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.

 

For those with foot pain that has lasted longer than one year one year, how how do you manage to be able to walk around or find shoes? That’s my problem I have now bought the foot pain traveled to the other foot as well my feet have grown, and none of my shoes fit me. The top of 1 foot gets extremely right as soon as I stand on it, no one can explain exactly. I started out as a tendinitis that was spread to burning and sensations and pains all over a foot and an ankle It’s been very hard for me to do the work on this area because I still doubt that that it’s actually TMS although no one really knows what it is except what they can see on imaging, which is just normal changes for my age and some wear and tear from previous injuries. I’m getting more and more desperate as the months go on since I’ve become deconditioned and unable to pursue any activity that requires a lot of standing or walking. I’m wearing HOKA sneakers they prescribed orthotic, which I believe actually started the perpetuation of symptoms in last summer but at this point, no other shoes fit me that I’ve tried because my feet always hurt. I know there’s a lot of medical information in this however, I just wonder how to go about practical aspects even if it is TMS. Thanks

 

You do the TMS work, and as Dr. Sarno points out, you begin dropping the "crutches".
Crutches are special shoes, or anything else you "feel" you "need" to keep out of pain.
The fact that your pain has traveled to your other foot mirroring your first pain site is a real key in recognizing that this is all TMS, especially if you've been cleared that there is nothing wrong.
The more you try and add these things or make "rules" around your TMS (like special shoes, etc) the more the cycle will continue because you are feeding the beast - the TMS mechanism by giving it your power.
I too am deconditioned because I was in bed bound for two years.
I just do things. It's not easy, it hurts but I do things.
At one point I had such horrible foot pain that walking anywhere was excruciating...and so the cycle continued to take hold until I could hardly move my body.
Finally I just had enough. I discovered TMS and Dr. Sarno, but the process was difficult mentally for me to really dig into.
But then I'd just had enough. Life was BORING not doing anything.
So I walked up and down my stairs and it hurt like *fing* hell. I wore my "special shoes" and still did it.
Then I let go of the special shoes at times. I began to walk up and down my stairs bare foot. And when I had pain, I'd say to myself "Geeze you are mad as hell at something, aren't you!" and laugh at it.
Slowly it began to dissipate. Standing and walking was really hard, but slowly I began to do it for longer periods of time. I used Claire Weeks to get rid of the anxiety over it and kept telling myself that there was NOTHING wrong. It's taken a long time, but now I walk miles.
Yesterday I had a few good jolts of the pain (which rarely happens) and I knew it was because someone else had posted about foot pain and I read it (and I was walking up a hill, something I'd at one time told myself I could never do again, and I guess that's still in the back of my mind sometimes). I just told myself "Oh, well. It'll pass in a minute, gotta get my groceries home!). And it completely passed - I began to turn my attention to something else and before you knew it, it passed.

You need to stop allowing these things to be your distraction. You need to remind yourself that Dr. Sarno says it's all BENIGN, you need to find ANYTHING else that's interesting and you need to conquer your anxiety over getting back to activity. It's not easy, but it can be done.

Now I'm going to go out and walk down a hill and get some paint, then walk a few miles back home again. I don't care if it hurts. I love painting!

 

Wow, you're pretty amazing ! I would wish I had this courage, but not there now. I still doubt it's TMS st times because I have redness on top of feet one worse and some swelling.
My symptoms have increased from ankle tendon to eventually diagnoses of bone problems,neuropathy not seen in EMG etc
A few months was more hopeful but now feet are burning ,stiff and numb and the worst thing is that besides my special shoes and orthotics none of my shoes fit me and that is so hard for me because I am used to what I know and to replace all shores with different brands ,sizes just too overwhelming for me because nothing works and even the special shoes now hurt and burn. So I'm really stuck in fear /freeze mode. !

 

well @Bealillie
It's up to you to do the work, and to follow through with it. It's a tough road, but if I can do it, you can too.
I went through the tough time with shoes. Now I am experimenting with shoes. I wear a nice firm shoe to walk in, and save my "fun" shoes for fun.
"Diagnoses not seen on..." any kind of tests are really the Doctors trying to give you SOMETHING even though they really have no idea what's going on. I've been there. I was diagnosed with some pretty scary foot/ankle issues but after awhile, I decided I didn't believe what they Doctors were saying, because they all said there was nothing they could do for me except: try shoe inserts, try different shoes, try soft shoes, try firm shoes, try flat shoes, try this try that...nothing concrete. So it was all bull*crap.
You are currently afraid, feeling helpless and anxious about it.
What have you actually done re: work with TMS? Did you do the SEP from start to finish?
Did you read a book about TMS?
Have you read a book by Claire Weekes?
All of these are regularly mentioned on this forum, and they really really do help. I'm not brave, I just made a committment to myself to do the work and to start enjoying life again.

 

I think what might help you is read a ton of success stories? That’s how I got convinced, reading the Amazon reviews on sarno books. It’s amazing and telling that there are so many. I still find it hard to believe that so many people are recovering, and that it just works. It just works. Even though it really sounded like woo woo self help when I heard about it first.

The other thing that comes to mind when I read your posts is reeeeeaaaad and don’t stop until you believe it. There are so many books on tms and every one can give you a different insight. For you I’d recommend steve ozanich book The great pain deception, because at some point in the book even you as a reader don’t believe this all can be tms. He has so. Many. Extreme. Symptoms. Also he’s a really good example of someone who didn’t read a book and got better . He also describes the process of how he overcame his doubt

 

Hi,@Bealillie
This is what I’m always up against. My symptoms worsen, and at some point they start to take me down emotionally. I isolate from friends and family. I project that I’ll always be stuck like this. But that’s the beauty of this forum. There are successes here—and great advice! Don’t give up hope no matter what. This is a battle of wills. Yours against your primitive brain and your hyped up nervous system. The only way to lose is to quit. So don’t quit. One of these days you’ll punch through. And do whatever it takes to live. Don’t avoid friends. Do things with them. Accept that you have to walk slow for now, or whatever it takes. Give up your pride. That’s the only way to keep yourself out there with people. It has been a hard pill to swallow for me. But I’m less isolated now. Keep throwing healing plans against the wall and see what sticks for you. Something will work best. Keep fighting! We’re here for you. ❤️

 

Cactus I can’t really tell you how much you inspire me with every single post! I always get something out of everything you write! I love this idea. I’m thinking I might just start going up and down my stairs in defiance. my symptoms have gotten so they lock me down every time I try to go up the stairs and it’s gotten worse. Maybe I should just get in its face. I love this! You really are a great example. Thank you so much for sharing your story every day!

 

Thanks Diana, I try, but the pain by now is not limited to walking only also, sitting since a long term coccyx and sciatic pain have resurfaced since being so home bound in the last 6 months, am doing a lot of psychotherapy which is only partially helpful, but only gets me so far. Seems like it’s one step forward , many steps back such as a fall sideways yesterday which caused more sciatic and foot but also have severe burning in both feet , one much worse originally injured and chronically swollen. Actually went to pool last Friday which I had not done since March ,

. I have had numerous episodes of TMS in my life , saw and externed with Dr sarno when a student and was immersed and did well with him concepts . What happened beginning a year ago had become a much larger problem and I am trying to work through program. however i am still at level of doubt/fear because of consistent increase in symptons,my aging , loss of most of former friends, job and finances, seems life threatening to me at this point almost. I went to Dr Gwodz in NJ last week one of 2 drs trained by John Sarno. He st least confirmed some of my condition however without a coach still difficult to make concrete moves. Went to try swim finally with outcome independence didn't go well. Hope another time . My brain not believing in the program anymore
Emotional work has made symptoms worse as I try to do more , but cannot ignore it,

 

I completely resonate with "YBS" and also a victim stance. I think this is me 100%, I've slid back into that way of thinking. Thank you for this!

 

@Bealillie
You are certainly dealing with a lot. Psychotherapy can help, but unless it’s TMS oriented, it may indeed make symptoms challenging. You are facing all the things your brain has kept you from feeling and on top of that you sound isolated.
It’s very hard, but as @JanAtheCPA put it, you need an attitude shift to help you move forward. This is where Claire Weekes comes in. She can help you deal with the states of mind like anxiety, depression and other mindsets (self victimization) that this process can bring. She empowered me to turn the switch in my mind - to refuse to allow myself to think those thoughts and to forcefully turn my mind elsewhere.
The pool make your brain try to hold you back? Then fill up the bathtub and swoosh your feet around in relaxing warm water.
Try some chair yoga, a few moments of tai chi standing up (only doing movements you are comfortable with) retrain your brain to not only sense safety in movement but seek it out. It can be done. It might hurt but that’s OK, you’ll get through this phase.

 

Thank you all, I’m doing the work and have discussed my issues with Dr Gwozdz who was helpful , I have gone swimming twice very short periods cannot avoid exposure to pain at this point. I finally realized the trigger for my decline about a year ago is theme that has factored into my life in the past but not for many many years until a fire last year. This then began a cycle of trauma. My anger at something I should have realized earlier and self criticism is going to be difficult to process, so if all my symptoms are really TMS ( still some doubt) I expect resistance.