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Important question! Alex is 100% correct. TMS symptoms often times “settle” in a place that is important to us. Now, I want to be clear: it’s not that your brain is doing that on purpose to make you more miserable. The symptoms are only responding to how your brain responds to it.

Let me explain: The TMS/Chronic Pain personality type is one that is hyper-focused on problems. We tend to see a problem and work as hard as we possibly can to fix it. We know that we have a weakness somewhere, so we do our best to overcome it. Harder and harder we work to make sure that weakness doesn’t get in our way.

That skill is exactly what makes many TMS people successful in life, but it’s also the same skill that causes our pain to stick around. Why would that skill cause our pain to stay with us?

Well, here’s an analogy: Let’s say you are deathly afraid of mice, and you’re in your house/apartment/yurt and you notice a mouse scamper across the kitchen floor. Your anxiety shoots through the roof and start feeling really scared. The mouse disappears behind a wall and you can’t see it at all. Now, the only evidence we have regarding the mouse is that it once was in the kitchen, but it is gone now. We can’t see it. But because you’re so deathly afraid of mice, your brain tells you that it’s probably just waiting to come out and run through the kitchen again.

How is your body feeling in this scenario? Panicked, scared, jittery, nervous, anxious, etc. And your body will stay this way until you either

1) forget about the mouse entirely (which is unlikely) or

2) you convince yourself that it’s gone (either because you kill it or you see it run across the street to the neighbors house).

In either case, eventually your body will calm down, because you know that the mouse is no longer a threat to you. If you thought that the mouse would be there for the rest of your life, ready to scamper to across the kitchen floor at any time, it would be very difficult to live in that house/apartment/yurt because you’d be so anxious! In fact, I’d bet that eventually you’d move.

Now, say you’re waiting for the subway to go to work. You look down at the tracks and see a mouse. Maybe your body gets a little bit of anxiety, but nothing like the anxiety you experienced when you saw the mouse in your house (I’m a poet!).

Why?

Because you CARE that the mouse is in your kitchen, but you don’t care that there is a mouse on the subway tracks.

If you didn’t care as much about the mouse in your kitchen, then your body wouldn’t react as strongly. The only reason your body is getting panicky and anxious after you saw the mouse in the kitchen is because your brain told it to do so! Whereas your brain doesn’t see the mouse in the metro as a threat, and so there is no reason for your body to react with anxiety.

Back to pain:
The mouse is your pain, and the kitchen is whatever specific body part you care about most. As Alex said, if you had pain in your toe (the mouse in the metro), you just wouldn’t care as much, and the pain would go away. But because the pain is in a part of your body that you care about, your anxiety is triggered to the nth degree. And, as we know, anxiety keeps pain alive.

Because you care about that part of your body more than other parts, the pain is sticking around. If the pain had shown up in your right arm/shoulder/neck and it didn’t feel like a threat to you in any way, it may have been there for a few hours or days, but then would go away. BUT, just like the mouse in the house, we care that it’s there, so it’s hard to tell ourselves that it’s no big deal. Overcoming TMS is learning how to not care so much. It’s learning how to not perceive so many things in our lives as problems that need fixing.

The difference between the mouse/kitchen scenario and your pain is that you can’t move out of your body, so you’re stuck with your pain until you can prove to yourself that it’s harmless and that there’s no reason to feel threatened by it. Anxiety and pain are intricately interconnected, and until your anxiety reduces, your pain won’t reduce.

We learn not to fear mice by realizing that they’re completely harmless, and in fact they’re kind of cute. Now, I don’t expect you to find your pain cute, but if you can learn that it’s harmless, you’re one step closer to eliminating your pain.

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Any advice or information provided here does not and is not intended to be and should not be taken to constitute specific professional or psychological advice given to any group or individual. This general advice is provided with the guidance that any person who believes that they may be suffering from any medical, psychological, or mindbody condition should seek professional advice from a qualified, registered/licensed physician and/or psychotherapist who has the opportunity to meet with the patient, take a history, possibly examine the patient, review medical and/or mental health records, and provide specific advice and/or treatment based on their experience diagnosing and treating that condition or range of conditions. No general advice provided here should be taken to replace or in any way contradict advice provided by a qualified, registered/licensed physician and/or psychotherapist who has the opportunity to meet with the patient, take a history, possibly examine the patient, review medical and/or mental health records, and provide specific advice and/or treatment based on their experience diagnosing and treating that condition or range of conditions.

The general advice and information provided in this format is for informational purposes only and cannot serve as a way to screen for, identify, or diagnose depression, anxiety, or other psychological conditions. If you feel you may be suffering from any of these conditions please contact a licensed mental health practitioner for an in-person consultation.

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