Daniel L. chiro diagnoses and neck pain

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Question

My chiro says I have a straight neck and will cause problems in the
future - is this the case?

Also how far do I need to delve into the past to start feeling better.

I have been on the couch "again" for a week and thought I was
going to die. I play golf and love it and was playing when my
lower back went and travelled up to a excruciating pain in my
neck and behind my shoulder blades. Thought it was "the end".
I read Healing back pain but must admit not sure where to go
from here.

Thank you

 

Answer

Alright, there are a lot of questions here, but hopefully I can answer them all.

In response to the question about your neck: no. It’s not the case. I don’t know exactly what is going on with your neck, but just having a “straight” neck in and of itself will not cause problems.

When it comes to “delving into your past” you often times don’t need to go deep in order to see relief. In fact, I’ve had many patients who don’t talk about their past at all and still see relief.

Lastly, this is the important question to answer because it is actually a response to all three of your questions.

You are scaring the crap out of yourself in many different ways:

- Your first question expressed fear regarding what your chiro said.

- Your second question hinted at fear about how much work you’ll have to do.

- And your third question flat out says that you were telling yourself that you life was over because of the pain.

You are dealing with a lot of fear! And that is where your focus should be. Your new goal is not to get rid of pain, but solely to get rid of fear. You need to do everything you can to keep your body out of a state of fight or flight. When you start experiencing pain, take 5 deep breaths and tell yourself 10 times that you are going to be okay. Do that as many times as it takes to start to believe it. It may take 10,000 times. That’s okay.

Your pain isn't going to go away overnight, but when your brain begins to feel safe, you will notice significant improvements. Keep at it.

---

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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.

Questions may be edited for brevity and/or readability.

 

Spot on. You are so right. I feel constantly anxious about life, my health, children, income.
I feel it's a habit developed from childhood when I feared my mother at every turn. I fear
flying along with so many things and wake up each day to a racing heart.

Love your honesty now just need to learn the way. Have started with Day 1 today.
I live in South Australia where there are no TMS physicians. Is it imperative to see one?
I go in on Tuesday for a colonoscopy. I guess I really am "fearing the crap out of myself".
The doc feels I may have IBS or diverticulitis. Again this is a stress related illness.

When I was in real estate and bringing up my children on their own I fell in a heap
for a few years. I recently have been asked to increase my hours in my job in sales
which I do enjoy but in the back of my mind worry that I may overload myself again.
I do tend to want to go hell for leather.

Love my golf so much and can't to get back into it.

Thank you so much for your time.

Cheers

 

Read Steve Ozanich's great TMS book "THE GREAT PAIN DECEPTION", he's a golf swing coach and writes about how he overcame his TMS by playing golf.

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Thank you for that. These people are in Sydney which is still a 2 hour flight away from me.
If I work my way through the Education Program which I found on the site will that be of help.
What else would I need to do?

 

There's not much you have to do, just change your mind. Accept Dr. Sarno's simple theory, wrap your head around it, sleep on it, let it sink into your un-conscious. Edna St. Vincent Millay's quote that is in the books sums it up, "Pity me that the heart is slow to learn, what the quick mind beholds at every turn." Anyone of the Good Doctor's four books will make the point. Don't overthink it, or you'll get another TMS affective symptom, "paralysis by over-analysis"--avoid the psychobabble.

 

Sounds too easy. I guess listen to the babble in the head and change it.
Thanks for the chat. I think when my back went out (so to speak) it then
affected my stomach and I wound myself up so much and became so
stressed out and worried everything just snowballed. The worse you feel -
it's like a roller coaster and I became quite frightened.
Just want to go hit that little white ball again and get back to work and laugh.

 

Yesterday I watched the 2hr video of Dr Sarno that I found on another thread. I appreciate that he has dared to go beyond conventional medicine to explain what looks really puzzling to a physician, he has not gone far enough. He has looked around and said to himself "what else do we have to try and explain these seeming inexplicable situations, because I can see my patient has no physical reason for the pain and yet they feel pain". Thus he has found Freud, which is part of conventional medicine and has used the Freudian theories that ideas that are bothersome come from the past. I would have agreed with him in the past but I have seen some startling evidence that leads me in a different direction.

My first reaction to his theory was that ideas of themselves have no volition. They cannot rise up from or act in the subconscious and have an effect. You only need to sit in meditation and watch the activities of mind to see this reality. Ideas arise out of nowhere and then disappear again. Rather it is ideas that are in the present that are troublesome but those ideas are also accompanied by volition. I found that toxic people use ideas that are general to describe some real event and then utilize those ideas with a changed meaning to convey an intention of harm.

I think the most important thing that Dr Sarno has offered through his work is that physical illnesses can be the result of what we think or more correctly ideas we uphold with confidence. But he has tried to explain it using what he has been taught at university and that is the medical paradigm, that the body is a machine and that physical illnesses have physical causes. I have a science degree and only studied human anatomy and physiology and microbiology as part of that degree and I had firmly believed this paradigm. He has a lot more training than me and I think if the teaching at university can affect me with much less learning in biology then how much more it has affected him. So I can understand how he has looked to explain that the mind is the brain or the brains activities and that the self is some computer program in the machine. With this thinking he has gone on to reason that the brain is making decisions for you. Thus he has tried to explain the muscle tensions that causes pain as the brain doing this to cause distraction. But for a lot of people this is a stumbling block because you have to take it on blind faith. And furthermore it is dis-empowering. One cannot help but ask "if the self I feel is a computer program or some how generated by the brain then what control do I have to make changes.

A very bad experience in 2000, in which I experienced breathing difficulties and serious chest pain, liberated me. I had had these health problems many times before and had been diagnosed by different physicians as being associated with my heart. However their opinions varied greatly and their solutions were scary so I had gone to Chinese medicine and saw some relief but nothing permanent. On this occasion, out of desperation to stop me from leaving him, my late husband revealed to me what he had done to adversely influence me. I saw indisputable evidence that ideas had caused me to react and with this realization the pain and the breathing difficulties vanished in the space of a few minutes. This experience seriously challenged the medical paradigm that I had learnt at university and which I had accepted for the previous 20 years without question.

The shift I made in belief, which has made the most unbelievable difference to my health, is that the body is purpose-driven and not a machine. Furthermore I have realized that the mind and consciousness are not physical. I also have realized that the self is an identification with the activities of mind, i.e., ideas and belief, thus those ideas cause a reaction and that reaction is in the body.

For instance an idea of some type of work is "back breaking work" will give rise to muscle tension in the back /lower back. Muscle do tense up sometime but they also need to relax. If the idea is believed then there is ongoing muscle tension. This then creates many different problems, eg tension in tendons and pulling bones over a long time, over-activity in the nerves feeding the muscles and inflammation etc. All of these actions contribute to pain. Once you see that the idea is just some hateful suggestion, then you discharge it and laugh. You relax, so your muscles relax and your body returns to resting metabolism. In resting states any jobs the body needs to do to restore health are done but most of all the pain vanishes.

I also realized that owing to the foul games that my late husband had played, and which he had admitted to in the end, I could see that the fear was due to a threat he had made to me mentally by exploiting a close and trusted relationship. So I realized that in the pasts I was using the fear as evidence for the idea. And this fear was often subliminal and I was only aware of feeling hot or even as having "lots energy". Now I am able to dismiss a troublesome ideas easily so I am able to avoid health problems and have good health.

 

Yesterday I watched the 2hr video of Dr Sarno that I found on another thread. I appreciate that he has dared to go beyond conventional medicine to explain what looks really puzzling to a physician, he has not gone far enough. He has looked around and said to himself "what else do we have to try and explain these seeming inexplicable situations, because I can see my patient has no physical reason for the pain and yet they feel pain". Thus he has found Freud, which is part of conventional medicine and has used the Freudian theories that ideas that are bothersome come from the past. I would have agreed with him in the past but I have seen some startling evidence that leads me in a different direction.

My first reaction to his theory was that ideas of themselves have no volition. They cannot rise up from or act in the subconscious and have an effect. You only need to sit in meditation and watch the activities of mind to see this reality. Ideas arise out of nowhere and then disappear again. Rather it is ideas that are in the present that are troublesome but those ideas are also accompanied by volition. I found that toxic people use ideas that are general to describe some real event and then utilize those ideas with a changed meaning to convey an intention of harm.

I think the most important thing that Dr Sarno has offered through his work is that physical illnesses can be the result of what we think or more correctly ideas we uphold with confidence. But he has tried to explain it using what he has been taught at university and that is the medical paradigm, that the body is a machine and that physical illnesses have physical causes. I have a science degree and only studied human anatomy and physiology and microbiology as part of that degree and I had firmly believed this paradigm. He has a lot more training than me and I think if the teaching at university can affect me with much less learning in biology then how much more it has affected him. So I can understand how he has looked to explain that the mind is the brain or the brains activities and that the self is some computer program in the machine. With this thinking he has gone on to reason that the brain is making decisions for you. Thus he has tried to explain the muscle tensions that causes pain as the brain doing this to cause distraction. But for a lot of people this is a stumbling block because you have to take it on blind faith. And furthermore it is dis-empowering. One cannot help but ask "if the self I feel is a computer program or some how generated by the brain then what control do I have to make changes.

A very bad experience in 2000, in which I experienced breathing difficulties and serious chest pain, liberated me. I had had these health problems many times before and had been diagnosed by different physicians as being associated with my heart. However their opinions varied greatly and their solutions were scary so I had gone to Chinese medicine and saw some relief but nothing permanent. On this occasion, out of desperation to stop me from leaving him, my late husband revealed to me what he had done to adversely influence me. I saw indisputable evidence that ideas had caused me to react and with this realization the pain and the breathing difficulties vanished in the space of a few minutes. This experience seriously challenged the medical paradigm that I had learnt at university and which I had accepted for the previous 20 years without question.

The shift I made in belief, which has made the most unbelievable difference to my health, is that the body is purpose-driven and not a machine. Ideas cause reactions in the body. Furthermore I have realized that the mind and consciousness are not physical. I also have realized that the self is an identification with the activities of mind, i.e., ideas and belief, thus those ideas cause a reaction and that reaction is in the body.

For instance an idea of some type of work is "back breaking work" will give rise to muscle tension in the back /lower back. Muscle do tense up sometime but they also need to relax. If the idea is believed then there is ongoing muscle tension. This then creates many different problems, eg tension in tendons and pulling bones over a long time, over-activity in the nerves feeding the muscles and inflammation etc. All of these actions contribute to pain. Once you see that the idea is just some hateful suggestion, then you discharge it and laugh. You relax, so your muscles relax and your body returns to resting metabolism. In resting states any jobs the body needs to do to restore health are done but most of all the pain vanishes.

I also realized that owing to the foul games that my late husband had played, and which he had admitted to in the end, I could see that the fear was due to a threat he had made to me mentally by exploiting a close and trusted relationship. So I realized that in the pasts I was using the fear as evidence for the idea. And this fear was often subliminal and I was only aware of feeling hot or even as having "lots energy". Now I am able to dismiss a troublesome ideas easily so I am able to avoid health problems and have good health.

 

If repressed emotions are the main cause for TMS don't we need to confront them
otherwise they will just remain in the subconscious or is there no benefit
in doing this. e.g. with journaling.

 

I have never found a "repressed" emotion, but I have found that where issues are unclear, often subliminal, we may not recognize the bodily reactivity. So for instance fear or anger, which raise the metabolism may simply feel like heat, usually hot all of a sudden or they may feel like "lots of energy" and even good health BUT such conditions don't feel right. I remember a time when I had a lot of energy and I am quite an energetic person but it feel like more energy than usual or unusually good health. It was due to anger but the anger was not apparent because the issues of injustice/ violation were not obviously so I did not appraise my bodily reactivity correctly. I have since questioned my bodily reactivity if it is unusual because I know that there has to be a reason for it.

There is a good neuroscientist, one I respect but don't necessarily agree with everything he says and his name is Dr Antonio Damasio. He has done quite a lot of research into emotions. He acknowledges that the emotion is the bodily reactivity and says that after that reactivity arises we appraise it. He says that our appraisal is "the feeling". He says that his research has shown that we appraise our bodily reactivity based on ideas and any information we may have. Most of his research is done with subjects that are either shown something that may arouse emotion or asked to recall events or situations that have aroused emotions in the past. So he studies their brain reactivity based on current or recollections, which he says may sometime be indistinguishable from some current situation/ emotion.

I do journal but I journal about what is going on in my life. If something from the past comes to mind I do note it and I note it in conjunction with what is happening now. Why did this come to mind now? I do think it is a good thing to go over what has happened in the past because we may appreciate how we have been affected in the past and by whom and then see if this is happening now. But I don't see a case for things from the past as having an affect on us in the present as if there is some part of our mind working against us. I think the subconscious is material that we have chosen to forget, that we may not be sufficiently aware of, that has lost our interest. With respect to insufficient awareness, I found a very interesting case, which affected me greatly until I recognized the problem.

My late husband was toxic or in psychological jargon psychopathic (one of those so-called "functional psychopaths"). When he revealed to me that he was toxic (took the mask off), I was shocked at first but as I began to accept the reality I found that ideas, especially limiting ideas and ideas that tried to drive me to feel guilty like you describe, which had in the past appeared "out of the blue" now had an author. There were many occasion he had tried to influence me again and now recognizing the ideas were from him, I mentally told him where to go. Sometimes it was when I was out shopping. It felt like an argument and when I came home and confronted him we had continued the argument. He verbalized the ideas he had presented. I was stunned. I recognized that in the past he had abused the relationship, won my trust and used the situation. What I found was that the past situation arouse because I had rejected information that then rendered some aspects subconscious.

Going back over my journals over the previous years I found that I had recorded several times that he had done things that really distressed me but then apologized profusely about them. I had forgiven him ticking off the occasions as "mistakes", thinking to myself "this is really out of character. I know him, he is not like that" but what I didn't know is that I only knew the mask and judged on the mask. He later told me that the mask hides a nasty character underneath. To be able to present ideas to me mentally, which appeared as my own ideas or at least ideas that suddenly appeared out of the blue, he had to get me to reject the nasty character. So he showed me the nasty character momentarily and then put on the mask again. In doing that he had caused me to discrediting information that was vital. I realized then that consciousness has to do with awareness with knowledge and that subconscious is still awareness but where the knowledge has been discarded for some reason, eg discredited, of no interest, boring, etc.

So I would definitely say journal, journal everything even when you don't think it is important because we only get to connect the dots after some time has passed and are able to go back over things.

 

It is easy--maybe easier said then done. It depends on how badly your sub-c "thinks" it needs your TMS symptoms to PROTECT you--the little gremlin is just trying to help--in psych talk it termed a DEFENSE MECHANISM. IMHO, the best thing you can do is not sit in lotus ruminating on the origins of your pain but get out there and JUST DO IT!, a la SteveO and hit a million golf balls to prove to yourself and inform the gremlin in the sub-c that you don't need it's protection any more--you can take control of your life again.

I don't know where all the meditation talk comes from, I don't recall Dr. Sarno referring patients to mediation classes but I could be wrong on that. I think the meditation thing may come from the current new-agey vogue for yoga and the Eastern religions. I've done meditation and it has it's place and silent dinners can be interesting, but if you're suffering from TMS, not be able to DO, then sitting around "not doing", ruminating on ones aches and woes seems counterproductive to using the body to do what it used to do. Well, the US has done the yoga thing and is on to the next craze, pilates and gyrotonics is just around the corner--there should be a lot of slightly used yoga mats and blocks on craigs list soon.

He does say, when you feel the pain, switch your thinking to the psychological--that's proactive. To me that means think about what current event has triggered the tension, turning up the volume control on the pain. Deal with that thought event--how to solve it or accept that you can't change that situation/person and continue hitting the little white ball--or in my case the fuzzy yellow ball.

G'luck!
tt/lsmft