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Hi there, thanks for the question.

The experience you are describing is very common within the TMS community. What often happens is that in doing reading and investigation of TMS people will come to understand that they need to "feel their emotions". So naturally, being TMSers, they take an analytical, systematic approach just as it sounds like you are. You have reflected and thought about things in your past that could be good candidates for powerful emotions and you have come up with this incident. This is a good start. Unfortunately, you are using the same approach to this "task" that got you in this mess in the first place. You are approaching your emotional life as though it were a problem to be solved, and you want to hear specific steps to take that will lead you to relief. This is a very understandable perspective, as of course you want to be out of pain, but as I said, this is the kind of approach that gets you in trouble in the first place. From this perspective, emotions are means to an end, a hurdle to overcome and deal with on the road to recovery. The problem here is that from this point of view, you are engaging with your emotions not as a way to support yourself and enrich your life, but rather in service to "fixing" your pain. The pain is still calling the shots!

We don't want the pain to be the center of your focus. The pain is nothing more than a side-show, your unconscious mind's way of keeping you distracted from the emotions. So what to do? Of course I can't tell you how to feel. Many people that I work with ask me to tell them how to feel their emotions, concerned that they simply don't know how to do it. So you're in good company. The problem is that no one can tell you how to feel, you have to decide to do it yourself, you have to decide to take an open and honest look at what is going on inside and open yourself to the experience. The good news is that everyone is born knowing how to feel. It's a natural part of being human. The problem is that many of us learn how to repress our emotions because at some point it can be a means of protecting ourselves. This self-protective pattern then gets stuck and eventually, long past its usefulness, begins to cause suffering, in your case manifesting as TMS. The emotions cause so much distress that your unconscious mind has decided that it is better off distracting you with a migraine. All this is to say that if you suffered a traumatic event and you think that you have no emotions around it, you almost certainly do but they are being repressed. Your task, which is admittedly challenging, is to decide firmly that it is your will to allow yourself to get in touch with and to feel these emotions. Now this will require patience and practice; after all, you have been spending a long time doing the exact opposite. But there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that you can do it. I have seen many, many, many people do so who have very much doubted their capacity.

I hope this is helpful.

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