Last post about this for now, promise
A long-gone poster here by the name of Hillbilly really helped me out when I was at my worst, and I saved everything I could of his. I'm posting a few things he wrote about recovery from TMS, and I didn't want to take credit for his words. But they saved my life, so here are some of his gems:
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"few weeks passed in which I walked through the motions of living. At night, suffering from terrible insomnia, I would ponder the things I'd read that gave me hope. I got out a pad and paper and began to write down the things that I wasn't doing that I knew I needed to. This was an epiphany for me. I wasn't following the simplest advice of all, which was to let the pain come and go or stay or whatever it chose to do, which both Dr. Weekes and Dr. Sarno prescribed. The problem was that I was still allowing my symptoms to control me. I wasn't in control at all in my life. I made room for rest, avoidance, paced myself too much. I decided I needed one thing, and that was courage to push through the pain and doubt and go back to living again. I took a break from all forums, all internet searches, and decided on one goal: I would live fully again, and I would be stronger and more resolute than before. I didn't need a hero. I needed to find the inner strength for MY journey.
I was introduced to a lady who had gone through what I had through a mutual friend. She agreed to take me on as a pet project. She told me to buy a book called “Mental Health Through Will Training” by Dr. Abraham Low. I began to read the book in the two weeks before I met with her the first time. I got the feeling that I was listening to a football coach while reading Dr. Low rise above the complaints and whines of his patients and calmly, assertively tell them they were wrong. They were simply giving in to their stress symptoms. Even though none of them mentioned back pain specifically, I knew what he was saying spoke directly to the way I was behaving, overthinking, avoiding, mentally manifesting tumors and bleeds where there were none. TMS? Schmee Em Ess. Broken will and cowardice was my diagnosis.
When I met with my therapist, she was always so sure of what she was telling me was correct. That was impressive. It was also a stark contrast to those on forums I used to listen to give advice even though I knew from their own accounts that they were unable to find their own solutions, they could advise me on mine. She gave me homework. Some of it was strange, like washing my wife's feet, but some things were just plain, everyday activities that I didn't do because of my symptoms like going for a walk with my daughter. But it all made sense in retrospect. This was living in which you took chances and impacted the people in your life. No more hiding. I increased my chores around the house tenfold. Within weeks I stood on a ladder for three days and stained my deck. I went to ballgames and sat on bleachers and talked to people around me. I was not ever comfortable, but I was OK and began to feel human again. This is the main point. You have to behave like a person who is healthy because in reality you are. You only think there is something wrong because of how you feel. One evening after cleaning up our dinner I went outside to build a fire in our firepit. I was bending over and over to pick up wood and sort of noticed that my back was moving freely and easily. It was the last I heard from my pain. It has been several years now.
You are going to get better. You will restore your health to normalcy. There will be times that you will feel reluctant to do something, pressured, conflicted, but you will experience no more than normal fight or flight reactions that every human being on the planet experiences.
After reading the above, you either had one reaction or another. You either believed it or you didn't. The dividing line between those who recover from nervous illness, and those who don't is what they actually believe. You can write or chant affirmations until you are purple in the face, journal your life's story colored with lots of offensive words about your parents or ex-spouses or children, do yoga with eastern gurus, sit in sweat lodges, beat pillows with mini baseball bats, or many, many other interventions people have undertaken to overcome their problem, but until you do absolutely nothing except understand what you are doing wrong and fix it, nothing will improve.
What you are likely doing wrong is avoiding life. Specifically, you are avoiding discomfort. You've probably had this discomfort since childhood, but that isn't important. You were born sensitive, and you have little resistance to stress in your nervous system. You get powerful symptoms when stressed. You have difficulty concentrating, can't organize your life well, avoid social interaction, avoid any activity you think might cause embarrassment, avoid doing the most basic chores or daily living because they are boring. Instead you fill your time with things that command your attentive energy. More probably you do more than one. The biggest one I see is staying on this forum or another, posting your thoughts or those of others, getting into arguments about things that don't matter to anyone, including you. If you are an adult, you need to work. That is what adults do. Even if you don't do it for money, volunteer. Read some Thomas Carlyle. He'll inspire you.
Meanwhile, there are people who love you who are watching you do this, have probably sought many times to encourage you to get back to living, but have met with such resistance that they have stopped altogether. The choice to stop is yours. You are no different in that respect than a drug addict. The decision has to come from inside you. It is a simple act of the will. It is not complicated and does not require the intervention of a counselor or guru. You have to be so tired of being miserable that you decide once and for all to fix this, to live courageously, and to stop coddling your precious feelings. Everyone alive suffers embarrassment at one time or another, and you are not so important that you can't accept it. It angers you, perhaps to the point of temper tantrums, that there are demands upon your time. You must stop seeing your failures or upsets as anything more than normal, average occurrences. Because objectively, that's what they are. Ask a few people what they've struggled through, and you're likely to be surprised. Then think to yourself, “Wow, if that person can do all this after going through what he has, I should be able to also.” You can, of course, if you believe it.
Lastly, there are many people who offer advice on this forum. Many of them are well-intended when they offer their advice, but their advice is limited to their own reading, life experience, and ability to understand. Mine is no different. I was terribly excited about helping others and for several years worked with those whose problems couldn't be seen on an MRI but wouldn't resolve. The ones that got better stopped excusing themselves and went about their lives. Those that didn't continued to malinger, blame childhood trauma and look ubiquitously for treatment programs and methods that were expensive and untested.
Here are the most common pitfalls I see with recovery:
1) Believing that you must do or not do something because it was written by a doctor, especially Dr. Sarno. I've read scores of threads here that make me shake my head because people actually erect mental barriers of warning that if they were to stretch to relieve their pain that they "send a message to their unconscious that there is a structural problem." Really? If this is a benign condition, how can you hurt yourself? Stop worrying. That's the real issue.
2) I have read the advice of those who advocate psychotherapy (Freudian, Jungian, etc.) for dealing with these problems. Trace those statements back to their origins, and you will find someone with a financial interest in those practices with 100% certainty. If a person has labored through what I call getting their Freud patch at psychology camp, they're damn well gonna make it worth their while. Avoid these people and their advice and please, please, please stop buying their books and DVD's. You have a shelf loaded down with them already and here you sit reading the words of an educated moron.
3) You and your experience are unique, but not exceptional. In other words, stop seeing impediments to your happiness in every act of life. Expect and accept discomfort, disappointment, even grief. It won't kill you. Fear is the jailer of your life. You might even be fearful of your own anger with yourself or someone else. That's OK too, just stay determined to get the things done you need to in order to feel like a productive adult. If you can stop letting your "feelings" influence your life in any way, you will recover fully and not look back.
4) Finally, although it is not a requirement here or elsewhere, you need to understand and even ask for the experience of someone who offers advice. Never ask for or accept advice on finances from a homeless beggar. Use the same reasoning when getting advice for treating your anxiety or TMS as it is called here from someone who tells you with firm conviction what to do who meanwhile is suffering away, avoiding their own issues, especially those who spend the most time here. If you spend your time here, there is a tradeoff that you can't get back. Thank them kindly for their time and thoughtful offer, then ignore them completely.
"The first and final hurdle to getting well is and was and shall forever be when you no longer care how you feel because you have determined that your ailments are benign and can no longer scare you or keep you from accomplishing anything. A disciplined mental approach to thinking about accomplishing your daily tasks despite bodily rumblings is essential while you recover. Self-discipline is the no. 1 goal. You have to take it seriously and do it always. No exceptions. Despair over how you feel even for an instant has chemical byproducts that worsen the way you feel. Imagine what happens if you despair all day, every day for months or years over symptoms that are created out of despair to begin with. Ironic, isn't it?. The worst thing facing you is emotional chemical releases, which are nothing at all, really. They will burn up in time if allowed to without cycling through the additional negative reactions to how you feel."
"Here is something that you can do that will help, I think. Go to google and download the free ebook The Freedom of Life by Annie Payson Call. This was written over 100 years ago. It is a very good primer on nervous health and how it gets interrupted. Read especially the sections on how to deal with discomfort.
Then after reading it, keep track of the amount of time that you are spending thinking about your body and what it is doing, what you are restricting yourself from. You will find that you are living in a state of constant fear, which sets up vicious cycles of fight or flight responses. This is not terribly difficult to understand. The trick is to stop the cycles. The body in this state is never at rest, and your constant focus upon it makes it remain so. When you accept the diagnosis as TMS or anxiety or whatever benign condition, there should be a conscious effort then made to accept or ignore the pain and related sensations as transient, normal stress responses that will resolve when you no longer react to them fearfully. This will take some effort. Be patient with yourself. If you are impatient, that will trigger the stress response. If you get upset because you can't do something and want to, that will trigger it as well. Problem is most if not all of us have lived so stressfully and so reliant upon adrenaline to get through the day for so long that we think that is normal.
The thinking you just posted will lead to more illness. I have seen countless people whose refusal to accept the symptoms as stress related suffer endlessly, going from doctor to doctor and having them find nothing at all clinically wrong or getting some nebulous diagnosis like myofascial pain or fibromyalgia or CFS, which just led to more suffering because they read lots of scary stuff on the internet and didn't follow a set program of recovery. Anxiety conditions can last a lifetime if not interrupted on the conscious level. You must understand what is happening, accept that it is the ONLY thing causing your problems, and make a constant effort to stop fearing your symptoms. Simplify everything to prevent worry and you are on your way to lasting health.
If you allow yourself to ruminate about physical explanations, you are doomed. There is nothing that you can do to set your mind at ease even for a moment. I know. I was there for two years. You have to break this habit of self-diagnosis right away to get on the way back to health.
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There is a point at which a person becomes willing to have their pain or gurgling gut or dizziness or weak legs. This is the point at which they go away. It is an amazing thing to allow yourself to suffer, which by definition is its antithesis, which ends it forever. The reason you suffer is because you are unwilling to have these symptoms. If you were, you wouldn't have them. This isn't some mantra chant from eastern religion, but a fact that you can live in your own life. Be willing to suffer and you end all suffering. Think that over. Invite your pain to increase, and you will see that it will diminish.
Once you have reached a point where nothing can affect you in the way it now does, you will be rid of the pain forever. It will have no purpose in continuing. You won't dread it. You won't pine for it to be gone. You will have figured out that it is, as Art states, a manifestation of stress, which only grows as you add your own reactive stress to it. Without this reaction, it is a normal occurrence, no different than sweating out a sports game on the couch.
. I was looking for Abraham Low's discussions on what he calls 'defeatism,' and a good concise discussion came up on the Wikipedia page (
