Day 1 Hopeful

Welcome to the forum and the SEP, @hopeful1782. With a so-called diagnosis of fibromyalgia, you're in the right place!

Perhaps it would help to take apart this word fibromyalgia, and realize that it's a combination of two Latin based terms that just mean pain in the fibrous muscles. As a diagnosis, this is meaningless, because it simply describes the symptoms.

Doctors came up with this term because it sounds like they've given you a diagnosis, but a real diagnosis comes with treatment, and as you know, fibromyalgia does not come with treatment, because the cause of your pain is unknown as far as the traditional medical community is concerned. That's because it is a mind body condition - a construct of what we call the TMS brain mechanism.

This primitive mechanism was designed to give us pain or other symptoms as a distraction against emotional distress. It's a survival mechanism designed to keep us fearful and alert instead of emotional, so that we don't get eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger. That's all it is!

Hang in there with the SEP, and understand that thanks to the Symptom Imperative, you might get worse or new symptoms as you do the work. This will be great news because it means that your TMS brain mechanism is trying to fight back and keep you in fear instead of allowing you to recover and get your life back. All you have to do is to have faith that you can fight back and you can do this!

~Jan