Finding A Dr in Florida

Hello, This is my first post.
I Have read Dr Sarnos Books, Freedom from Fibromyalgia by Nancy Selfridge and am now reading "The great Pain Deception" which I Love Love Love!!!! I have just read the part on having someone to talk to about stress, anxieties, problems and it really hit home with me. I have been journaling but cannot do it everyday. I fell so much better by talking it out with someone as suggested In the book. I would really like to go to a therapist as I feel a stranger would be best for the things I want to talk about (I think it would cause less problems ) There are no Drs on the list for Florida. I live near Ocala. Does anyone know of a TMS therapist in Central Fl ??? Or where I can find out, beside calling all the therapists in the phone book?
Thank you for any help with this. This Wiki has been such a great help to me and am using it to help my Daughter in law also.

 

Hi Beachygirl (the forum has a Beach Girl too!), and welcome to the forum. I don't know anyone in Florida, but if no one has any suggestions, you might consider a skype appointment, which many of us do. Maybe not quite as good as face to face, but really gives you lots of choice. Sounds like you have already made a lot of progress with TMS.

 

Thanks tarala, I did see those Skype appointments. I have read DR Sarno's books several years ago. After I had experienced rotator cuff pain for 2 years and then dealt with Plantars Faschiitis in both feet for 2 or 3 more years. Wished I had known about it when I went through those painful years.
TMS made perfect sense to both myself and my husband (who cured his heel pain by reading "MindBody Prescription" ) I have Hashimotos Thyroditis that has killed my thyroid.I have also had a terrible time with my meds not working properly for several years. And was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. I had forgot about Dr Sarno and TMS during this time of having barely enough energy to walk across the room and no brain to speak of. So alot of my troubles are thyroid related But I have that perfectionist personality and the always striving to do more. My brain gets working faster and faster and faster till I get in such a tizzy.
This forum has helped me so much! I have been lurking for a few weeks and as I stated am reading The Great Pain Deception. So maybe I will wait till my bloodwork shows I am getting enough thyroid meds (low thyroid causes alot of anxiety and depression and negativeness) and then see if I feel like I still need a therapist. I have a very supportive husband but he is pretty messed up since he was raised by an alcoholic father and a very emotionally distant mother. Even though he has gotten better over the past few years This makes it very difficult to bare my feelings to him as he is so defensive and would not be able to handle what I would say since over the years past he was the cause of alot of my TMS (which he knows)
so thanks for the suggestion.

 

Scott Brady is in Orlando, where do you live? I'm sure he could recommend someone to you (most likely his own institute). He's very familiar with Dr. Sarno and TMS, he calls TMS, AOS. As some people do, they take Dr. Sarno's work and label it with their own label. I never got to read Brady's book but people seem to like it.

I'm interested in this Hashimotos Thyroditis. Many females with TMS have contacted me this disorder. It seems to be a mindbody effect. I know a lady who has had back pain and a few other TMS equivalents, she texted me a few days ago after she was diagnosed with Hashimotos. It makes sense since the thyroid has something to do with metabolism ~~~> energy. TMS is an energy overload, in that, there is a great disruption in how the body handles energy. It won't release it, due to the repression, grief, anger, etc. The release (balance) comes from letting go, growth, forgiveness, understanding, etc.

Good luck
Steve

 

Thanks Steve. I will look up this Scott Brady. I live in Summerfield, 1 hour north of Orlando, 15minute south of Ocala.

My antibodies (what they measure Hashimoto's with) are very high and have been. My body has been attacking my thyroid for years and has killed it according to the lab results. It is hard to believe that my thyroid could come back to working order through using the TMS techniques. But you are the expert, not me. I know that Dr Sarno did not attribute all health problems with TMS and in the books I have read he always recommends a Dr checking for valid reasons for health issues which I think not producing Thyroid hormones would fall under???

I also realize that in order to be rid of TMS symptoms, medications and supplements would have to be given up for that particular problem or we are not really believing the problem stems from TMS . I could not do that with my thyroid meds.

I just want to add that I have listened to one recording of your phone interview, I think it was number 3, discussing somewhat of the shadow, It really hit home with me and I have bought your book and am really enjoying it and know it will help me and hopefully my daughter-in-law too.

I was so touched by your story and what you and your family have been through. The injustices of this world really cause me great grief and pain. But I am so grateful that you used your therapy (writing your story ) to help others.
Thank you
Barbara

 

Hi Barbara, let me clarify. I didn't mean you could heal thyroiditis with TMS healing. I meant to raise the question, that the destruction of the gland appears to be a mindbody effect. Don't stop taking your hormones.

When I was 7, I had rheumatic fever. It is a rheumatic disorder of course, as the body attacks itself. I know, without doubt, that I did that to myself through anxiety. I can see it clearly in my mind's eye as I look back, it's an effect of attachment disorder like most autoimmune disorders.Few doctors see it, but Gabor Mate is spot-on in his observations. When we are emotionally isolated and anxious, and therefore ANGRY, the body attacks itself because it has no other outlet. We live by morals and codes of ethics. And as Dr. Sarno said, the people suffer from TMS because they want to be good people, and to do what is right. If you're deeply furious, from the detachment panic/fear, and you cannot harm anyone else due to the strict adherence to codes of morality, then your mindbody simply destroys itself, as to not harm others.

I'm sure this is why so many people have their heart murmurs leave when they've healed from TMS. The murmur is a byproduct of rheumatic fever, and autonomic disorder from anxiety, TMS. Dr. Sarno had the murmur like many of us.

So my intent was to say that I believe Hashimotos could be a form of mindbody-effect from anxiety, like rheumatic fever, etc. I don't want to make any claims on what is and what is not TMS. I just try to help people heal themselves from TMS. I'm not a healer, I just show them how to free themselves from their own minds.

Good luck Barbara. I told my story to help people like you, and so I told it for you. I don't know anything about Scott Brady except that he knows all about TMS, and that I've seen people get angry that he mentioned spirituality too much in his book. But that is why I want to read his work. It was a spiritual journey for me.

Steve

 

Steve, that is interesting. I was diagnosed with Hashimotos over 20 years ago. From my research way back when I learned that it ended up destroying the thyroid in about 70% of the cases. But that means it doesn't in about 30%. So far I have been lucky and I get my thyroid levels tested about every 6 months. I am not on any hormones. I used to get the antibodies levels tested but I haven't done that in a while. I am very interested in hearing that there may be a TMS connection because I have always hoped my body would figure out a way to reverse the Hashimotos before it destroyed my thyroid. I know the doctors say that it not possible but I have heard of people in which it has gone away on its own. This is very encouraging! Now that I am thinking about it, it makes perfect sense.

 

Good point o' long lost one. Welcome back Kotter. The ego is at the center of all our problems. The word ego means"me." When you begin to see how much nature/God has intended us to be united, connected, then you begin to see the issues that haunt us. I used that word tracordify to try and explain a very complex process, but it comes down to the divided mind. It's divided on purpose to provide motivation and for a means to be re-united.

The ego is the wall that separates us, and once divided the deep pain of unification begins that we call life.

Steve

 

Hi, SteveO. Too many people are ego focused.
When I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune 45 years ago (before becoming a freelance writer of books), I overheard a fellow worker tell another, " Walt looks like he belongs on a polo pony."

I laughed because I was just a journeyman newspaper reporter from a poor Polish-Austrian family in a Polish neighborhood of Chicago. I didn't look like a rich polo pony guy from the wealthy Chicago suburbs. I didn't feel like one. I felt lucky to be what I was. I had grown up a poor boy from Milwaukee avenue and my dream had come true, a reporter on the number one newspaper in Chicago in the 1970s.

It was a very stressful job. I used to worry that today would be the day I would f--k up and not know something I was expected to know. Seven years on the paper and that never happened.
I should not have worried all those days of all those years.

If I had f---ed up, I wouldn't have been fired. Even if I had been, and I knew I wouldn't been fired, it wouldn't have been fatal. Tomorrow wold still be another day.

Unless it would be the last day. Then, hey, what an adventure lies ahead!

 

My boss, a book publisher, has (I even told him so) a bigger ego than ten Grand Canyons!
He denied it, but it's more like twenty!

He's actually his own worst enemy, a writing genius but giving himself TMS big time
from being a perfectionist's perfectionist and just DRIVEN to be the best writer and publisher ever.

I feel I've already done ten or twenty times what I ever hoped to do.
No gorilla on my back. Not even a monkey.

 

Walt I can't picture you on a polo pony. You're more like a small Jaguar, or an Aston Martin, something cool but sensible, and unpretentious.

 

Hi Barbara,

I am moving to Mount Dora from West Palm Beach in the forthcoming weeks, and I would be happy to assist you with anything you need. I am not a physician, but I am writing what I endeavor to make a literary, non-self-help TMS book called "A Disease In Three Acts," and have had some tremendous experience with TMS that is more deeply probed on TMShelp. Please let me know how I can help you.

 

Walt,

Nice to be here from TMShelp. My last name is Egol, 3/4 Ego, truncated from the Ukranian Egolnikoff. Aptonymous for a person trying to master what amounts to the somatic study of self-involvement, no? I too am a writer, having received my Masters in Frappuccino Assembly (MFA) in Screenwriting. TMS and writers, peas in a pod, duck to water, plus all others. Narrative could be considered the afflicted humor in those with TMS if we were following Hippocrates instead of Sarno. But he did give us the concept of the wandering womb.

 

Whoah, that has to be one of the coolest things that I have heard about in a long time. Can you tell us anything about it?

Welcome to the site.

 

Screenwriters are, in my opinion, the unsung heroes of films. There's so much work that goes into a good screenplay, and so much detail in a script. I find screenwriters don't get nearly as much credit as they deserve! What sort of films do you like to write?

I, too, would be very very interested to hear more about your literary TMS book. (Love that title, by the way.) I don't think there's a book like that out there. Certainly, a non-self help book like this one could help inform more people about TMS. Echoing quert - can you tell us more about it?

 

Thanks, Becca!

I was just typing it up as I got this message. I'm so happy I've joined up here. Here's the thrust of it:

While I only recently became a member of the wiki (my reasons for absence being both boring and uncompelling), I have had a presence on the TMShelp forum for the past few years.

I was founded in a maelstrom of TMS, born into a family with a renowned physician father who was qualified to both love me and diagnose me, and occasionally he did both. His addictions and anger led to a chronic projection that felled both my mother and me in his presence: I was told by him from a young age that I was always angry, unlearning what my feelings meant or were into an oeuvre of one problematic human setting.

As a result of his tautology, never able to reason my way from beneath his slate of influence or damaging, circular rhetoric -- or even the vitiating accusations that came from both the rapidity of his tongue as well as his puncturing glare -- everything he came to tell me about me was unfalsifiable, and not capable of renouncing his presence, became my truth, and I was rendered false 24 hours a day. I became obese by eight, was a chronic bed-wetter and vented violently by throwing chairs, stabbing furniture and terrorizing my sister eight years my senior. I hit puberty at 11, and my weight and power -- socialized into a physique from my home life -- became commodities in middle and high school, and by 18, despite tearing two ACLs (including one in a football game the day my mother moved out of my father's house) and having a full labrum and rotator cuff reconstruction on my left shoulder, I was bench pressing over 500 pounds and was probably one of the strongest high school students in the state.

This story/person would be cleaner if I didn't love my father back. In spite of his deviant traits, he attended to me with intervals of tenderness and overachievement, confusing me about my place within him, yet knowing him to be a fractured yet sincere ally. This was often expressed in the form of him referring me to therapist colleagues, and by the end of college I had been to over a dozen.

And by the end of college, from a combination of family circumstances and existential decay emergent from my choice to go to graduate school to study screenwriting (as opposed to following through with medical school), my properly classic symptoms of TMS, IE those convolved within the fatal designations of the pain syndromes (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, myofascial pain ), started in my wrists in February and had spread through every sarcomere of my body by August of 2008; even pumping my own gas was excruciating. By 24 my life was over, and $30,000 of secretive and untenable visits across the spectrum of healing craftsmen -- including the indoctrination into something resembling a healing cult -- had me more concerned at the end with not stopping treatment and less so with getting better: if I wasn't going to get better, as long as I had a credit card at least I didn't have to stop trying.

"You won't get better as long as you don't accept that it's all between your ears," said my father for the last time, now diagnosed with terminal esophageal cancer and unwilling to hear another lick of my pain journey, which he's sure is all in my head, because I'm all in my head.

It was only by discovering my father's words outside of him, in those of Dr. Sarno's, that my father's message could click within my fibers, to undo the body's rigor even if for a second with the mellifluous sound of his love for me finally passing the polygraph. He got to see me graduate and out of pain and into movement three months before he passed away.

And it was through stories I came to see my body and it's climate, both my own past narrative and that differential tall tale we can choose to tell, which can enlighten us into health by the moment. I no longer live in California, but back in Florida, where I can tell the healthiest story to myself, after formally studying it for two years.

I've written for Dr. Schubiner, which I'll link here, discussing how story impacts our health and our relationship with the doctor.

I'll also leave one of my several first chapters from A DISEASE IN THREE ACTS, which I hope can function as not one more self-help book, but as a story powerful enough to slip beneath the reactive sentiments of those inured by self-help -- books which say not just what Dr. Sarno and others say, but the diametric opposite.

The book will be a gateway drug to the cohort of established psychosomatic writers and stewards, with a narrative rather than informational engine that I hope can stand on its own as a literary text, with the unique variable being that the catharsis will be the message behind books such as THE DIVIDED MIND, HEALING BACK PAIN and UNLEARN YOUR PAIN, arrived upon vicariously by readers hopefully invested in the development of my relationship with my doctor father, as opposed to subjecting themselves to one more contentious data sprawl. I think that if the story is powerful enough, the "knowledge penicillin" will be an ancillary digestion, and will leave previously incredulous readers open to the stress-pain model even if they hadn't sought it out.

"A hyper-masculine, powerlifting young man, diagnosed with and incapacitated by fibromyalgia, must find a way to connect to his doctor father before he passes away, after he has cleaved their relationship beyond knit by declaring that the pain "is all in his head."

There are a lot of contentious headings there that don't naturally associate on the page.

Maybe if people read about a family member who's a doctor, then the implicit trust that should come with that designation can finally make people accept that "It's All In Your Head" may not be a diagnosis of dismissal, but of an urgent and poorly-articulated love.

We represent the self-selected few who could make the connection to the depth require to bring back hope. My book will make those who are repulsed by it not feel talked at, but regaled, incepted and therefore open to the idea that their chronic pain may be both caused affected by their psychologies.

I'm here to help in any ways I can, and I think my book has the power to outreach others with shared persuasions if only because I am lucky enough to have had my cobble of variables be self-evident after going through pain hell.

-- Jared

Here's Story: The Irreducible Diagnostic Criterion

http://www.unlearnyourpain.com/blog/mbs-blog-33-the-heros-journey-guest-blog-by-jared-egol/#!

Here's a taste of the book, one of several Chapter Ones:

Chapter 1

My father went to medical school to become a doctor, while my medical degree came from film school. I did my coursework while applying for disability at twenty-four, and in a crack of eleventh-hour nepotism was awarded my first internship beneath him, when he died semi-upright on the watch of his intake Hospice nurse, and I could observe his clutch of pain swirl down into a vague bewilderment, which graduated me.

 

TMS is an approach you simply can't force on another. People have to come around to it on their own. But perhaps a book like yours, which seems like it would contain a more mainstream narrative (father/son relationship), could be a way for skeptics to become more informed about the mind/body connection and become more open to it without feeling like they're being pushed to accept the concepts. I am curious, will the book have a memoir-esque feel to it, or are you leaning towards more academic nonfiction?

Even though this may not be your primary intention, I think your book could also help non-skeptics -- those who are, more or less, open to the TMS diagnosis. There is an insane amount of power in reading the story of another...just look at Forest, and the role success stories played in his recovery. And, some of the most influential chapters of Steve Ozanich's book are those chapters he devotes to recounting his TMS healing journey. But moreover, stories of success -- even partial success, like having an hour or two of no pain -- give people hope, and having hope makes all the difference in beating TMS.

 

Becca,

Jared is a traveller most brave. I have read his words, known the mystery of them and would run to his voice because in him the sun shines, and faith rolls all our wounds away. He is a rare soul. May his words and love nourish all who pledge themselves to the healing path.

Jared, Darkness calls and you know my affinity for the descent. You can always reach me in the sweetness. Love, love and more love.

 

Sorry it took a little while to reply, Becca. I've been busy moving and shaking, but mostly moving.

My book will most definitely have a memoir feel, and will perhaps even more so have its feet in the Creative Non-fiction/Narrative Non-fiction pool. The only aspect that will cater to the academe will be the studies and other information compiled along my journey, in the context of how they changed ME. This will be important, as by this point in the book I will have suffered a great incredulity towards not the idea that my mind is fueling the pain, but that it is happening in a way that has nothing to do with changing myself. By this point in the book I am knee-deep in the delusion of bodywork (and its respective cult feel), and am somewhat armed against anything else working despite a harrowing progression of symptoms.

I most certainly hope the text caters to those of us who are already here. My father's voice as an intensive care physician at the top of his field was loud and proud, authoritative even in death, now hearing it in my own even when I'm not talking, endlessly teasing his words of loving earnestness apart from those that primed me for pain in the first place.

If you look at "Tell To Win" by Peter Guber, you'll read what we already know: that data does nothing to a heart. People in pain may achieve surface shifts from a datum that nullifies structuralism, but access to narratives, especially the wordless ones about ourselves, which happen in the rare moments of ascetic contact with ourselves, will always yield a more visceral truth that will outlast a data point. Many here run back to the data to pacify themselves, to the targeted placebo of being told nothing's wrong by a soothing, credentialed voice (where credentials are degrees, experience and statistics) , and it's this recidivism that tells us just how unsure and scared people are inside.

In other words, people may find hope in the data, but not meaning. It's when people superimpose their stories over the endpoints of the pain studies and pain personalities that the data will mean anything. I hope that my book can be a story that popularizes the data and still be not about it.