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'Wins' board idea/technique to aid you on your journey to recovery...

sam908 said:
Another concept which Dr. Low taught, and which meshes perfectly with what Dr. Sarno and Dan Buglio espouse, is that commanding one's muscles to move teaches the brain that the feared actions may be "distressing but not dangerous."
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Would this be by talking to one's brain like Dr Sarno advised? Or saying just saying something like: "Leg muscles work! It's safe and I know you can move just fine"?
 
Do you care to share any wins today?
Today for me:
  • I didn’t let my pain bully me into thinking I’ll fall in the bathroom.
  • I didn’t let my anxiety overwhelm me when I first woke up.
  • I started tapping again on the tapping app. (Did this awhile ago but stopped).
  • I also started again on the curable app. It’s nice. (Both the tapping and Curable are based on pain reprocessing therapy; so a good fit for me.)
 
Mr Hip Guy said:
Sorry, definitely didn't intend it that way and you're right it's mostly a recognition of my own tendencies. Poor wording on my part.
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It can still work with OCD - you just build in ways to deal with it.
I’m a retired teacher who taught children and adults with presumed cognitive differences in the earlier days of “behavior modification” - many of my students had OCD tendencies. Still responded extremely favorably to reward vs correction (correction was big back then, I favored only using reward eg. Spending extra time with a person doing something they enjoyed eg. One guy loved dancing so we danced his reward - create rewards that do not feed into OCD.
 
Diana-M said:
Do you care to share any wins today?
Today for me:
  • I didn’t let my pain bully me into thinking I’ll fall in the bathroom.
  • I didn’t let my anxiety overwhelm me when I first woke up.
  • I started tapping again on the tapping app. (Did this awhile ago but stopped).
  • I also started again on the curable app. It’s nice. (Both the tapping and Curable are based on pain reprocessing therapy; so a good fit for me.)
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Fab @Diana-M! My wins so far today:
  • I started worrying and catastrophizing about what might go wrong with some work we're having done to our house next week, but immediately stopped those thoughts in their tracks, stopped them from spiralling me into a pit of doom and gloom and moved my thoughts on to other things, e.g. thoughts about looking forward to starting a book that was recommended on @Rabscuttle's non-TMS book recommendations thread.
  • I went back to doing some light 'non-linear movement' exercises in my bed before I got up today, which only take a few minutes yet I had recently given up doing them.
  • I stood in the kitchen and made my husband and me a fruit salad to eat for our afternoon snack; he loves it when I make a fruit salad and the thought of his pleasure in eating my efforts made me smile.
  • I spent 10 minutes doing a new visualisation where I imagined all the cells in my body were as light as clouds :)
 
I walked 6.5 miles all over Portland and up and down a giant hill despite my mind telling me it “might” be too much.
Heck, days not done yet! Gonna go stand for 6 hours straight on hard cement in my “you can’t wear those” boots to see some bands!
I have 0 pain!!
 
Cactusflower said:
I walked 6.5 miles all over Portland and up and down a giant hill despite my mind telling me it “might” be too much.
Heck, days not done yet! Gonna go stand for 6 hours straight on hard cement in my “you can’t wear those” boots to see some bands!
I have 0 pain!!
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Cactus!!! You are an inspiration!
 
Cactusflower said:
I walked 6.5 miles all over Portland and up and down a giant hill despite my mind telling me it “might” be too much.
Heck, days not done yet! Gonna go stand for 6 hours straight on hard cement in my “you can’t wear those” boots to see some bands!
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Ha! Love it! :)... Courtesy of Nancy Sinatra... "These boots are made for walkin' and that's just what they'll do, and one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you -- TMS! Are you ready boots?... Start walkin'!"
... Just had a little dance in my living room, singing along to that one :rolleyes: dancea
 
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@sam908 wrote on this thread:

"Another concept which Dr. Low taught, and which meshes perfectly with what Dr. Sarno and Dan Buglio espouse, is that commanding one's muscles to move teaches the brain that the feared actions may be "distressing but not dangerous"."

And I was wondering whether this would this be by talking to one's brain like Dr Sarno advised or just saying something like: "Leg muscles work! It's safe and I know you can move just fine."

Being keen to know, I just looked it up and in case anyone else is interested, it seems that Dr Low was into speaking directly to the body part, whereas Dr. Sarno’s method is about reassuring the brain and resuming normal activity broadly; the direct verbal command to individual muscles or body parts is apparently not a part of any of his documented therapeutic instructions.

I haven't tried the Dr Low approach before, so I will give it a go if/when I get some muscle stiffness (which has been one of my 'residue' mind/body symptoms).
 
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BloodMoon said:
Ha! Love it! :)... Courtesy of Nancy Sinatra... "These boots are made for walkin' and that's just what they'll do, and one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you -- TMS! Are you ready boots?... Start walkin'!"
... Just had a little dance in my living room, singing along to that one :rolleyes: dancea
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Nancy is one of my idols! My first pair of knee high boots were custom made to look like those in a biker movie she made. Still working on getting back into my knee high boots with heels.
 
BloodMoon said:
Being keen to know, I just looked it up and in case anyone else is interested, it seems that Dr Low was into speaking directly to the body part, whereas Dr. Sarno’s method is about reassuring the brain and resuming normal activity broadly; the direct verbal command to individual muscles or body parts is apparently not a part of any of his documented therapeutic instructions.
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Can't remember where I got this from (I think it was Ozanich's book) but I also like to visualize blood flow to the affected area - we know Sarno said it was oxygen deprivation causing the pain, and even if that's not the case, then blood flow brings oxygen and healing etc - but not just blood flow but a niagara falls level of blood flow. I picture gushes and gushes of blood flowing. It might sound crazy but it works.
 
I spent 6+ hours with my brother in law yesterday splitting wood from a massive white oak that fell on my property recently. This was extremely physical work, lifting 70-80+ lb sections over and over and shifting them around onto the splitter with only a couple of short rest breaks to refill fuel in the engine. Lots of supposed stress on my legs and back and grip/arms. I'm not supposed to be able to do this kind of thing at my mid 50's age, so yeah I'll take that as a win. :D
 
BloodMoon said:
Yes, Dan made that very observation/point, that is, the visual cues and evidence of her progress were in her face (her 'win' board was on the back of her bedroom door) but if you stick your 'wins' in a notebook on a shelf somewhere you have to remember to make the effort to look them up.

My thanks to @Diana-M for giving the time at which Channelle describes how she used her 'win' board (20:45 for anyone else who's interested). It's not a long section of the video and imo it's really worth spending just a little bit of time hearing her talk about it...

For instance, I liked that she described that even with her 'downs' she was able to view them as 'wins' because she took on board that recovery isn't linear, she accepted that the journey was going to be bumpy and viewed a 'down' as one step further along the road towards recovery. When she describes it, using hand gestures, I could tell that she was kind of visualizing her journey/path to recovery in her mind's eye to be something like the graph below, which is from 'The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook' by Vanessa Blackstone and Olivia Sinaiko. (The key/legend came out a bit small so just to say that the solid, black straight line is 'what people think healing looks like' and the meandering dotted line is 'what healing actually looks like'.)

View attachment 2744
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Hi everyone, this curve is interesting but not realistic. If the x-axis represents time, I don't see how we can go back in time unless we can travel through time...
 
Cavalcanti said:
Hi everyone, this curve is interesting but not realistic. If the x-axis represents time, I don't see how we can go back in time unless we can travel through time...
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The graph depicts a recovery trajectory but is not intended to represent chronological time. Individuals with TMS typically monitor recovery by tracking symptom intensity and frequency, which can lead to dysphoria when symptom reduction is not a linear, monotonic process. When the nervous system generates new symptoms as older ones remit (the symptom imperative), the clinical picture can resemble oscillation or regression—one step forward, one step back; one step forward, two steps back; several steps forward, then a partial reversal and so on. Phenomenologically, this is often interpreted as stalled or failed progress, even though, at the level of neural circuitry, adaptive change is occurring. Through activity-dependent neuroplasticity, newly formed or strengthened neural pathways that encode safety, reduced threat appraisal, and altered pain processing gradually gain dominance over pre-existing, threat-based circuits; this competitive reweighting takes time before it becomes robust and behaviourally stable.
 
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