Another Cause of TMS ?

Perhaps I missed it but I have not seen in any TMS/stress disorders book coverage of repressed emotions regarding bad habits and behaviors. We are each born with an inherent sense of right and wrong unless we have serious psychiatric conditions.

As we grow we are socialized with more interoperations of right/wrong. If you want to get Freudian it could be called the Superego – I am not a Freud fan so I prefer to call it the True self that is the gateway to spirit. In ancient wisdom it is also called the “one who knows.”

When we do something we know is wrong...eat bad food, smoke, cheat, lie, the One Who Knows watches and sends out a microburst of emotion that we are off base. We can take the emotional FYI and use it to alter course or we can suppress it. God, I know a quart of chocolate is bad for me...but I am just going to silence that inner voice and do it anyway.

So no need to do psycho-archeology and dig for old repressed emotions, we have one right now today that is causing a neuronal storm. Lets say the food awareness suppression is a number one. Yelling at your children a number three. Having sex with your brothers wife is a number six and killing a child a number 10. Each has more electrochemical energy that has to be altered to keep it out of awareness.

The psychiatric and psychological communities have become so aware of this moral repression causing damage they are going to include “Moral Injury” in a future DSM.

OK, so the moral blip of awareness comes up and we chose to tell it: Not now...not tomorrow or not ever!! If we do this often enough the brain, being an organ of energy conservation says: next time the True Self sees a violation we know the human will just shove it under the rug so lets just do it for him/her....automatically. The Bible even commented on this: “Through Rebellion Their Hearts Hardened.”

So when we tell the small inner voice to shut up it will and we will have lost our internal compass and possibly the pathway to our spirit. In ancient wisdom traditions spirit is the word for “ Breath of God” or the energy that animates and heals us. Shut that door and we are on our own...not good as Adam and Eve can attest.

Our nervous systems are designed to handle brief stress even in huge amounts, we are not designed for the drip-drip-drip of psychological stress from repressing our True Self. This death by a thousand paper cuts is modern life. Separation from True Self is the most severe childhood wound.

Children who grow up in adverse conditions learn to shut off this inner voice, they have to since they don’t have the cortex yet to know how to process strong emotions. They learn the only wayy to survive is to alter reality by living in their minds...bodies don’t lie, minds can be made to.

So are stress disorders from old emotions buried in the body...well maybe, maybe not! Remember the old story of the man who lost his keys and was out at the curb looking for them under the street light. His neighbors all came to help when one little boys asked. “ Where were you when you lost them” to which he replied I was in the back yard but the light is better out here.

When we have denial, personal deceptions and emotional suppression occurring every day why look under the street light for the answers. Dr. Sarno says think psychological for our pains and illnesses – yes but understand many of us have lost the awareness of our inner compass FOR TODAY and no amount of mucking through the graveyard of emotions will solve it.

As Byron Katie would say the work is to become mindful, conscious and honor the small inner voice (the child) so that it will learn it can be heard and we can be trusted to listen and obey. As we honor it, it is my experience it gets louder and provides more guidance.

So it could just be that TMS/stress conditions are caused by loosing touch with our True Self, our spirit and becoming willful and deaf.

 

Sorry this part was omitted by mistake:

How does this cause TMS? I am coming to understand that messages from our True Self/Spirit require great effort to willfully over power at first. Then as we become “Good At It” it still requires just as much neuronal energy but the process is automated so we don’t feel the effort.

Ever try holding a beach ball under water – at some point you give up. Could be that our True Self says: I give up, the human is not listening and has become deaf to my inner voice. Hmmmm...next step is maybe a pain or I could really whack the human with a medical disorder that has no real cause...that ought to scare the human into listening. Unfortunately there is an elephant in the room and all we hear is the pain or disorder static,so we focus on that.

Denial is looking for the next bright shiny thing to distract us, suppression is saying: “I don’t want to hear you” Symptom substation means that the symptom awareness (pain – suffering –fear) begins to own us so we don’t have awareness of the scathing moral and internal inventory we need to do (aka Sarno).

I am convinced that my TMS has come upon me because I have internal areas out of harmony caused by my childhood wounds and my spirit wants better for me. Just like metal being refried in a crucible the more the heat gets turned up them more dross is removed....or we perish in denial!!

 

But doesn't each one of us at some stage in childhood have to formulate a false self just to meet mommy and daddy's expectations? They're bigger than us and if we let our True Inner Self out into public family space, they just might "whack us". Remember that scene in the bar in Good Fellas? "Before I whack you, I'm gonna buy you a shoe shine box". First you accept a submissive shoe shine box (the False Self) to avoid conflict with your parents and then they might "whack you" anyway despite the phony goodist pose you've adopted to keep the peace.

 

Not if the parents are emotionally healthy and have a basic education on raising children

 

How many parents in this society meet those ideal criteria? Not many I would think. Even the best of them have big fights in front of junior and sis. And if they don't have conflicts in front of the kids and keep it all hidden, the kids notice their false front anyway. There is something inevitable about that Freudian concept (so sorry!) of narcissistic scarring.

 

I have friends who have raised amazing children because they are educated and emotionally healthy people. They were totally present with the children and these kids are always happy and very strong. One is a Tail Hook pilot at 24, one is 25 an owns adventure travel company.

There is a total of 9 in four families and they are in love with life . The whole family participated in the childrens interests, exposed them to athletics, music, foreign travel and one who is low income always had a family dinner everey week night and a morning talk before school about what they wanted to happen today

 

Yes, I do know the chairman of a large department in the Humanities at a big state university here in California, and he and his wife work full-time at being ideal parents. Cross-country skiing with the kids in Colorado, trips to the S. of France with the family every summer. A tall order to be sure. But my experience with military brats is that they appear squeaky clean out in public in front of adults, but they also have learned the military code of snitching, stealing and lying, which they practice among themselves out of view. Any thing's okay as long as you don't get caught. The children of the super-rich I have encountered do work very, very hard to over-achieve because that's the duty of their class, but they also are not above cheating to get straight As. Also, the personal lives of their parents are anything but perfect; plenty of broken homes with three and four moms and dads. They do get the best jobs because again they go to best schools where there's a straight track to Wall Street, the State Department and the Pentagon. They certainly don't have tidy lives filled with moral rectitude. A lot of them are so burned out that they hide from their dictatorial parents in easy kick back jobs while they wait for a rich relative to conveniently die. My point? Very few families really work at raising perfect well-balanced kids. The divorce rate in California for first time marriages is around 51%, and the single-parent mom is rapidly becoming the new unit of social organization. And then there's the divorced dads who work late every night in the office because they have to pay alimony and child support payments. They've always seemed rather difficult to "get along with" to me. Perpetually angry and unloved. I think most people who get married and have children don't exactly match the "Father Knows Best" 1950s model, and their kids have to grow up to take care of themselves while the parents pursue their own self-centered teenage values. Not to say that there aren't exceptions where people take child-rearing very, very seriously and turn out some well-balanced offspring. But the rather accidental qualities of modern life make it difficult to achieve and maintain that ideal family structure.