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Hi there, the way I see it:

1- Feeling anxiety, stress, anger, sadness etc is pretty normal and we should allow ourselves to feel it. The problem is we are socially trained to repress these feelings, and that's the issue here. Usually you won't be allowed to be angry in a public place, for example, so the therapeutic way of dealing with this would be, when you are in a safe place you try to identify what's stuck inside of you and let this feeling emerge whithout controlling it. Then you let this feeling be and eventually run out of its energy. And by no means you should use the symptoms as the metric if you've done that right, because symptoms might be caused for lots of different reasons, and neuroplasticity is a slow process (for modern standards at least).

2- It's hard to feel calm when the symptoms are screaming in your head. I don't try to force calmness during these periods. Doing this definitely frustrates me and causes more stress. There's a Jim Prussack's success story where the patient tells about "embracing the suckness" of these moments. I like this strategy because it's honest. So what I usually do is a message of safety that'd go like this "yeah ok symptoms are acting up now, I know it sucks but that's when neuroplastic healing really happens". Of couse, to think this you gotta believe you'll in fact heal eventually.

I'd also say there are a lot of contradictions in the methods you'll come across. Brain MRI is somewhat new and expensive. Sarno did his discoveries without it, so of course there are some contradictions with modern approaches. We still have a lot to learn on the matter. Anyway, I like the way Australian researchers are tackling this, specially the works of Dr. Lorimer Moseley.