This is where I diverge slightly from you and Eskimo. I also have a consistent level of fairly significant pain, but it's the other associated symptoms -- stiffness, loss of fine motor control, etc -- that are absolutely wreaking havoc on my sense of well being. If the pain never changed, but I regained the ability to move/function like before, I could be reasonably content.
Tbh, I think we "problem healers" have a case of OCD on 'roids.
I'm sure a lot of this will be repetition, but I do remember at my worst reading some things that made me go 'ah! Now THAT makes sense!' Sometimes it was just how something was worded, or perhaps I was just ready to hear it.
Also, apologies for the delay
@Mark1122 , but there have been some really great responses so I'm happy to read others' input.
'OCD on roids' made me chuckle, but that itself IS part of the problem. It's just another branch of TMS. A habitually stressed system, caught in survival mode. will often cause someone to think OCD thoughts. This is why buying into the OCD thoughts and continually acting on them will just keep re-introducing the stress hormones that cause the OCD in the first place! (In most cases).
This is why over-analysis, over-dramatization (or both), self-diagnosis, defeatism, and anything like that will ALL sabotage your recovery. They are all understandable, but if they are allowed to continue, the brain/body will keep producing the same chemistry, and you will be trapped.
So do any of these sound familiar: 'Why me?' 'I can't live like this!!' 'What if its..(insert deadly diagnosis here)??' IT'S SO BAD! No one understands what I'm going through! What did I do to deserve this? Why aren't I healed now? Is this TMS??
All understandable (I did all of them myself, and considered suicide many, many times), but these types of thoughts (and the chemical releases that come with the thoughts), will produce chemistry in the entire system that will just keep the process going.
So, if you haven't accepted the TMS diagnosis yet (And some of you haven't, or you wouldn't keep asking 'Is this TMS??'), then go to all the doctors you can. Maybe they'll find something.
But if you have accepted the TMS diagnosis, and still aren't healed yet (or aren't making any progress at all), you have to really take a good, hard, look at yourself. No one creates TMS consciously and on-purpose. So I'm not trying to blame anyone, find fault, or say anyone has some defect.
Like I said, wayyyyy back I started off as a dietitian, and I worked with very heavy people. They'd always tell me how many things they tried, some new pill or home exercise equipment they had bought, some new book they had read, that they didn't really eat that much, and they just couldn't understand how they were so heavy.
That is until they started journaling everything. I'd grill them on portion size, how often they REALLY exercised, how they thought and felt, and always and all ways (see what I did there
), it was something they were doing or not doing that was keeping them stuck.
The process to cure TMS is really very similar. You have to change 'you.' And you have to do it consistently, with an energy greater than the energy that is keeping you stuck where you are. This usually requires crisis for people, but some of you already appear to be there.
This can't be 'I tried this for a week, month, etc and I'm not healed yet!' approach. Just like losing weight: 'But I was great for 6 weeks, and I haven't lost 50 lbs yet!'
Baby steps, consistency, and self-accountability will win eventually. But more often than not, we don't progress fast enough, so we jump to another book, another technique......hope comes initially, then fades as the old 'you' comes roaring back. The pain returns or sticks around, the 5 lbs lost becomes 10 lbs gained, and we dig the hole deeper.
As mentioned a million times already, this is not a game. Healing requires utmost sincerity and consistency, just like permanent weight loss. You can't keep weight off if you keep going back to old ways of being, and you can't heal from TMS if you stay stuck in the person you've been for the last X number of years.
The pain (and all the other TMS equivalents) are a SYMPTOM of the body being out of balance. And it's out of balance because of how you've consistently thought, acted, spoke, felt, and been for years and years (in most cases). Looking back on my case, I'm surprised it took until I was 16 or so before severe back pain exploded on me. But then again, I was a sickly kid, so the constant introduction of stress hormones most likely weakened my immune system tremendously.
ALL thoughts, actions, words, and feelings come with chemical releases. ALL OF THEM. For example, the feeling of fear causes anxiety-type thoughts, and causes the release of epinephrine, norepinepherine, cortisol, and many hormones and neurotransmitters. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU ARE FEARING. So if I fear my boss at work, how my patients are going to react to me, what my girlfriend thinks of me, if my car is going to break down......the things I'm fearing don't matter , but every single one of those thoughts will produce the hormone/neurotransmitter release I mentioned. So, just like a person trying to lose weight has to be honest with themselves about how much they are really eating, a person stuck in fear (or depression, anger, failure, or whatever) has to be honest with themselves about how often during the day they are thinking and feeling fear. This is the start of self-awareness.
At that point you will start to realize how often you are doing all the things I mentioned a few paragraphs back that are sabotaging recovery. I don't need to know anyone personally that is 'stuck', because after 16 years of practice I can guarantee you that they are doing at least one of those things (and problem several of them) throughout the day, every day. Just like an overweight person keeps overeating. It's just become habituated.
So with awareness, you can start to stop yourself from doing these things that are sabotaging your recovery. After that, there are many, many techniques to help shift the thoughts and feelings (which therefore shifts your internal chemistry) throughout the day. This is what we are all talking about when we're talking about shifting the internal environment.
But you can have the greatest meditation technique in the world, the greatest therapist, etc. and it won't matter if you fall back into old patterns the rest of the day. So if I talk to a therapist, or sit down to meditate, and have a great session, I'll probably feel a bit better for a little while. But if after the session, the old familiar 'But what if?' 'This is never going away' thoughts and feelings are allowed to steer the ship again, the effect of the meditation, therapy, etc just went out the window, because my familiar, internal chemistry just re-asserted itself, and I'm right back where I started.
There is not one set way to heal, as
@miffybunny.
@Dorado, and any of us that have been through this have repeatedly stated. It will take time, and it will take consistency, just like weight loss. My old Master teacher in Beijing also liked to say "The hardest part of moving a boulder from one point to the other is to get it rolling!' The same applies here. It might take a tremendous effort to see even a little improvement, but if you stay with it long enough, eventually it will budge.
I just had a girl in my office today who told me she listened to self-hypnosis on YouTube every night for a YEAR before she finally started to heal. But now she's doing great.
Funny, and I may have mentioned before, but I had another patient with a history of severe panic attacks. When I questioned her about them in our first appointment, she told me she hadn't had any in years. I asked her how she managed that, and was it some intense therapy, many hours of meditation, etc. and she looked at me and laughed. She said 'every time I had one I thought it would kill me, and I always worried about when they would come. I had so many, but nothing ever really happened, so I just really stopped giving a shit whether they came or not!' And lo and behold, that was what cured her.
Very Zen
It's not helping my case, that I've got my main symptoms(stomach and teeth/jaw pain) after course of antibiotics for acne, so it's kinda like I still deeply thinks that acne destroyed my life... first making me an outcast in school, someone who others would laugh at, and then destroying my body after I tried to deal with it. It's also why I'm kinda affraid of doctors and medicine - I trusted them once and how I ended up?