the goal is not actually healing the pain, but rather becoming more present, centered and truer to oneself. I can appreciate that perspective very much as it is largely the kind of work that I have been trying to do for 7 years with my counselor, but also feel that it leads to confusion in knowing how to proceed. Honestly, to me that is a life-long goal, to know oneself authentically. So, I feel that I need the specificity of a TMS therapist to help me see how physical/psychic pain and personal growth relate to one another.

I hope that I can learn to identify my emotions and stay with them in order to see more closely what is in me that needs to shift so that I can live more authentically. I have been so resistant to emotions for so long that it is hard for me to feel them unless they are provoked (and even then often not). My counselor told me that for me pain=death, because I fear it so much and center myself around it, withdrawing into my mind which is death. That makes so much sense to me. I want to change it. I want to grow and feel myself. But I know that I am scared to. I feel like I am rebelling against the belief that I am my mind which doesn't want to give itself up and die. And I am scared of the depth of the feelings when they do come. Lately I have felt so lost, but I know there is freedom in it, I have seen it. But once the feeling is gone and I am back in my mind, the belief is buried again (though I think not so deep). I have, though, been feeling more lately just how unbelievably constricted and tight my body feels to me. It's scary to let it go, to become more vulnerable to the whims of the world and the people in it that don't seem to see even the faintest glimpses of truth and would just as soon squash me as be kind. (And my paranoia makes this into so much more than it really is). I fear that I may not be that strong, but know in my heart that it is my mind that keeps this reality in tact. I appreciated Alan Gordon's method for growing self-compassion by putting energy toward your inner child or a felt understanding of who I was as a child and growing the desire to protect him. I feel that I am still largely that child anyway, so reframing myself in that way does seem like it may lend itself to wanting to stop my self-abuse. God, I hope that I truly want this for myself and that I am strong enough to do this. As Herbie has said, take small steps and give myself time.
Namaste,

Andrew
 
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About "the will to live," the great British actor Robert Donat (Best Actor Oscar, "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"), 1939,
winning over Clark Gable in "Gone with the Wind." Donat was sickly all his life and in his last years needed
an oxygen bottle to help him breathe. He willed himself to live until he finished starring with Ingrid Bergman
in "Inn of the Sixth Happines," dying just a few days after completing his work in the wonderful movie about
a British woman missionary in China at the start of World War II. So willpower plays a really big role in our health.
 
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