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Hi Nancy I am sorry to hear about all of your distress and suffering over such a long time. The previous replies you have received on this thread are amazing. Here's mine.

I relate to it on some levels as I had tms pain for over 20 years. I have recently had another short bout of it after a nasty fall. I was experiencing intense stress from a long term constantly triggering situation in my life. It was initially horrifying to me when I realised after about eight weeks post injury that I was in worse pain in my back and could that mean my brain pain was returning at full force. It was. It's gone now. It took me two weeks to return to a pain free state. I learnt that even though I had a successful recovery ten years ago I had fallen back into ignoring and numbing my feelings and emotions once again. I returned to this site and completed Alan Gordon's recovery programme. What helped me the most from that was the somatic tracking method. It helped me to tend to myself without judgement or any pressure to change anything that was happening for me but to just be present with whatever was happening in that moment. This was the most important support and comfort that calmed my nervous system and deeply validated the emotional pain. I would take a few minutes to go inwards and feel any outstanding sensations in my body and just be with it and try to open up to what it was telling me.

I also paid attention to my thoughts around the symptoms in order to catch anything discouraging and replace them with encouraging ones instead. I did not allow myself to monitor how much time was passing and changed the way I talked about my symptoms. I would not say I am in pain, instead I would say I'm in a state of fight or flight. I accepted the pain, experienced it as just a temporary sensation and got on with whatever I wanted to do.

For a long period of time before the fall I had been progressively setting healthy boundaries to improve my quality of life but not supporting myself enough through the emotions that that brought up for me. They felt too overwhelming and I pushed them away. That was why the somatic tracking helped resolve the pain because it provided a way to deeply validate my own emotions. I was not aware enough of how emotionally challenging it could be to set healthy boundaries and that I needed more self compassion through it.

I wish you courage and peace through this journey.