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This is all good work, Eli. And I actually do have something specific for the skepticism/doubt and also for the flares in general, which is self-talk.

Your TMS brain mechanism is not an aberration. It was evolutionarily designed to do one job, and one job only, but it's a really important one, which is to keep you safe in this extremely dangerous primitive wilderness. Except, of course for the fact that our brain has that totally wrong, because our brains still think we're living in a dangerous primitive wilderness - after all, modern society is just a teensy blip of time since homo sapiens evolved to live for tens of thousands of years in the wilderness. So this job of keeping you safe means keeping you in fear, always on edge, always looking out for danger and always, always assuming the worst. This works for absolute shit in modern society , never mind in a society with the extremely complex stresses since the advent of the industrial age .

So when you have skepticism and doubt, when you experience a sudden flare or a new symptom, or even if you suddenly experience anxiety, the technique that has always worked really well for me is logical self-talk. I just thank my fear brain and remind it that this (whatever symptom) is not necessary because I'm actually physically quite safe. The self-talk for skepticism and doubt is basically the same, which is to say "thank you for trying to keep me safe, and in fact I AM safe, and I'm going to choose to believe in this process and have faith that my symptoms are unnecessary."

It's important to acknowledge that your brain is doing what it thinks it's is best, and that it's okay for you to be vulnerable to your true emotions instead of repressing them.