Friends/peers: I think that Lee is not understanding the work at all, because he keeps asking essentially the same questions in spite of our attempts to explain it. We are spinning our wheels.
I am going to be brutally honest about what I'm seeing,
@Lee222. I am not a professional psychotherapist, I am just a person who discovered Dr Sarno and did this work and recovered from multiple symptoms thirteen years ago. I've seen people similar to you many times since then, so I can assure you that you are not alone. However...
@Lee222, I asked you to tell us what you thought about The Divided Mind by Dr Sarno.
You ignored my question. This is very strange, because most people can't wait to tell us how they relate to the book and how it gives them hope.
I feel like you probably rushed through the book only because we told you to read a book by Dr Sarno, but you did not actually pay attention to what you read.
I think the reason you're so fixated on the type of practitioner is because
you are searching for someone who will simply fix you, without any real effort on your part other than showing up and paying the bill.
You are starting to do the program because we told you to, but you're already complaining about it because it makes you uncomfortable.
The whole point of this work is that you must be willing to be emotionally uncomfortable in order to face the truth about what you are repressing.
I'll bet that this is why you have been so frustrated with psychotherapy in the past.
The things that are making you uncomfortable are the things that are making you sick because they are being repressed. Dr Sarno rediscovered this fact, which is ancient knowledge, and repackaged it for modern understanding and modern stressors. However, he said that some people are too repressed to benefit, usually as a result of childhood adversity or trauma, and they need professional therapeutic psychotherapy.
As I told you before, Dr Sarno did all this even though he was the US equivalent of a physiotherapist with a medical degree. He created his modern theories of repressed emotions because he was frustrated that he couldn't fix so many of his patients with back pain, using purely physical treatments. He had a keen eye for personalities and realized that his patients all had similar emotional personalities, so he started talking to them about their lives and their childhoods, instead of working on their backs. And people started recovering just by talking.
Based on things you've told us, it seems that you have rejected psychotherapy as useless. I suspect this is because you put up a wall every time you become emotionally uncomfortable, and the therapists see this wall, and are unable to break through because your repressed unconscious brain is so skilled at making it unbreakable. So they give up and tell you to just get on with your life, because they don't want to waste their time and your money if you are unwilling to do what it takes.
If you're going to go through the SEP complaining about being uncomfortable, and managing to do the exercises without any emotional commitment, this will also be a waste of your time.
Finally, although it's subtle, I am seeing an underlying theme of victimhood in what little you have revealed. Victimhood is anathema to recovery from the TMS conditions. If you were to go back into psychotherapy, with a commitment to take emotional risks and to be uncomfortable, victimhood would be a useful topic to get started.
