Day 10 - Going Down to the Basement

In Brady's book, Pain Free for Life, I found his metaphorical description of the work we do really helpful.

1. Shut the Door on Upstairs Living Room Explanations.

Imagine a living room with bright lights where the TV is running programs from medical experts about your condition, and featuring folks suffering from all the problems and symptoms of your particular brand of TMS pain. Your MRI AND X-rays are hung like pictures to remind you of the alleged physical basis for your pain. It is hard to look away and not pay attention...the evidence seems so strong and reasonable, and scientific, right? But this is precisely what you need to do as step 1 - walk out of that space and lock the door behind you, so you are no longer under the spell of illusion telling you that your pain has a physical cause.

2. Go Downstairs to the Unconscious Basement

Now imagine that you see stairs going down to a dim, unfriendly basement, filled with boxes and boxes of "stuff" - all unlabelled. Some have been there a really long time; they are covered with dust and cobwebs. Others are newer, but they too are bulging with unknown contents. You realize that in order to become pain free, you need to go through these boxes, check out their contents, and label them clearly so you'll know what you've hidden down there that your unconscious is hiding from you.

3. Bring the Boxes Up to the Conscious Kitchen

Decide that you will make a thorough inventory of the contents of your unconscious basement. Your strategy is to bring up one box every day, open it up, and spend as long as 15-20 minutes writing a list of all the memories you have about the contents in that box, especially all the long repressed feelings and emotions. When you are done, you label the box, maybe something like, "Abandonned Emotionally By My Mother When I Was 22 Months"'. For some boxes, you may decide to do something to heal, forgive, or undo a situation, because it is within your current power and will to do so. For most boxes though, you simply accept what is, acknowledge the contents, and once done, you return the box to the basement, keeping the inventory list handy for future reference.

4. Inventory List of Triggers/Emotions in Your Conscious Kitchen

Now you have a good mental awareness of the contents of your painful memory boxes down in the basement. It is your inventory list of basement boxes, which you keep stored upstairs, perhaps at the front of your recipe box of former pain triggers. You take some time to further reflect on all the things that trigger the list - maybe a time, place, person, situation. If some current event triggers anger in similar situations, your unconscious no longer has to hide the source from you with TMS pain symptoms. You acknowledge your story (past history, current pressures, personality type), tell your unconscious to slow down any tension reactions and to send oxygen rich blood and neurologist-peptides of positive emotions like endorphins, dopamine to the old pain site.

5. Joy and Gratitude

You take a breath and smile, giving internal thanks for all the help you have received on this journey, from Drs. Sarno, Brady and the people on the TMS Forum, and from your own internal source of Love and Light. You are now pain-free, and know how to stay that way for the rest of your life. Whenever you have a chance, you reach out to others you believe suffer from TMS pain, and pay it forward.

 

Thank you Ami.. that is really useful and helpful

 

A couple of times... Or if your list is as long as mine, I am going to get really fit going up and down those stairs a lot. ;~D

Thanks for the laugh!

 

this is great...printing it out and putting it in my folder of good TMS reads for those tough days when I need good reminders of how to stay on the healing path. Thanks for sharing.
Lala