Anxiety Disorder or TMS?

I’ve been experiencing severe anxiety for a very long time. I wake up with anxiety and every manifestations of anxiety you can think of (panic attacks, OCD, constant worrying, overreacting to situations) and have anxiety throughout the day. The anxiety I live with is so constant everyday, I’ve been choosing to see this an anxiety disorder thats been brought on by traumatic events. I know my brain doesn’t feel safe and I’ve taught it overr time to feel that way due to the way I’ve reacted to life circumstances and situations. I’ve also been watching Irene Lyon’s videos on nervous system dysregulation, and that resonated greatly with me too. But here’s the thing….the anxiety almost completely goes away at night and is usually replaced by physical symptoms like migraine headaches. This strongly points to it being TMS. I guess what I’m wondering is, should I drop this idea that I have anxiety disorder and treat it like TMS or does it really matter? And this idea of “nervous system dysregulation” seems like another way of saying TMS as well. All seems like semantics and there is a lot of overlapping between these terms. Any thoughts?

 

Yes ditch the word "disorder". Anxiety is part of being human and the human condition. We have to stop pathologizing everything. Everything you listed are one and the same. I don't care for Irene Lyons at all because she overcomplicates the process to absurd levels and uses way too much sciencey sounding (aka scary!) verbiage. She gives me a headache tbh. It's just another person bastardizing Sarno's message imo. Your brain and nervous system are working fine and they know what to do without having to engineer them from the outside in. It boils down to understanding what is going on which is fear of fear in a nutshell, and practicing outcome independent and investigating your emotional world (inner conflicts for ex). Dr. Claire Weekes and DARE are great resources on anxiety in general. This process is not complex or mystical as some of the marketing and messaging on social media would have you to believe. Instead of Irene Lyons, check out Dan Buglio or Dan Ratner, or interviews with Dr. Schubiner, Dr. Clarke, Dr. Schecter, and other MDs in the field ...they use a practical approach and framework.

 

TMS is anxiety. Anxiety is TMS. Have you checked out Dan Buglio? PainFreeYou.com. He’s all about soothing your anxiety and fears to heal TMS. He has daily videos. Also any book by Claire Weekes, MD. She’s the queen of healing anxiety.

 

yes but at what point do these symptoms become “mental illness?”. There’s a fine line between TMS and actual mental health issues

 

The fact that your anxiety goes away and physical symptoms appear is curious.
There is absolutely no reason you can’t seek help and support for the anxiety while doing TMS work. There are quite a few TMS specialists in the US who provide therapy. You’d need a qualified professional therapist to give you’d as diagnoses of a mental health concern.
We’re not doctors here.

 

This is a distinction without a difference. I think you're trying to find an "out" as a way of avoiding doing the psychological work. It all comes down to addressing emotional repression and dysfunctional thinking patterns whether you call it anxiety, TMS, or an Anxiety Disorder. Pick a program, like the SEP (free on this site), and do the work everyday. The only way out is through.

 

THIS !!!

 

!!!!!!!

 

Well I am still incredibly confused because I’ve talked a number of times with Dr. David Hanscom (who does the back in control blog) and he tells me my symptoms can be attributed to inflammation in the brain, basically my brain is on fire which is causing all these mental/emotional symptoms, and they need to heal for me to get better. But everyone on this forum is telling me the opposite, that there’s nothing wrong with my brain and I just need to do the psychological work for the symptoms to go away. He also says it’s not psychological, it’s physiology. Very contradictive. Not sure how many people are familiar with David Hanscom’s work, I think he’s posted in here a number of times, but I’m of the impression his stance clashes with the classic TMS/Sarno position?

 

Some of the MDs in the field use terms like neuro pathways, neural circuits, or in Dr. Hanscom's case, inflammation, but the problem I have with all of that type of verbiage is that it physicalizes something that is simply functional anxiety. All of these terms are still the "effect", not the cause. I had major symptoms that were visual and altered my actual physiology, but it was STILL just tms. I think your brain is trying to use "mental illness" or Dr. Hanscom and "inflammation" as ways of fitting your negative narrative that you are "different" and therefore uniquely doomed. They are shields in a sense, from facing your thoughts and emotions. You have health anxiety. That's it. It's not mysterious or exotic...it's simply plain ole anxiety. The sooner you accept that and lose your doubts about being different , the faster you will get better. There are certain patterns and profiles of sufferers and combinations of profiles. If I had to guess, you are in the attentional/ocd group. It feels safer to stay in you head, intellectualizing, debating, researching, analyzing, looking for contradictions in details, etc etc , rather than actually deciding to believe you are fine and dealing with the inner conflicts and emotions if necessary.

 

Is the idea that the autonomic nervous system is actually the thing that tells the brain what to do (as Irene Lyons put it) a bunch of BS? I’m trying to get a clear picture and understanding of how this works in my head. The idea that it’s stored trauma in the body (like in the book “The Body Keeps Score) that’s causing all the symptoms and pain and that in order to heal, you need to actually release the trauma from the body by speaking the body’s langjabe and doing somatic work, as opposed to psychological work. Again, a major conflict with TMS theory. How trauma plays a role in TMS symptoms, I still don’t get.

 

David,
There’s a test you can take called the ACE test that scores the level of childhood trauma you have. I scored 6 out of 10. Most people with TMS score lower. It doesn’t take much. So speaking as someone with a steep hill to climb with the childhood trauma, the answer to your question is the abuse from childhood causes a huge reservoir of rage. Current life triggers even more rage, because it will remind you of the childhood trauma. It’s like everywhere you turn, you’re reliving it. For example, childhood sexual abuse is the absolute violation of boundaries. Then as you grow older, anyone who violates your boundaries in even the simplest of ways is actually triggering memories of sexual abuse. And if you haven’t done any work on this, it’s all subconscious. But the body is doing its best to distract you from what it thinks is too overwhelming to ever think about. That’s TMS.

 

psychological conflicts --> physiological changes

 

Perhaps your confusion arises from not understanding the difference between localized inflammation and systemic inflammation. An example of localized inflammation is a sprained ankle. Dr. Hanscom was talking about systemic inflammation. Systemic inflammation is about how protein molecules called cytokines regulate the working of the central nervous system, i.e., brain and spinal cord neurons.

The central nervous system works best when there is approximately a 50-50 balance between pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines. Why have any pro-inflammatory cytokines? One important reason is that they help us to learn. Learning requires the creation of new connections between neurons, and pro-inflammatory cytokines facilitate that. If the balance goes chronically awry in favor of too many pro-inflammatory cytokines and not enough anti-inflammatory ones, various chronic physical disorders can result, and so can chronic anxiety and TMS.

Below I will link to a monograph by Dr. Hanscom titled Plan A - Lowering Inflammation, Lengthening Life. In it, he talks about lowering systemic inflammation. He wrote the monograph during the height of the corona virus pandemic, so his focus was on surviving the pandemic. But what he wrote applies equally to anxiety and TMS. Below is some of what he wrote. I have added the italics.

Any mental or physical threat, perceived or real, is going to be met with a defensive response from your body. Much of this is mediated through the vagus nerve, at the core of the autonomic nervous system. The response is the well-known flight, fight, freeze, or faint reaction . . . .

Although threats come in many forms, they always activate pro-inflammatory (Pro-I) cytokines. Besides obvious physical threats, mental threats are even more inflammatory and harder to manage because we can’t physically escape them. They create a sustained inflammatory response that forms the basis for chronic mental and physical disease. Examples of mental threats are memories, negative thoughts, suppressions, repressions, insecurities (social, financial, health, etc.), cognitive distortions, loss of life perspective and purpose, and social isolation . . . .

Discovery and acknowledgement of all our threats – whether real, imagined, anticipated, or repressed – is the first step towards addressing them. The second is choosing an adaptive rather than a maladaptive escape to safety, whether the threat be physical or spiritual. We are better at physically escaping to safety than we are at dealing with spiritual crises . . . . If you don’t feel safe and peaceful, you are carrying elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines. . . .
​

As Ellen wrote above: psychological conflicts --> physiological changes. Hanscom discusses 12 kinds of ways to lower one’s pro-inflammatory cytokines. Some of them are physical things, e.g., get adequate sleep, but most of them are in the psychological realm. Below are the psychological ones.

1. Understand and treat anxiety.
2. Employ expressive writing.
3. Calming techniques.
5. Address anger/Practice forgiveness.
6. Directly address family issues.
10. Play.
11. Giving back.
12. Regaining your life vision/Reconnecting with life.
​

If you are interested in seeing what Hanscom says about these things, here is the link to his monograph: https://backincontrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Plan-A-V4.pdf

I want to end by emphasizing that the essential first step is discovering and acknowledging all of your threats. Only then can you find an adaptive escape to safety. If repressed anger is your problem, you have to discover and acknowledge who you are angry at and why.

​

 

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@Duggit,
As always, your contributions provide such in-depth insight. I appreciate this so much! I’m especially happy to hear it because it is validating my current efforts to get myself to safety.

I’m making headway on all of these steps!
1. Understand and treat anxiety.
2. Employ expressive writing.
3. Calming techniques.
5. Address anger/Practice forgiveness.
6. Directly address family issues.
10. Play.
11. Giving back.
12. Regaining your life vision/Reconnecting with life.

And that’s giving me hope, even if symptoms are still lingering.

 

@Duggit , you always bring the receipts! Appreciate your willingness to share the original source material with us. I always learn a lot from your posts.

 

It’s definitely all the same thing, in my opinion.

My back pain healed pretty fast but I had awful anxiety and chronic dizziness and weird under the skin itching sensations for years so I can totally relate to “inflammation in the brain”, in fact I quite like that concept. It really did feel like my brain was burning at times and I think my nervous system was in complete and constant disregulation because of the constant worrying and anxiety and living in survival mode. I also did tons of therapy and internal work which was interesting and helpful to understand root causes but frustratingly did little to reduce the actual worrying and symptoms! For me it just meant more and more internal focus on myself and rabbit hole type thinking and that (IMO) is not helpful for anxiety.

For me I have to say that I found Joe Dispenza’s meditations unbelievably helpful (and enjoyable) in aiding my recovery from chronic anxiety. Learning to shift my focus off myself on to a larger sense of space beyond me had the most amazing healing effect for me, it was like a holiday for my brain and I started to understand what it meant to “just be” and what an amazing place that is to rest in and how much the brain and body need and crave to spend time there. It is the Claire Weekes method vastly enhanced by modern technology!

His explanation was the first time I understood how anxiety traps you because thoughts create feelings and feelings create thoughts so if you get into that anxiety cycle you are in a never ending loop unless someone shows you the way out. In that way it seems exactly like any of these mindbody issues to me, you are trapped in the fear which produces more symptoms which produces more fear and on and on.

You have to stick with the meditations but the effect grows and grows as you retrain your brain. In terms of anxiety, I am not completely recovered but well on my way and feeling better than I have felt in about 30 years.

 

@Davideus85
I had not listened to Dr. Hanscom in a while, and listened to an interview with him recently.

I get your confusion. His messages and the information he focuses on and relates changes frequently. When I first began reading his writings it was anger focused, then love focused, then all about the chemical interactions of stress and anxiety. I think he tries to comfort his clients who often take on the heavy weight of responsibility and self-blame for their TMS. It’s his way of saying that your thoughts create physiological changes but the genesis is not the inflammation… the result of these thoughts, stress and anxiety can be inflammation as one of the symptoms.
In the earlier stages of my TMS you could see severe inflammation and what was only explained as “arthritis” on the imaging I had done. I actually never believed this because it didn’t feel like arthritis. Later on, all inflammation had cleared up in those places, even though symptoms remained. However, my stress and anxiety did not clear up until I began to treat the root cause: emotional distress and unconscious anger. Which circles back to Dr. Hanscom’s earlier work and his own experiences with TMS.
Although very new agey, I think the film Love Heals gives an excellent short synopsis of all his ideas rolled in together. It also provides an incredibly creative approach to TMS work.