21 Year Old With Foot Pain Destroying Life, Need Help

This has really taken a big toll on my life in all aspects and I'm writing this to see if anyone has any advice for me as I'm lost at the moment.

To give some background on me, I'm a 21-year-old college student who had found TMS through an elbow injury I had a few years back. Back then I had no idea about TMS but found once I stopped my extreme fear of "making the injury worse" and started using my elbow more my improvement was exponential. Now this elbow injury is a thing in the past but I write this part because I have shown I'm susceptible in allowing my mental take over and cause pain.

The injury/pain I'm currently dealing with has been going on since November of 2023 (1 year and 2 months). Leading up to this injury I was a very active person on my feet (15k steps a day / stair master and running often. On one specific day, I walked for hours barefoot on a hardwood floor. Nothing seemed different that day but when I woke up my right foot felt off. I tried to ignore it for about 2 weeks but it felt like it was getting worse so I stopped being so active on my foot. I've seen multiple orthopedic foot doctors and my situation seems to be describing capsulitis / plantar plate injury/turf toe/pre-dislocation syndrome. However, despite being fairly conservative on it (3k steps a day, always wearing protective shoes, no heavy lifting) the injury just seems to not heal in the past year I've had this. I've asked to get an MRI in the past but the doctor didn't order it, I have an appointment with another one in a few days and plan to ask him for one as well as a possible PRP injection.

It's had a huge impact on my life socially as I've avoided any activities with friends that involve any sort of longer periods on my feet or walking. I feel my mental health has really gone down because of this and feel more and more isolated.

Some interesting aspects of my situation is that it doesn't feel much different when pressing into the foot/injury site. Starting a few months ago I started getting some numbness in the injured toe whenever I was resting and I believe gets heightened during times I worry about it. This injury constantly takes over my thoughts and leads to anxiety, thinking about if I'm making it worse or delaying recovery whenever I walk on it. I would also say I don't really feel stabbing pains when walking or standing on it, more so a general discomfort. From my research this kind of injury can be very long and slow healing. However, its just hard for me to know how much of this is actual damage and injury still and how much is just a years worth of my mind becoming hyper sensitive to this injury.

Back in September of 2024 my relationship with this injury was in a much healthier space. Despite the symptoms reltively being similar as they are now, I believe it wasn't eating my mental like it is now. I would think about it, but I wasn't letting it dictate my every movement in trying to not use my feet unless neccassry. Then one day I was recommended to try PT, and the experience was very negative as the person had me doing one leg calf raises which typically is the worst thing you could do for this injury. After this moment, I became much more worrysome over protecting it which I believe in return has increased my symptoms. All this points to evidence that the mind is playing a major role but I have trouble committing to this as I know this type of injury can be easily made worse if you go overboard.

If anyone has any experience with toe/foot pain or something similar I would really appreciate any advice. Thanks

 

Hi @reorre121

I can feel so deeply for your distress. My current symptoms began in my feet and legs. It is overwhelming, isolating and terrifying. It feels like your life might be over. But that’s not true. What’s true is: your body is talking. It’s saying, “ouch!” It’s talking because you have traits and habits that cause you to stuff your bad feelings. They are stuffed down into your feet and leaking out. You’ll have to do the hard work of learning about TMS and working on yourself to heal. To do that, you need to let go of all medical solutions. Those are only distractions. Have you ever seen this video? It’s a good place to start. Watch the whole thing. It talks about foot pain.

 

Hey @reorre121

Foot pain is a set of symptoms I went through - it moved from what they thought was one issue to another issue. I had a few years of PT on and off - nothing worked for long.

My suspicion is that your injury has healed, our bodies often heal - even if slowly in a few months. But sometimes our brain just hangs onto the sensations of the pain to keep us from some imagined "further injury" that is probably fueled by your fear of doing "more damage" and staying away from doing activities you used to. Your association with what sounds like perhaps a mild discomfort is magnified by a brain that is spending all it's time focusing on it.
It's a form of OCD.
Now, ruling out something might be necessary for you and perhaps having an MRI is a good idea.
I had MRI's on my own feet/ankles and there were visible changes, and the "diagnoses" seemed to be accurate, until...
I had other "injuries" like "frozen shoulder" which I innately knew was a bull*crap diagnoses (before I even knew about TMS) and healed it by USING it against the orthopedists recommendations.
I began seeing a completely different type of PT and we realized that I kept having foot problems because I wasn't using my feet in a normal manner. I got so used to limping and walking in certain ways and using devices that I had convinced myself (and didn't even realize it) that my feet were horrible, and I was doomed and that I would heal when someone told me I would (or would not, which most people said). So I decided my feet were FINE. Absolutely FINE.
I started walking and they'd flare up.
So I'd take a break for a day or two and do a bit less, then go back to doing a bit more.
THEN I noticed that I could stop the pain in it's tracks by laughing at it. It worked like a charm. Sure I'd have some painful steps, maybe even a day, a few hours but slowly I could stop the pain in minutes. Now it's seconds.
My own foot pain is directly related to anger I don't want to feel. Now I just laugh at it and say to myself "boy, you must surely be pissed off at something". I don't even need to know what it is = just accept the anger and feel it instead of the foot pain.

Crazy but for me it works!

 

Thanks for this @Cactusflower, what you said I agree with a lot. I'm at a point where I want to believe my chronic foot pain is truly TMS and nothing is wrong. I want to live my life normally (walk normal / not avoid stairs / not limit myself to less than 3k steps a day, etc.)

However, I just have this fear that if I do that I would make it worse and that would be truly detrimental to my progress. I believe this mindset is heightened by the fact that many doctor / people who have actually had this plantar plate / turf toe injury say that often times tears don't often show up on an mri. So I think that even if my mri comes back showing nothing abrnomral, the nature of this injury would still have me fearing making it worse by treating it as if it's fully TMS.

Any thoughts on this, thanks!

 

This is typical TMS fear. Everyone comes here in fear that something will make things worse.
Science has proven that ANY chronic condition including illness becomes much easier to cope with, bear and of course with TMS irradicate when people stop living in fear. & regulate their nervous system.
Is fixating, worrying , living in anxiety etc. making it any better? We hag made your old elbow symptoms better, and did that “damage” show up on an MRI?

Have you considered that the diagnoses you were given “doesn’t show up” on MRI’s because it’s always TMS?

So next question. Besides sports etc what do you enjoy doing?

 

I think foot pain is one of the symptoms mmany tms’er have had. It’s very debilitating, so a great distraction, maybe that’s why.

I think you don’t have to go all in at first, you could simply do somatic tracking while sitting down, or reading -All The Things- about tms on this forum and in books only the knowledge about ways to know if something is tms will help you, probably enough to make your first guess about the nature of your pain.

Congratulations for having found this forum and the tms world! It’s great to be aware of the quirks of our brains. Only you (and doctors ofcourse, but mostly you) can decide if something is tms or not, and it’s completely normal to have doubts, and keep those doubts for a while.

edit: forgot to mention, but foot pain bothered me as well. I applied the tms techniques and after a massive extinction burst it never came back.

 

Some real nuggets of wisdom!

 

You've got some excellent responses above!

This is the part to expand on. How did you find TMS when you had that elbow injury a few years ago? Did you read a book by Dr. Sarno? Or someone else?
How exactly did you stop that extreme fear you had of 'making the injury worse?' How--what connection did you make to be able to use your elbow more?
Figure out what worked and develop from there.

There's a phrase 'book cure' that refers to people who read a book (often by Dr. Sarno) and had immediate results--a lot of times if the symptoms do return, deeper work is needed.

Awesome--you've got folks posting who have experience with toe and foot pain. Take that in. Because this is a trap that can be very hard to dig out of. The trap of "Until I find someone who has the same physical symptoms I have, I can't possibly get better." With that mindset, it's easy to always find some differences between your symptoms and everyone else's, and the symptoms often just jump to another part of the body.

Then, it gets worse, b/c some folks try to find someone with the same symptoms and in the same order (well, his back pain shifted to his foot and then his hip--mine went from back to foot to now headaches, so I can't do what he did to get better--it's completely different.) Sounds absurd, but TMS is absurd.