Does anyone have any information on pain avoidance and integrating normal activities again?

It would be great if someone had some information on this. I know Sarno says to stop any medical treatments you may be doing and resume normal activity immediately, but I've also heard Howard Schubiner talk about keeping our brain feeling safe and its okay if you need these things.

Has Alan addressed this directly?

After avoiding eating specific things due to a jaw issues and not opening my mouth too wide, and avoiding sitting down for years it is hard to know how to intergrade this.

 

Dr. Alan Gordon does discuss this too, I believe I recall him saying that avoidance behaviors can be useful if you feel your pain is so acute that you cannot effectively work on recovery without reducing it. I think the message is for avoidance behaviors to be used in moderation / strategically.

Are your avoidance behaviors directly helping to prevent severe, acute pain or are they mental conditioning that you've developed? Steve Ozanich talks specifically about his own sitting pain in his book and how he committed himself to sitting for as long as it took to prove to his brain that in spite of the pain he would be OK. And amazingly, the pain subsided after what I believe he described as almost 30 minutes of awful pain.

Your avoidance behavior with eating sounds more like fear than an action taken to resolve real actual pain at this stage and it would likely benefit you to begin abandoning that behavior as it only reinforces your fear-based conditioning.

On the one hand, it is counterproductive to your brain if it feels utterly helpless and stuck in terrible pain, on the other hand, you continue to teach it that you NEED these things to stop feeling that way.

I will say in my own experience, when I stopped the physical treatments and avoidance behaviors, my symptoms improved greatly (I have pelvic pain). I stopped avoiding tight clothes, I stopped re-adjusting constantly while sitting, I started exercising again, I stopped trigger point therapy and stretching. Nothing terrible happened. Instead, I learned I never needed any of those things, they were all based on fear and not the reality of my condition. I hope that helps.

 

Sarno did not say that. In Healing Back Pain, he wrote: “I suggest to patients that they begin the process of resuming physical activity when they experience a significant reduction in pain and when they are feeling confident about the diagnosis {of TMS}. To start prematurely only means they will probably induce pain, frighten themselves and retard the recovery process. Patients are usually conditioned to expect pain with physical activity and so must not challenge the established programmed patterns until they have developed a fair decree of confidence in the diagnosis."