GeorgieO Being courageous, looking for the positive and asking for help

I wanted to post another article from Georgie Oldfield's blog. Georgie is a physiotherapist in the United Kingdom and a member of this forum. She is the founder of SIRPA, the Stress Illness Recovery Practitioner's Association, a group that trains TMS/PPD/Stress Illness practitioners in the UK and abroad. Georgie has gratefully given us permission to re-post her blog articles on our site.

I really like the idea of finding ways to turn negatives into positives. It can be very easy for people with TMS/PPD to see everything in a negative light, especially in regards to symptoms. It is easy to think negatively the first moment your leg hurts, however this is not productive and won't help people heal faster. One way that I've found to think about my symptoms in a positive light is to see them as a helpful sign to slow down and look inward. Quite often, I get caught up in what I'm doing and I forgot to focus on my own needs at times.

When I obsess over something like this it of course increases my stress level. Whenever I notice symptom cropping up, I simply use it as a sign to slow down, and investigate how I'm feeling at that moment. This usually helps the pain fade away quickly. Key to all of this is turning something negative, i.e. increase of pain, into a positive, using it as signal. Does anyone else do something similar?

 

That's great to hear Beach-Girl!

I think a lot of TMSers focus a lot of their attention on being in control. I was like the idea of surrendering to what is, and being allowing of the present moment. Of course, I still have a difficult time doing this, but I think in time we can be more accepting of things.

One of the biggest things to making progress is as you mentioned trying not to project horrible things into the future. Before we do something active (go for a walk, work at the computer or even get out of bed) it is easy to project the thought of What am I going to do when my pain comes back. I think even the question of Am I going to get pain doing this can prevent us from recovering. The reason for this is because we are thinking physically, but much larger than that I think is the fear of the unknown. That is where this idea of being courgeous and surrendering to what is comes in. If we are more allowing of certain things we can retrain ourselves to no longer be afraid of what may happen or come up in the future. I think it helps us handle the self induced pressure that I think a lot of us create.

Beach-Girl I am glad to hear you are making progress and that you enjoyed reading Georgie's Blog post. I thought it was terrific.