Why am I still in pain? Why doesn't it work?

[AC45]

Tattvasami, you sound like a grand master rather than a new member. You are very wise. I first heard about Dr Sarno on April 8th this year and threw myself into journalling for about 7 weeks. My 'inner voice' told me I then had to take a break from searching for the exact reasons for tms and instead focus on relaxing, meditating, loving myself and loving life. I recognized I was trying to perfect journalling. Now my inner voice has lead me back to journalling again. I started Dr Schubiner's 4 week program yesterday and it is good.
Namaste.

Ellen - I too spent weeks journaling. It helped and I got better. However at some point, you will not always have the answers or understand why your TMS is back. There does seem to be some kind of mix between "doing stuff" and figuring out when to stop, accept and relax. It is such a journey!

 

[PainNoMore]

There is a general misconception about TMS that is the reason why people are having trouble and are on this forum, searching for help. I am trying my best to explain things so that hopefully, some of you can see the error in your thinking.

Dr. Sarno discovered that people who are prone to TMS tend to have certain personality traits. These traits include being perfectionistic, worrying, trying to control things, putting pressure on yourself to succeed, being good to other people instead of being real, etc. The general feeling of someone with those personality characteristics is of someone who is in constant stress and worry. You probably are someone who just can't relax, can't let it go. You are always searching for answers, you just can't let things be as they are. You want control over life and over yourself. EFFORT is what defines you. I would also call this the "no pain, no gain" personality. It's the constant self-imposed pressure that you put on yourself. You actually are tense all over, it's not just pain that you have. But as your belief system dictates to you, "no pain no gain", so you believe that in order to accomplish things, you HAVE to be this way.

This constant self-imposed pressure produces unconscious rage, as Dr. Sarno has discovered. If you think of it only in terms of anger, you are slightly misguided. What is meant by the rage is just massive emotional energy, anger, sadness, everything mixed together. People make up labels and then say that this is anger, this is sadness. But feelings are more like a spectrum of energy. It does not really matter where you put anger or where you put sadness on that spectrum, it's basically all the same energy and "anger" and "sadness" are just labels. And when you put pressure on yourself, you are generating LOTS of that emotional energy internally. This energy, when expressed, can cause lots of trouble. You might start to cry, get angry at someone, you might even want to beat someone up or beat yourself up. Anyway, the possibility exists that this emotional energy could cause trouble.

Now, here is where you lock yourself into TMS pain. First you put pressure on yourself, which creates unconscious rage. The rage needs to be repressed, so your brain creates some symptom, like back pain, in order to distract you. It creates something for you to focus on, so that you won't experience your rage. Due to your personality, you not only are distracted for the time that it is needed for you to be distracted, but you get HOOKED on the pain. You are perfectionistic, so you can not allow yourself to have pain, because pain is not part of you being perfect. So you start fighting it with all you've got. The problem is that you are always fighting. First you worry about some things in your life, you try to fight them, you try to control them. Then you get pain and you start fighting the pain. Some people get so deep that their whole life revolves around pain. EVERYTHING they do is in some way related to the pain. This is the worst case scenario of being completely hooked.

So, by trying to get rid of the pain, first you probably go the usual route. You go to doctors and you try to do everything to get rid of the pain. Then you realize it's not helping and you find out about TMS. So far, so good. But then you learn about TMS and you continue trying to solve things with your fight-fight-fight attitude. What is the message of Dr. Sarno? If anything, it is to realize that there is nothing wrong with your body, the pain is due to psychological processes, so stop fighting it and it will go away. But you don't get the message, because it is incompatible with your mindset. Your mindset dictates that everything in life can only be accomplished by effort. No pain, no gain. So you can't possibly understand the message which tells you to go the other way, to let go of the obsession. Instead, you get the typical message from Dr. Sarno that you must do this and do that. You get the message that you need to think about the rage and the reasons for it every minute, every second of your day. And that is exactly what is still keeping you in pain.

So I hope I inspired some of you to take a look at your thinking processes and hopefully start to see things in a new light.

tattvamasi - you have a gift. somehow you were able to see me a year and a half in the future!

yesterday, i was reading another thread and someone linked this thread...that's how i got here. forgot who it was, but thank you too. i had been struggling some and this has already helped me immensely.

 

[sandiego3343]

Getting rid of TMS (or any other psychosomatic illness, really) can be summed up in 2 words: let go. Unfortunately, teaching perfectionists how to let go is difficult. If you have spent years and years of your life worrying, trying to control things, trying to do everything perfectly or well, trying to be a nice person, then what you really have perfected is your perfectionism itself. And then you get pain or some other disease and you find out that it is caused by your perfectionism/goodism personality. What are you supposed to do? If you continue being a problem solver and do everything you can to get rid of TMS, then you still don't understand what TMS is all about. As long as you want to get rid of TMS, it stays. The more you fight, the more it persists. The moment you let go, it disappears. So really, what are you supposed to do? How do you let go? And the only answer I can give you is that you can't. How can you yourself let go of yourself? How can you force yourself to not force things? How can you want to be pain free, if what is required to be pain free is to not want to be pain free? You see, you've got yourself an insoluble problem and it can't be solved by doing something. It can only be solved by letting go. By really going deep and thinking it through, you will see that you really can't do anything about it, and when you see that, you just let go.

I

I feel fortunate to have come upon your 3 posts, tattvamasi. They have been very helpful. I printed them out as part of my daily therapy. Do you have more posts I can look at?

 

[Balsa11]

Hi Tattvamasi,

I appreciate your post. The quote above is great. When we start working with anything: our perfectionism, our Inner Critic, our habits (I mean this list as beyond, and including TMS work), we can only at the start bring all our patterns into it. This is natural. What more do we have to work with then the very "approach" that got us into "this mess?" And when we are suffering, such as in pain, we are all the more desperate, worked up, and more prone to apply our stress-fueled, more rigid tools.

In my experience the sensible way to deal with this is to observe, hopefully without judgement. Observe the unskillful, habitual patterns we bring to bear in an effort to "improve" (again in any realm, including and beyond TMS). With observation, what works for me is to use the "paradoxical theory of change" which is "don't fight it, and it will relax on its own." This approach takes a certain steadfastness, and it takes work with the Superego. I defend my space to reject and struggle, and effort, and have all my "wrong patterns."

In a sense this may be part of what you are saying about the mistakes we make in our personal Sarno approach. We try too hard, and this slows progress. I am also saying that for me, the way to work with "trying to hard" is not to "try hard to stop trying hard." With observation and awareness and time, we see more clearly the suffering we are causing ourselves, and the habits that cause the suffering tend to relax, dissipate.

For me, as I began to digest Dr. Sarno's work, and have some success, I backed off doing too much. I journalled a little, I stopped coming to the forum, I read the 12 daily reminders. I worked gently to increase my activity. My whole life had been revolving around pain, and I was desperate to have it end. But when the relief started, I held it all with a pretty light hand.

I could see the way my personality deals with things: efforting, perfectionism, constantly measuring and comparing progress, and Dr. Sarno said this was probably the root of my TMS. So as you suggest, I made space for progress, and did not push it. I think that some good breakthroughs in the beginning helped this. I sort of trusted that the activity of unraveling TMS had been started, and much of it would continue down deep, without efforting. This is the way I dealt with my propensities that you speak of. Each person has to work with your teaching about this in their own way.

Andy B.

@Andy Bayliss How do I stop efforting and comparing? I have no motivation to do anything different otherwise.