What else is there - Seriously

Hi @Kozas ,

What you describe as this constant, stationary pain or symptoms is a reflection of unconsciously "holding on" to the sensation. When sensations don't ebb and flow and seem stagnant, it's important to explore what relinquishing control means to you. Sometimes the prospect of "letting go" and observing is perceived by the brain as particularly scary. In general the need and drive to control every aspect of one's life...emotions, sensations, external conditions etc is exhausting and generates a ton of tension. The goal is to communicate to the brain that relinquishing control and saying "F it" is safe. Essentially, give yourself a break.

 

And also letting go of somatic or body tension along with that.

 

BINGO! And, although it will probably annoy the living crap out of you eskimoeskimo, remember what Dr. Sarno said that one of his patients realized: denial of the syndrome is part of the syndrome. I'd add that obsession on the syndrome is part of the syndrome as well. As long as it is kept in the intellectual realm of reason and theory, it's not going to make that connection to the unconscious mind. I took to jokingly calling it "nerdal pathways" because I see people nerding out so hard on TMS here and it's clearly a defense mechanism (and one I'm personally familiar with). It's not easy, because we don't repress these feelings for nothing on a whim: they're perceived to threaten our security/ identity and whatever else. Also, Miffybunny is brilliant in this thread.

 

It's ok to nerd, just not to overthink TMS! What do we all nerd about besides TMS?

 

These people that have reached a level of acceptance with their pain will receive the corresponding amount of relief. They are not adding preoccupation to the mix. If they knew the actual reason for their pain they would be able to resolve it entirely by taking the appropriate steps to do so. There are effective methods to resolve psychological/emotional/remembered pain pathway causes of chronic pain.

 

Obsession is 1000x worse than denial. Obsession feeds it

 

How did you achieve this independence, particularly of your environment, in practical terms, @RogueWave? Could you describe how you endeavoured to do this in the early days of your quest to feel better that led to your eventual success - with some examples from a 'day in the life' of @RogueWave, perhaps? (I think this would be helpful to me and maybe to other 'strugglers' too.)

 

Well that sounds reasonable, but just because something sounds reasonable doesn't mean it's true. How do you know what constant pain means? I've read many TMS books, watch many videos but never encounter anything that says things you said about constant pain. I'm just curious how do you know that? Like I said it's pretty reasonable and indeed most of my life I put pressure on myself but I want to know if that something that was described by doctor like Sarno or Schubiner or just something that someone invented because it sounds nice

 

I can relate a bit to eskimo,

I too am still in pain next to brainfog, heart palpitations and exhaustion everyday. The thing is it only got worse, a lot worse during my TMS period. Because my body would alert me not to do certain activities and i did them cause belieiving in TMS. I still atleast hope that TMS is what i got but i am again at a point where i am just scared to keep believing. Because i get the feeling if it's not TMS something terrible could happen to me since my heart is reacting a lot too. I feel really sick, exhausted and everything is spinning next to my pain ofcourse. I don't even care about the pain anymore. But my heart scares me.

I can say for myself that reading eskimo's messages can work a little against believing TMS like some wondered here. But on the other hand what if there are people here who don't have TMS and ruin their life even more with the TMS approach because they ignore the symptoms their body gives to alert them of maybe real damage?

Again i don't know anymore what i got myself but i can relate to eskimo and maybe we are TMS'ers who haven't healed yet. Maybe we both get to heal in the future and this thread will be an amazing story to get people through who really struggle to heal as well.

Maybe my post is bad for healers to read and i should delete it again but i wanted to say this.

 

Just because a person has constant pain, that does not rule out TMS. I personally experienced constant pain, burning, redness, swelling, and stabbing in my feet and knees for months (years) but it was still TMS and it was still "learned pain". This is covered in the literature and research. Lorimer Mosley is a pain researcher who has conducted many studies on the nature of chronic pain.

 

I just want to add one more thing. If you constantly look for reasons as to why you are different or why you don't have TMS, you are only prolonging your suffering. I could have easily pathologized myself as as CRPS patient with an incurable, debilitating, neurological "suicide disease" but I chose to view it as a learned habit of the brain. Nothing else in the medical world had panned out and frankly nothing the doctors were telling me made any damn sense. Some do not like hearing this but it's truth. We are responsible for our suffering and we are responsible for our healing.

 

To start this response, and to add to what @miffybunny just said, please keep in mind we are all creating these situations, but we are absolutely not doing it consciously or on purpose. The funny thing is, after a certain age, the subconscious programming is ‘driving the ship’ far more than we realize, but this is info for another time

The first, and overall the most important part of my healing process, was knowledge.

First, knowledge of how I got there (my Dad had bad PTSD from Vietnam, so it was an abusive household from birth). But that was normal to me, so most of my life I just thought I was more driven than other people, an over-achiever with a bit of a bad temper. But that was just ‘me.’

My sister had the same experience, and her TMS was so bad she was in a wheelchair for several months with terrible back and neck pain. 12
Specialists in Boston, and no one could figure it out. I talked her out of Suicide several times in my early 20s before she found Sarno, and to this day I credit him with saving her life.

I say all this because the first part of my healing process was to objectively look at my whole life, and humbly saying ‘oh, yeah, this affected me FAR more than I ever wanted to admit.’ This helped ‘open the door’, to understand why my body was stuck in survival mode.

So after several years of debilitating back pain, reading TMS books cured it after several months.

It was a blessing and a curse that that happened so fast, though, because I never really had to dig any deeper.

Years later, after I started my own office, bought my first house, and had all the typical adult stresses start around the same time, the TMS came back with a vengeance, but this time it was about 20-30 other symptoms that would fluctuate. I suspected TMS immediately, but reading Dr. Sarno’s books didn’t help this time. I found the other TMS forum and Hillbilly’s posts, and immediately started to look at things differently. I tore through Weekes, Low, and host of others. This helped, but I couldn’t seem to fully get ahead of it. So I’d keep re-reading, and slowly things improved.

So for me, step one was admitting I had a problem (sounds like an addiction, right?), and that it was housed in the mind/emotions.

The second step was re-assuring myself though the things I read repeatedly. Hundreds of times, over and over, drilling it into my head. I felt better slowly over time, but it was still a struggle, and I’d have some really bad days. But the information laid a solid foundation, which was a big part of it.

Believe it or not, this went on for several years. I had MRIs, blood tests, etc. Looking back, my analytical/medical mind worked against me for sure. Fear, concern, fixation....were all winning, and this delayed my healing. No matter how much I meditated, read, talked about it...I just couldn’t fully get ahead of it. And to make it worse, my main symptom was constant dizziness. It always felt like I was on a boat in big waves. So just ignoring that was nearly impossible. I began to feel trapped, like ‘if I can’t ignore this, how can I ever heal??’ I fought depression and suicidal thoughts regularly at that time. I tried every modality out there, and many helped a bit, but nothing was fixing it.

From reading these comments, I think quite a few people are stuck in that place.

But then, like Hillbilly, I had an epiphany of sorts. And it’s exactly what anyone who healed had said, but I realized I just wasn’t doing what they recommended. I realized even though I was trying to ignore it, I was waiting for my situation to change to feel/think differently about it, instead of changing myself. I noticed that fear ruled a lot of things in my life. I didn’t fear my actual symptoms as much, but I noticed I feared confrontation with my employees more.

The situation didn’t matter, the feeling did (and the chemical release that comes with it).

So after noticing these patterns, and after getting so sick of being sick, I finally started just doing things and thinking differently. As much as I could, I’d just let thoughts and sensations come and go, and on top of that, I just kept trying to think and feel as if I was already healthy.

This was very, very difficult at first! Especially when symptoms were bad. But the absolute ’I am done with this!!’ energy kept focused. So with practice, even in the midst of dizziness and other things, I started to smile more. I kept asking myself ‘what would perfect health feel like right now?’ Over and over. I shed my old skin so to speak. I spoke up when I didn’t want to, I did things I was afraid to, ALL while feeling shitty.

I keep thinking of how it would feel when all this stuff was gone, even if I felt horrible. Bad thoughts would come in, but I’d catch them and shift them immediately.

No more I said, and this is it. Do or die, really, because I couldn’t live with it anymore (still sounds like an addiction, doesn’t it?). That ‘post in the ground’ saved my life. Your resolve has to be greater than your addiction.

Knowledge->experience/practice—>being/becoming.

That is basically how I did it. Practice, practice, practice until you shed the old you (and with it all the pain and dysfunction)!

 

Thank you so much for sharing your story, @RogueWave.

So, would you say that you 'faked it until you made it', e.g. smiling more, when you probably didn't feel like smiling?

And when you 'shifted' your bad thoughts, was this 'shifting' mainly about recognising that they were bad and not concentrating on them, letting them go -- or did you sometimes consciously replace them with something positive, e.g. thinking of something you were grateful for, or something else?

 

RogueWave .... what can I say
What a post! Nailed it!
Hey @eskimoeskimo are you in on this? This will help a lot of people to “see the light”
Love it ..... marls

 

I understand, but I quess it's hard to believe when years goes by and nothing changes like in eskimo case(or mine too, to be honest). I kinda envy how strong your believe is. Maybe that's part of TMS, but I have many thoughts - for example just because you had CRPS doesn't mean that everyone with CRPS have TMS too. Humans and our world is extremely complex. Many people here believe there are 2 cases of pain - TMS or structural, where I on the other hand believe it can be a plethora of causes. For example change in microflora, which is not really structural nor emotional. And even TMS seems not really like a 'one' problem but a bunch of them, coupled together - some people seems to have pain because of difficult experiences in childhood, some had structural pain once and clinged too much to it, some are maybe hypochondriacs, some are too perfectonicts and think too much about every little pain, making habit in their mind.
I'm trying not to think about it too often because it can make my head hurt, and it's not like I want another place in my body that hurts I just think Sarno was just a beginning, and we need much more knowledge about TMS. Maybe someday...

 

Thank, @Marls. I know I’m long-winded, and I hope that doesn’t turn anyone off to reading through them.

@BloodMoon All of the above! There isn’t a set way to do this, so you have to find your own details. That’s why I’m happy to see people share their success stories, because you’ll find we all have some things in common. As a mentor of mine liked to say ‘different door, same room.’

And to be clear, I failed a lot! There were many times that things were so bad that I just couldn’t ‘observe it’ or shift my thoughts/feelings. But I kept trying, because I couldn’t take the other option any more.

At my worst times I’d go work out, take a cold shower, read or watch vids of success stories, etc. Just anything to snap me out of it at the time.

Also, I’m not sure if I shared this story before or not, but at one point I worked with a hypnotist to help me with the insomnia I had at the time. He told me a story about a woman he saw who had been in a car accident 10 years prior, was knocked unconscious, and woke up in the hospital with a paralyzed arm. She had no recollection of anything other than skidding off the road and waking up in the hospital.

However, when he put her under, she recalled everything that happened from the accident to the hospital, including the conversation the EMTs had while they were riding with her in the ambulance. She said ‘one of them said to the other ‘when someone has an accident like this, they usually end up with a paralyzed arm.’’

And that single suggestion, from an authority figure, while she was unconscious, is what kept her arm paralyzed. Her body repaired the injury, but the mind kept things stuck. She worked with the hypnotist and got movement back.

The hypnotist then said to me ‘do you know is stronger than a hypnotic suggestion? How you think, feel, and speak about your problem. That has a greater effect over time because it is repeated over and over....so make those things healthy!’

 

Just for a laugh RogueWave..... I’m going to pay you an Australian’s highest compliment
“This is going straight to the Pool Room”
marls

 

I believe detail is what a lot of we 'strugglers' need -- so, imo they are fantastic and are perfectly as long as they need to be -- they're meaty, not long-winded!

And thank you for your reply to my last posting -- all you wrote is extremely helpful.

I've been thinking about the above and it made me realise that in avoiding / fearing feeling uncomfortable, I've ended up extremely, painfully uncomfortable!

Also, I came across this quotation today which, for me, ties in with your advice to 'shed' the old me:

“First tell yourself what kind of person you want to be, then do what you have to do. For in nearly every pursuit we see this to be the case. Those in athletic pursuit first choose the sport they want, and then do that work.” — Epictetus

Thanks again, @RogueWave.

 

I have these discussions with patients daily, and the conversation usually goes something like this:

“I tried the anti-inflammatories and they didn’t work!’

Me: ‘Ok, then we can rule out inflammation as a cause.’

And it goes on like that. Every time they tried something that didn’t work, I tell them they eliminated a possibility of what is causing their pain.

Every ailment in the body only has so many causes, so failed treatments can help rule them out.

After awhile, what is left? Do you think your body is so unique that the normal ‘rules’ don’t apply? (People try and convince me every day that this is the case with them).

TMS is one problem (basically the body is stuck in a sympathetic dominant, fight or flight mode) but the potential symptoms are many, because that situation can affect literally any system in the body. And symptoms can switch, ebb and flow, which makes it all the more confusing.

 

YES, exactly! The quote, and what you wrote.

So I hope it makes sense now, that WHAT you are fearful of, obsessing over, worried about, depressed about, anxious about, etc doesn’t matter, it’s the repetition of that feeling that matters, because with that repeated feeling comes repeated chemical releases, and that is what keeps the body in a state of dysfunction.

The feelings/chemicals also influence the thoughts, which validate the feelings, which re-introduces the chemicals....and the hamster wheel is in motion. So we try and take our attention off our pain, but we start obsessing/worrying about other things. The brain doesn’t differentiate, worry is worry.

Alan Watts talked at length about this from a Zen perspective. He said ‘so you’re worried about money, and you think you’ll feel secure when you get it. But then you work hard and get it, and now you worry about your health. And if you feel healthy, you worry about losing your money, or the future.’

I’ll say it again, the thing doesn’t matter, the feeling matters, and how often we repeat it. And the circumstances that started the whole thing in motion were usually set up far before something ‘tipped the cart’ and the symptoms showed up.