Is this for real?

I've been experiencing severe pains in my buttocks when sitting for several months now (no physical cause). I've been following some of the advice from reading books on TMS. One of the things I do is talk to my brain. I use affirmations like ... "I'm physically health and strong" ... "I have nothing physically wrong with my buttocks" ... "TMS pain does not fear me". So anyways, just this morning the pain ramped up to the extreme on my left buttock. I couldn't believe what I saw. I saw a fiery red boil that's 2 inches wide. It's so painful it's bringing tears down my eyes when I sit. I'm thinking is this a) a genuine infection (never had such a thing in my life like that) OR b) the brain playing hard ball games with me i.e. you see, it is physical now OR c) something Sarno said about lack of blood/oxygen supply to the area causing chemical wastes build-up (I'm thinking these wastes caused a bacterial infection)? I'm astounded what's going on. The medical community would say (a) but my brain seems to be so angry as of late and causing all sorts of crazy symptoms. I'm thinking (b) or (c). Has anyone experienced anything similar. I think I'll need to go to hospital tomorrow and ask for a cortisone shot as it's unbelievably painful!

 

You know, sometimes people just get boils. It's a great idea to go get it treated. Generally they lance boils and give you topical medication so that it clears up quickly. They hurt a LOT, but can be treated.
Sarno's theory of lack of oxygen has been debunked.

The important thing is to not feed the TMS beast. That means trying your best not to get in fear loops, to freak out, panic and further increase your anxiety.

Are you doing any of the TMS work that people have suggested in the earlier posts you have made?

 

Do you mean the SEP? Yes, already started that.

If Sarno's theory of lack of oxygen is untrue then what exactly is the theory behind the cause of the pain?

 

Yes, severe pains in my buttocks when sitting is a symptom I have experienced, to include feeling that my buttock muscles are on fire... with not other explanation for it other than TMS. It never developed into a boil though (but see below re anxiety/stress being a key facilitator in creating optimal conditions for the formation of boils)...

I also experienced many bouts of severe pain and red hot inflammation of my breast tissue which gave me a fever and chills (that chattered my teeth uncontrollably for hours on end) for which I was prescribed antibiotics in case of infection. I was checked out by the local breast clinic and they could find no reason for this to keep happening (I'm post menopause so it wasn't anything to do with breast feeding or hormone fluctuations due to periods). These bouts could only have been down to TMS.

I think I mentioned to you before that at least two members of this forum used mind/body/TMS work to recover from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, which often involves swelling, redness and inflammation of the body, especially the limbs. One of the aforementioned members' feet swelled up and were so painful that she could only wear a huge pair of Crocs.

I asked perplexity.ai for you...

"The mechanisms linking mind-body interactions to physical inflammation and pain involve complex neuro-immune pathways and psychological processes. Here's a synthesis of the key processes:

1. Neuro-Immune Communication

• Cytokine signaling: Pro-inflammatory cytokines (e.g., IL-6, TNF-α) act as messengers between immune cells and the nervous system. Chronic stress or psychological distress increases cytokine production, which can cross the blood-brain barrier and alter neurotransmitter function (e.g., serotonin, dopamine), contributing to depression and pain sensitization.
  
  
• Central sensitization: Persistent inflammation primes nociceptors (pain-sensing neurons) in the peripheral and central nervous systems, lowering their activation threshold. This leads to hyperalgesia (amplified pain) and allodynia (pain from non-painful stimuli).
  

2. Stress and Sympathetic Nervous System Activation

• Stress hormones: Psychological stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, releasing cortisol and adrenaline. Chronic stress dysregulates cortisol production, promoting systemic inflammation and immune cell activation.
  
  
• Sympathetic feedback loops: Stress-induced sympathetic nervous system activity can sensitize peripheral nociceptors and trigger neurogenic inflammation (e.g., substance P release from nerve endings), creating a "vicious circle" of pain and immune activation.
  

3. Brain-Periphery Interactions

• Pain perception modulation: The brain’s interpretation of nociceptive signals is influenced by emotional state, attention, and past experiences. For example, negative emotions (e.g., anxiety) can amplify pain perception via the anterior cingulate cortex and insula.
  
  
• Neuroinflammation: Microglia (immune cells in the brain) release pro-inflammatory mediators in response to chronic stress or peripheral inflammation, exacerbating central sensitization and mood disorders.
  

4. Functional Syndromes and Chronic Pain
Conditions like fibromyalgia illustrate mind-body interactions:

• Mast cell activation: Immune cells in connective tissues release histamine and tryptase, sensitizing nearby nerves and perpetuating pain.
  
  
• Small-fiber neuropathy: Thinning or loss of nerve fiber insulation in 50% of fibromyalgia patients leads to aberrant pain signaling.
  

5. Psychological Factors in Pain Chronification

• Gate Control Theory: Cognitive and emotional states (e.g., fear, catastrophizing) influence spinal cord "gating" mechanisms, modulating pain signal transmission to the brain.
  
  
• Biopsychosocial feedback: Negative expectations or trauma can heighten pain sensitivity, while positive beliefs trigger endogenous opioid release, reducing pain perception.
  
  
  
  These interconnected processes highlight how psychological stressors and immune dysregulation jointly sustain inflammation and pain, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that challenges treatment."
  
  And I also asked perplexity.ai the following question:
  
  "Could the mind create a boil on the buttocks?"
  
  Answer:
  
  "While the mind doesn't directly "create" boils, chronic stress or psychological distress can indirectly contribute to boil formation on the buttocks through interconnected physiological mechanisms. Here's how this process unfolds:
  
  1. Immune Suppression
  Stress triggers cortisol release, which suppresses immune function. A weakened immune system struggles to combat Staphylococcus aureus bacteria – the primary cause of boils – allowing infections to develop in hair follicles or oil glands. The buttocks are particularly vulnerable due to friction from clothing and sweat accumulation.
  
  2. Skin Barrier Disruption
  Stress compromises the skin's protective barrier through:
  
  • Increased oil production: Cortisol stimulates sebum secretion, clogging pores
    
    
  • Reduced wound healing: Stress delays tissue repair, letting minor skin breaches (e.g., from friction) become infection sites
    
    
  • Compulsive behaviors: Stress-induced scratching or picking introduces bacteria into damaged follicles
    
  3. Inflammatory Pathways
  Chronic stress creates systemic inflammation through:
  
  • Pro-inflammatory cytokines: Stress elevates IL-6 and TNF-α, creating an environment favorable for bacterial growth
    
    
  • Neurogenic inflammation: Stress activates nerve fibers to release substance P, increasing local inflammation and pain
    
  4. Lifestyle Factors
  Stress often leads to:
  
  • Poor hygiene habits
    
    
  • Tight clothing choices (exacerbating buttock friction)
    
    
  • Sleep deprivation (further impairing immunity)
    
    
    
    While boils require bacterial infection to form, psychological stress acts as a key facilitator by creating optimal conditions for their development. Addressing both the infection (via medical treatment) and stress management is crucial for resolution and prevention."
    

 

This is so useful! Thank you so much for your post!!! In terms of your buttock pain, how long did you experience it for? Was it 24x7? Did it resolve itself? How exactly did it resolve itself?

 

Originally, when I wasn't using mind/body techniques (and I was going down the medical rabbit hole of doctors not knowing what was wrong with me and diagnosing me with so called 'fibromyalgia') I had bouts of severe buttock pain for many months on end over several years. Like I wrote to you before... I was very uncomfortably bedridden, and when not bedridden, very uncomfortably house bound, with very severe symptoms that made me unable to walk or weight-bear.

Once I believed it was all mind/body/TMS and I started reducing my anxiety the buttock pain reduced and went away as did a lot of my other symptoms. That said, I very recently had the return of burning buttock pain for a number of days... however this was because I was extremely stressed - amongst other anxiety inducing things, my husband was suddenly taken very ill and carted off to hospital in an ambulance and I feared that I would lose him. Once you see the relationship between your anxiety/stress/fear/anger/rage etc., and symptoms, you can't un-see it. In the meantime, until you truly, deep down see and accept the relationship, you need to 'suspend your disbelief' and continue with the SEP and keep reading and re-reading Dr Sarno's books.

My advice is also to stop comparing symptoms and time lines. What happened in my case is not an indication of what will or won't happen to you. I know that it's helpful to know that people have gotten over symptoms similar to one's own using mind/body/TMS techniques and it helps to know that what one's experiencing is likely to be mind/body/TMS. However, as you will have gathered from the perplexity.ai information I posted to you, mind/body/TMS symptoms can be all manner of things.

 

P.S. I see that you edited your post to ask if my buttock pain was 24x7.

Yes, the bouts I had were 24x7. It was hell!

After this... try to stop comparing symptoms to prove to yourself that your symptoms are TMS because if your symptoms move around your body, which they can do with mind/body/TMS, you'll find yourself on the exhausting treadmill of looking for someone else who had that particular symptom and recovered because it was TMS, and so on and so on and so on...

 

“If Sarno's theory of lack of oxygen is untrue then what exactly is the theory behind the cause of the pain?“

Sarno’s theory was never focused on oxygen. It is focused on repressed emotions which is why he suggests examining your personality traits and life stressors past and present. If you haven’t read one of his books, I suggest you do, they are illuminating, and if you haven’t read, you might try reading it again slowly. They present such profoundly unique ideas that it can be hard to get everything in one pass… especially with a TMS brain or personality traits that develop and tend to avoid the difficult parts of this work like truly looking inward. I re-read it three times (and some passages many more!).
The idea of oxygen has been debunked, but Dr. Hanscom who also teaches elements of this work suggests that it’s (with much proven science behind it) chemicals that are made in the body that are a reaction to our thoughts and emotions that effect the nervous system and thus the physical body. The mind/body connection.

 

Here’s an explanation from a new short video from the PPD Association:

 

@mikeinlondon As Cactus says, chemicals are made in the body that are a reaction to our thoughts and emotions that affect the nervous system and thus the physical body. The mind/body connection.

Back in 1999 Candice Pert a neuroscientist working in the field of molecular biology wrote a book called "Molecules of Emotion". As a reviewer of the book wrote on amazon...

"Over a 25 year period, her work resulted in a new understanding of how the network of chemical communication in the body is vastly more complicated and subtle than was ever previously suspected. Her discovery of the numerous chains of amino acids called peptides that have individual types of receptors in the surface of cells all over the body has brought a new understanding of the mind-body relationship. These chemicals are information carriers, instructing cells to react in certain specific ways, and are not just produced by brain cells, but in many places in the body, including cells of the immune system. What is now clear is that the body communicates with the brain, and information can be stored in various parts of the body. What is more, this information communication in intricately linked, and generates, our emotions. Anger, joy, sadness, stress, etc all produce, or are produced by, floods of peptides in the body being received by cell receptors and creating physiological changes. These are the molecules of emotion in the book title. It is a fascinating read of her struggles with the establishment but also the amazing discoveries and their implications. A bit over-scientific in places, but if you skim some bits it is well worth it."

 

I find your posts really insightful and I resonate with a lot you say. During the years you were suffering in pain how did you manage or mitigate your pain? For example, did you take any drugs for pain relief? Did you find any chairs that mitigated some of your pain? I'm looking for way to make my life more tolerable whilst I am on the TMS journey. I'm 100% certain my buttock pain is TMS but I do have generalised anxiety and irritability. I don't know what's causing it but I am taking low dose Mertazipine for sleep and I do wonder if that's having a negative impact on my nervous system. The other day I was in a good mood and I was singling and dancing to some music. I felt the pain reduced so I can see the correlation with state of mind and physical symptoms. Now, when I look back on my life, I see the signs. It started off with allergies, then progressed to severe acne, then to hayfever, then to colitis then to plantar fasciitis and now more recently to insomnia, buttock pain and breathing issues. I wish I knew why my TMS brain reacts in such a severe and extreme way. I was thinking about this today and I now realise that I am strong and physically in good health. I was just suffering the consequences of my brain attacking my body (that is the only way I can understand it). One thing I don't particularly understand is that colitis (that was listed in Sarno's book as TMS) can have a significant impact on one's gut. High inflammation of the colon can cause lots of health issues and complications like fistulas, strictures etc. What I don't understand is why would the brain cause such destruction to the body because colitis can cause destruction and it sometimes can be fatal. I do wonder what Sarno would say about that.

 

In this video Dan Ratner talks about peptides as a better explanation for the mechanics of pain:



This one covers the different understandings of the psychological root and treatment of the pain (Sarno's reservoir of rage, Gordon's somatic work, Schubiner's neuropathways, Levine's trauma etc.), and how they all point to the same direction, the shadow integration developed by Jung:

 

Because the brain rather have the body destroyed than facing the difficult emotions. Those emotions are deemed even more dangerous than the physical symptoms. So look deeply in life situations,childhood, close relationships, work, family, human interactions, finances, discriminations, etc. What would make the five year old you scream and kick " stop!! I don't want it. You can't make me!!! I hate it!" Something like that. Not the adult you who has to consider others needs feelings etc. Just you like a dictator. No social norms no politeness me first. Nichol Sachs said that would be real emotions but don't have to be true when we carry out our lives in reality. But we need to unload that and unearth those emotions and face them so we don't constantly get symptoms.

 

Also honestly I don't think any researchers would know exactly the mechanisms. They may be able to prove that minds cause physiological reactions in the body as a principle, but each individual is unique in a way that the mechanisms may work slightly differently each time. Humans are not mass produced machines so what works for some may not work for others in specific details. On the other hand, we are still all humans and share enough similarities so that Dr. Sarno ' s principles worked for tens of thousands of people.

 

Yes, I did, but that was before I knew my pain was TMS, and for me the pain relief was not worth the side effects of those drugs. (Dr Sarno wasn't against taking pain relief when symptoms are particularly difficult, but the aim is to keep 'thinking psychological', i.e. know that the pain is caused by the brain, and aim to not rely on them in the long term.)

As well as buttock pain I had pudendal neuralgia-like pain, chronic pain in my rectum plus tailbone pain. I used a cushion that I took everywhere with me to make getting on with life somewhat more bearable https://putnams.co.uk/collections/pressure-cushions (Dr Sarno advised not to use aids, but he also said that TMSers need to get on with normal life, resume normal activity, and my cushion helped me do that. I've used supports, for example, for my right thumb and wrist when I was experiencing horrendous pain in them, to also enable me to get on with my life, e.g. brush my teeth and so on (without it I couldn't move my hand at all). The main thing imo is not to think of any of the aids you might choose to use as being in some way curative, e.g. to not think "I'll use this wrist support to give my thumb and wrist a rest and then it will get and stay better.")

Snap!... except that I didn't have severe acne, but I have had other chronic symptoms which I won't list because essentially there's no point because, as I've mentioned before, TMS can involve all manner of symptoms.

Doing the SEP should help you find out why, what your particular triggers are, what you're stuffing down, what you're angry about and don't know it atm, etc.

This is because TMS is an over reactive protective survival mechanism involving the amygdalas/limbic system in our brain aka our 'lizard' brain, which we humans needed when we were cave men and women. Because it’s so primitive, the ‘lizard brain’ only has two settings – ‘danger’ or ‘all clear’. It’s REALLY oversensitive (because back then in primitive times it had to be) – anything that’s not ‘business as usual’ triggers the alarm (i.e. the symptoms) to go off. The 'lizard brain' doesn't care about the long term effects of it triggering inflammation because it's saving you from what it views as immediate danger. Our 'lizard brains' haven't progressed; in our modern world it mistakes and treats such things as having a boss that doesn't treat you well as being life threatening; the symptoms are there to distract you from your rage at your boss, to stop you punching your boss on the nose because s/he might punch you back or sack you, or s/he might kill you, or you might even kill them!

It's true to say that not everyone suffers TMS symptoms to the nth degree... but most people do, to either a lesser (or a greater) extent... Think of the amount of back pain, migraines, IBS and so on, that people in general suffer that are never recognised as being TMS.

 

First things first. Get the boil checked out sooner rather than later.

Ruling out anything physical is the first step especially a possible infection.

@BloodMoon has given you some great advice & lots of information to chew on.

Getting a good night's sleep is important especially in the initial stages of TMS recovery. Many here have recovered while on meds. Whether the meds are helping or not is something only you can decide. If they help with anxiety which helps to bring down the pain & helps you concentrate on the TMS work, then you might consider that option.

Good luck

Mala

 

Really helpful stuff, thank you

 

I think the brain (and other body clusters of information) has no option. You got all that repressed feelings "keeping the score in your body", and your ego and defense mechanisms not allowing them to be processed. So the energy starts being let out by other valves.

 

Interesting, my father is a psychopath and I’m on the other side of the spectrum ie very highly sensitive. I’m thinking perhaps I inherited his ID and it wants to execute psychpathic activities and my ego has made a judgemental decision to listen to my superego and not let the ID get its way. I noticed that my father has a very weak personality ie his ego and superego is very weak and, perhaps, his psychopathic and narcissistic ID took over his life. No one likes him and he’s the most repugnant creature. Perhaps, with me, I have a similar ID to him but my superego is strong (unlike his) and will not let the ID gets its way away with it’s behaviour. I do wonder and, perhaps, why I’m always so sick. It’s like there’s fire within me but something is stopping it from coming out. I don’t want to change my personality. I like who I am and would never surrender to any psychopathic activities. My ID and my superego needs to come to peace. Do you think this theory is valid? I mean as a theory does anyone think it could be possible. Perhaps by me hating him, as repugnant as he is, my ID is rageful that I’m rejecting it and it’s angry. I have no idea, there is no way of knowing for sure. It just feels that there’s something within me that isn’t at peace and there’s a contradiction like a war going on within. Does any of this make sense? Sometimes I’m confused who I truly am. I look at my family and I don’t feel I connect to any of them. I feel like a stranger in the midst of blood relatives. Perhaps if the ID, ego and superego are aligned then a person is in good health but if they are highly antagonistic then a war erupts and poor health follows. I do wonder, if I give in to my ID, so say I start acting and behaving as my father does would the pains and inflammation go away? I find a deep vulnerability in my ID and I feel I always need to be strong to carry the ID. Everything I do feels like it takes a lot of effort and isn’t natural. Does that resonate with anyone?

 

I don't profess to understand anything much about IDs, superegos etc, but I don't see how you can have inherited your father's psychopathy and be a HSP at the same time (see table below).

Perhaps you're an HSP and have got an inner battle going on inside you where you are fearing and resisting anything that you remotely associate with the behaviour of your father. Even when one is an HSP one can still have the desire to do or say things that may not be socially acceptable or 'nice' (and one's brain gives one physical symptoms as a distraction regarding this) but that doesn't mean one is actually fighting against psychopathy or narcissism.