Dealing with failure…

Ugh. Failure is not easily accepted by a TMS personality. The most disheartening thing I was told by my most trusted chiropractor was that after a year of treatment, her re-evaluation of me demonstrated no progress and she needed to discharge me for failure to progress. She said, and rightly so, that it would not be “ethical” for her to continue to treat me and take my money since it wasn’t helping me. I excused myself to the bathroom and sobbed. If she couldn’t help me, and she REALLY wanted to help me, no one could. I was a goner. And I was not going to get better. I think my heart broke a tiny bit that day.

 

Once you start working this Program and reading other posts you will see that maybe 90% of us got horrible stuff like that told to us. I was told 26 years ago that I would NEVER do physical labor again by the Team Doctor for the NY Knicks..(He was my surgeon)...I just rebuilt the foundations on two homes in a row, BY hand, this month. I have ONLY done physical labor since then and I turn 60 in a few months. I do whatever I want whenever I want. The only restrictions are my skill.
Imagine how depressed your Chiro would feel if she found out that virtually everything she does relies on the Placebo effect! Dr. Sarno said that:
" If The great architect turned off the placebo effect, there would be massive financial calamity" (paraphrased)
All Chiro, electro stim, acupuncture, a large part of Physical Therapy are all Placeboes. Period. A lot of meds too.

I liked my Chiro too when I was lost in the system...and I did get relief...probably because I trusted HIM and he was Psychologically comforting, which explains my good results...for awhile. But TMS untreated eventually even negated the short amount of relief I would get from visits.
The GOOD NEWS, is that it was all a placebo, so when I started looking at the real reasons, the pain shut off. It will work for you too. Keep reading Sarno, scribbling and Challenging the notion that there is anything wrong with you.

 

Thanks for the encouragement. I keep telling myself “there is nothing wrong with me, my body is healthy and whole, this pain starts in my brain and not in my vertebrae/nerves”. I just wonder, how strong the hold our brains have on us, can we truly break free and break out of the cycle? That being said, I’ve had 75% less pain today. When you started looking at the reasons for the pain, were you finding things you hadn’t known about? Did it open up a can of worms you had to feel all over again?

 

The way we are wired it's hard to remember. My son did a study at Vanderbilt and he told me that when we remember something, we are actually remembering the last time we thought about it ; not the actual event.
Makes sense. I have sat through a lot of guys' stories about hitting the game hitting home run, but oddly...No one ever has a story about Giving UP the game winning home run! Either they are lying OR we forget about painful things

I would say that the act of investigating honestly is what does it. It sends a message to the unconscious that we know what is going on and to quote Sarno "It is like Uncovering a covert operation...when the brain realizes we have found it out, it stops"

I knew a lot of the content from doing inventories in 12 step groups. What was surprising, was that I discovered a LOT of anger buried in relationships that I thought were GREAT...My marriage, Being a father, being a "Local 729 set painter" and such things. Volunteer things, social stuff etc.

I am not certain we ever find unconscious things in real time, but looking back in time, it is now obvious. The most important part is to look, particularly when the symptoms are trying to get our attention...THAT is thee most important piece of the therapy. It's on Page 67 of healing back pain.

 

Is there anything that could keep this from working? Like, for example, you have multiple reasons causing your TMS and you can’t figure them all out. Or you have a conditioned response? Or something else? If you have a symptom for years, will it respond differently than having something for weeks? I say this, because as you know, I’ve been hammering away trying to blow my brain’s covert operation for a year, with limited success.

 

That's an interesting question. My First thought is NO...Nobody has multiple reasons for TMS. It's always RAGE and Shame and Anger, but the last two are tied into a unification of 'The stuff that needs to be hidden'...the people , places and things change...But that is NOT an excuse to ignore the work!!!!
The best explanation I can give for that is: I discovered when I used to write inventory for the 12 step work, that my resentments were redundant...and boring. I started seeing a pattern and the OBJECT of my disquiet might change, but the feelings about it didn't.
It was like a Bear Trap sitting out in the woods...I didn't care which specific Bear it caught, just that it caught Bears (plural)... The objects of my anger has different faces and names but it is an entity unto itself. It is always hunting up it's next 'problem'.

These can be caught with careful observation. Our ego doesn't like them, but they are there.

It might be a little harder to find the origins, but with determination and help from the books, friends etc, as long as you remain open, the OG incident will reveal itself. That is why I always keep a pen handy when I am reading the texts of Sarno... the text itself triggers reminders of what I was going through sleep walking.
I can't stress enough that what I was involved with/Going through when the very first symptom occured has so far always been really important to the WHY..."Why did I need this symptom?"
Re: It's there to protect us...WHAT is it protecting us from?

 

Thanks, @Baseball65 ! I just came up with those reasons as theories of why it’s hard for me to find what’s causing my TMS. I’m going to take everything you said and go back and keep looking at things. About six or seven really huge things were going on when my current symptoms came— one of them was the pandemic, but that wasn’t the only thing in my life.