Hi, I wonder if anyone can help me. I suffered from debilitating back pain for 16 years or so which made me suicidal and I had a nervous breakdown. I read Dr Sarno’s books and completely recovered and built a new pain free life. About 3 months ago I was exercising and later that evening experienced back spasms but continued on going to work for a few days but then the pain returned and has been fluctuating- I was nearly better but did some vacuuming and bang I was back to square one again. I have had MRI’s which show usual age related symptoms so nothing sinister. I have been studying my Dr Sarno books and journaling but and this is the but - my brain keeps saying your body is not healed yet this is not TMS and yet it is displaying all of the symptoms. I am wondering why I am having such a hard time accepting TMS this time as I definitely was going through emotional issues at the time. Getting very worn out - can anyone shed some light?
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Why can’t I accept it’s TMS this time as I’ve had it before and got rid of it?
- Thread starter amkeire32
- Start date
Diana-M
Beloved Grand Eagle
Hi @amkeire32
Sorry your TMS is back. This happens a lot. To most people in fact. It’s because usually there’s a lot more to address than what you did the first time. There’s more emotional landscape to uncover. More to learn about how to live a better life— a life that is more true to who you are. It’s a pretty extensive journey. It just means you aren’t done yet.
Sorry your TMS is back. This happens a lot. To most people in fact. It’s because usually there’s a lot more to address than what you did the first time. There’s more emotional landscape to uncover. More to learn about how to live a better life— a life that is more true to who you are. It’s a pretty extensive journey. It just means you aren’t done yet.
Hi @amkeire32, One thing that stood out to me is that you've already returned to Dr. Sarno's books and journaling, which are very much top-down approaches. Since those don't seem to be shifting things right now, I wonder if it might be worth trying something that's perhaps new to you—a more bottom-up approach, like self-soothing and helping your nervous system feel safe. I can suggest a couple of books that have helped me with this if you're open to this idea.
I know I said a couple of books, but actually, upon reflection, I found this book to be the most profoundly helpful...
'101 Ways to Find Calm: How to use your body to soothe your mind' by Rebekah Ballagh
I happen to like its cutesy illustrations (when I don't usually like that kind of thing) but just to say don't let them put you off because the techniques themselves are powerful stuff.
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Cactusflower
Beloved Grand Eagle
@amkeire32 Please know that I've been through TMS a few times, even before I knew what TMS was. This stage is temporary. You've already proven that to yourself in the past. I go to a physical therapist along with doing TMS work (most people don't recommend that, but he's a very different type of PT) - he deals with people who have recurrent or chronic symptoms and is very re-assuring about relapses. Some things he points out is that our breathing changes when we are anxious, and that we often breathe shallow or simply differently and it can shift the way we move. The fear we experience with pain can shift the way we move. He notices two things about people in fight/flight mode. People can either hunch forward or sort of angle backwards in what is often termed "extension". Hunching is curling in on yourself, the opposite is trying to flea from the situation. Either way, it's simply a sign you are in a heightened mode which is basically what @BloodMoon is saying.
The first thing my PT taught me is to simply lay down and pretend to breathe through your back, right at the bra strap. You might feel a slight difference doing this. The key is not to force it at all, just sense it in your mind.
Have you tried meditation? That is another wonderful method (probably in @BloodMoon's book) to ease into the emotional work and soften the fear a bit, and those whirling thoughts. You can choose to do guided meditations or silent. One thing I enjoy doing is breathing in and pretending to breathe into my back and then send the breathe to my toes through the front of my body. Once at the bottom of the toes I breathe in again and send it up the back. Simple circles for a few minutes. I often do this during a guided meditation when the instructions have to start by taking a few breaths.
Insight Timer is a free meditation app and there are so many wonderful guided meditations there to experiment with. My favorites are called Slow And Savory Body Scan (15 minutes, lightly guided and she focuses mostly on extremities), I also really like Healing Vibrations (it's a whole 'channel') who have a few lightly guided meditations meaning it starts out guided to a sound bath and then just fades into the sound bath. Restorative Body Scan, and Cosy Autumn Sound bath on their channel are both relaxing (some sound baths I find irritating) and long - almost an hour long. They have longer. They also offer sound bath only meditations). Learning to play with things you like via meditation is a really nice way to introduce some relaxation and a bit of open-ness into your healing experience. Meditation is a really nice thing to do for yourself after journaling.
This is temporary, take it one breath at a time.
The first thing my PT taught me is to simply lay down and pretend to breathe through your back, right at the bra strap. You might feel a slight difference doing this. The key is not to force it at all, just sense it in your mind.
Have you tried meditation? That is another wonderful method (probably in @BloodMoon's book) to ease into the emotional work and soften the fear a bit, and those whirling thoughts. You can choose to do guided meditations or silent. One thing I enjoy doing is breathing in and pretending to breathe into my back and then send the breathe to my toes through the front of my body. Once at the bottom of the toes I breathe in again and send it up the back. Simple circles for a few minutes. I often do this during a guided meditation when the instructions have to start by taking a few breaths.
Insight Timer is a free meditation app and there are so many wonderful guided meditations there to experiment with. My favorites are called Slow And Savory Body Scan (15 minutes, lightly guided and she focuses mostly on extremities), I also really like Healing Vibrations (it's a whole 'channel') who have a few lightly guided meditations meaning it starts out guided to a sound bath and then just fades into the sound bath. Restorative Body Scan, and Cosy Autumn Sound bath on their channel are both relaxing (some sound baths I find irritating) and long - almost an hour long. They have longer. They also offer sound bath only meditations). Learning to play with things you like via meditation is a really nice way to introduce some relaxation and a bit of open-ness into your healing experience. Meditation is a really nice thing to do for yourself after journaling.
This is temporary, take it one breath at a time.
Ellen
Beloved Grand Eagle
I've had many relapses since my initial recovery. It's discouraging when it comes back, but it does happen to most of us. What I've found over the years is that the hardest part about a relapse is recognizing and admitting it's TMS. You seem to be struggling with that. But once I admit it and accept it, I've found recovery happens pretty quickly. So I recommend journaling about what may be going on in your life that has created this relapse and keep exploring that. Once you "get" why you're having a relapse, recovery can begin.
TG957
Beloved Grand Eagle
You are not alone. Here is my old post on telling TMS from non-TMS with many great responses to it: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/tms-is-a-trickster.26264/#post-135767 (TMS is a trickster!). We ended up with TMS for a reason. If you have a TMS personality, you should expect it to show up now and then, often with new symptoms.
Thank you so much - I will keep going.
Thank you for your words of wisdom - and thank know that other people are going through this.
Pain Lesson #3 in Dr. Schubiner's new Unlearn Your Pain book is (and the italics are his): "All injuries heal, and it is the brain that decides whether to turn the pain off or to make it persistent." You might have injured tissue in your back 3 months ago, but that almost certainly has healed by now. The fact that you still have back pain is, in my view, strong evidence that your current pain is TMS rather than due to unhealed tissue damage. The big question is why your brain has not turned off the pain. There might or might not be a single reason why, but if your mind thinks your tissue damage MIGHT NOT have healed yet, your brain will try to protect you from interfering with the natural healing process by creating pain that induces you to take it easy with your back.
The quote I used above is from the 2026 version of Schubiner's Unlearn Your Pain, the full title of which is Unlearn Your Pain: The Science of Recovering from Chronic Pain, Fatigue Anxiety, and Depression. It is much better than the earlier versions of Unlearn Your Pain (which lack the subtitle "The Science of Recovering" etc.), and it is backed up in the endnotes by hundreds and hundreds of references to modern pain science research.
I became an ardent follower of Sarno in 1991 when he published Healing Back Pain. At that point I had been suffering from chronic low back pain for 24 years. After six weeks of reading and rereading the book and applying what I learned, my back pain disappeared completely and for good. I have never had another backache. I have had other forms of TMS, most of which lasted for decades, too, but I ultimately overcame them completely and for good. I have not had TMS of any kind for more than a dozen years. I have moved beyond Sarno in a few ways, which I won't go into except to say that I have been significantly influenced by Scubiner.
Sarno wrote in his fourth and final book, The Divided Mind, that his patients did not get better unless they understood and accepted that the cause of their chronic pain was psychological rather than structural. He wrote much the same thing in his earlier books.
When Schubiner changed his practice from internal medicine to mind-body medicince, he spent some time with Sarno to learn from him. Regarding that, he wrote: "Dr. Sarno spent a lot of time with each patient, and he observed that stressful life events and unresolved emotional issues were frequently linked to pain." Schubiner follows the same approach.
Schubiner has reached basically the same conclusion that Sarno did regarding what is needed to recover from TMS pain, though he uses differents words. Instead of calling the conditon TMS, he calls it neuroplastic pain. And instead of saying, as Sarno did, that to recover it is necessary to understand and accept that the cause of the pain is psychological rather than structural, Schubiner says that to recover one needs to have an "aha" or "click" moment when he or she knows that the cause of the pain is emotional injury rather than physical injury. Schubiner's two main treatment methods are discussed at length in chapter 17, which is titled Change Your Mind to Change Your Brain: Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and chapter 18, which is titled Emotions Matter: Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy. They are not a lot different from what Sarno prescribed but reflect modern pain science research and are explained more fully.