Effective pain management tool

Day 34 of the program reintroduces this idea: "In most cases, at least the purpose of the pain is to preoccupy or distract you from painful unconscious emotions, then anything that leads to preoccupation will serve as a reinforcer." The implications of this concept have bothered me since the beginning of the TMS program--that we should not pay attention to the physical pain and reinforce this unhealthy cycle. It all felt a little "Don't think of a pink elephant" to me. It turns out my learning curve has a rather modest slope, but on the afternoon proceeding the Day 34 reading, I finally understood. After a stressful work meeting my already painful shoulder and elbow started throbbing so strongly that I eventually could not think of anything else and left work to walk at the state park for 20 minutes. Every time it throbbed on the walk (i.e. every damn heartbeat/second/breath...), I thought, ouch. wait, don't pay attention to it. ouch. dammit! don't pay attention to it. ouch. operant conditioning: U R DOING IT WRONG. beep boop beep boop FAIL. Finally my learning curve slope inched above zero when I realized that every time I felt physical pain I should avoid positive reinforcement, not through avoiding thinking about the pain, but instead by refocusing on the emotional pain--i.e. turn inward to the fear/shame/anger or as I like to call it, "Fshango Unchained." These parasites are always reliably present in the stomach, heart, throat area. For the rest of the walk I did that, sometimes coughing aloud from the overwhelming squeezing pressure on my trachea from the fear/anxiety. And no, the emotional pain did not fade away, as the annoying guided mindful meditation voices tell us may happen, but, BUT, the physical pain did. Another day that week I woke up with a Normal Person headache (i.e. not the kind requiring the precious, stingily-insured, and $25/pill out-of-pocket generic Imitrexes), and tried the same technique. Usually I would just pop an Excedrin right away, but instead I decided to walk the dog first and to focus on the uncomfortable and decidedly unfading emotional pain. When I arrived at work two hours later I realized I never took an Excedrin! I thought I should pay this epiphany forward to anyone else confused by the basics of TMS, so here it is: my free version of TMS for dummies. (P.S. Both of the pain examples above were fairly minor--distracting throbbing rather than all-consuming pain. As a result I cannot anecdotally share this as a success story in those cases, but hopefully this strategy can help prevent escalation to that state...)

 

This is Awesome swandive and it is a success story, all success is success. You did well with your understanding and to write about it -- explaining in detail as you have has been most beneficial , with your permission I would love to put this in the success stories. That's what it is. Congratulations my friend.

 

Absolutely!! If this can help anyone else I would be ecstatic. As always, thanks for the support Herbie!

 

BRILLIANT label!! I am totally going to use this swandive. Fshango Unchained. Absolutely love love love this!! And will totally use it. Thanks for posting about it. I get caught up in the same quagmire as you described but having these two words as a trigger to go psychological will be very helpful for me!

 

Wonderful! I hope it works well. I did get a migraine this week and I tried the technique and it didn't work--so I think it may be a strategy of differentiating tension-triggered from structurally-triggered pain. Although the fact that I was attending to my emotions probably helped to prevent the fear of the pain from heightening the migraine to a much less manageable level. Good luck!