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Hello all-

I think I may have discovered a correlation that (I hope) will bring people some relief from their pain. Granted many of you have already figured this out. At a minimum I hope it will provide you with a better understanding of how we/you “respond” to TMS.

Let me preface this by saying, I owe A LOT to many of the contributors on this forum (specifically those who run it and many of the book authors who contribute to it-you know who you are). You had mentioned this very thing to me a year or two ago and I simply wasn’t “hearing you”. Ultimately the catalyst for my present understanding was this “description” that I read in a book, that when compounded with the info that many of you had already provided for me…well, it struck me pretty hard and I had my “AH-HA” moment.

Let me explain:

About 6 months ago I was dealing with a short (yet very effective) bout of insomnia. Insomnia used to have its way with me for months at a time, even though I definitively knew it was yet another form of TMS. I say “used to” because I finally realized it was simply another divergence from my repressed emotions; me being mentally exhausted during the day was the perfect mechanism for not allowing me to focus on my emotions. I learned a lot about insomnia and the anxiety that causes it, by reading a very well-known book in the psych world called “Hope and Help for Your Nerves” by Dr. Claire Weekes.

Dr. Weekes was a brilliant GP and health writer who pioneered much of what is now our present treatment (and understanding) of anxiety, via Cognitive Therapy. Mind you she wrote this book about 60 years ago.

Ok, so what does this all have to do with pain, you ask?

The very smart and generous people who I refer to above…who had helped me…always used to say to me: “Avik, you need to observe your pain without judgement and accept the situation.”

“Do not fight it”…is what I would repeatedly hear.

This INFURIATED me.

What do you mean “accept” the pain?

How can I not fight it?

What am I supposed to do then…just sit here in misery?!
I was annoyed, to say the least. I could not wrap my head around accepting anything, let alone this horrible life of pain.

Well…unfortunately for me…I wasn’t listening to what people were telling me. I was too busy fighting them and being my usual stubborn, TYPE A self.

So, Dr. Weekes’ book did wonders for me years back so I picked it up again about 6 months ago for a refresher course on anxiety, in the hopes it would help me with this new bout of insomnia.

Dr. Weeks talks about how when you are in bed tossing and turning and you begin to feel anxiety (whether it be related to some specific fear in your life or more commonly, just plainly fearing the inability to sleep and function) you are “terrified because your body is in a sensitized state…shooting off exaggerated responses”.

Ok, this definitely made sense to me…

She goes on to say that when you feel the panic coming on (and I quote directly from her book in Chapter 20):

“Relax to the best of your ability, then examine the feeling of panic and prepare to let it sweep over you. Relax and go with it. Do not shrink from it or try to control it”.

This hit me like a ton of bricks.
This is exactly what I wasn’t doing.
Dr Weekes was dealing with Anxiety, the way I should be dealing with my pain.

When any one of the myriad of TMS-related-pains would suddenly come on, I would fight... I would scream at it...I would do essentially anything other than accept the situation I was in.
I would try to control the situation and push it away.

This is (according to Weekes), the way that most people deal with anxiety (which includes me). Our natural response to anything fear based is Fight or Flight.
When I get anxious, I force myself to calm down which in essence, is me trying to quell or push down the fear.

Now this does occasionally work for me (for both anxiety and pain), but it never lasts. I found the pain would come back soon thereafter. It was a short term fix.

I finally drew this correlation between what all of these very smart and progressive, TMS-experienced people were telling me for years, with what Dr Weekes wrote in her book….let it sweep over you. Relax and go with it.

I realized that “observing and accepting the pain” and “relaxing and letting it sweep over you”, were one and the same.

Words simply cannot express what this realization had/has done for me. It has changed my entire perception of pain and my relationship to it. Now when pain hits me, I automatically relax my whole body and mentally accept that this is TMS trying to just do its thing. I then let it do its thing while I mentally envision the pain sweep over my entire body. Kind of like a wave of warmth. Sounds crazy because who in their right mind would want pain to sweep over their whole body…but by relinquishing my desire to control it, it just dissipates.

Sometimes it dissipates more slowly than other times, but it ALWAYS dissipates. No matter what happens, I don’t judge it, I don’t try to control it-I just watch/observe it, let it sweep over me and I put up ZERO FIGHT.

TMS HATES IT WHEN YOU DON’T FIGHT.

When you don’t fight, you are not engaged!
And when you are not engaged in the fight, your attention cannot be diverted!
Not allowing yourself to be pulled into the game of TMS…by not playing with it…by not allowing it to occupy your brain matter...you render the (pain/oxygen deprivation) response powerless.

Wishing everyone a relaxing and pain-free weekend.

-A