Day 1 hoping for improvement this time

Heinrich, welcome to our community - and I hope you can find answers to your questions here!

The only thing you really have to understand, and then truly accept, is that your brain is in charge of every single physiological process in your body.

It's really that simple - your brain is completely in charge of your symptoms. This is mostly easily seen in things like blushing and stage fright, which cause real physical symptoms - symptoms that are absolutely not connected to anything other than your state of mind. Your brain did that all by itself.

The neuroscientists are telling us that our brains develop patterns of behavior, and those patterns can become hard-wired - but they don't have to be permanent. They can be changed, but that's the part that is NOT simple - it can be very hard work - harder for some people than for others, and harder for some patterns than for others.

This is probably what's going on with you. And while we know that it is possible for long-term stress to create actual physical changes, it's unlikely that you've done anything at this point that can't be reversed.

Special diets often work for someone who has TMS, for the following reason: they provide a tool on which to focus your mind, so that you can visualize digesting properly and feeling good. But without addressing the underlying emotional repression, the symptom will eventually return, or it will be replaced by some other symptom.

It's possible to accomplish the recovery without a special diet - I know, because I did it myself, right after reading my first book by Dr. Sarno. I'd been going through all of that digestive stuff - convinced that I was developing food sensitivities, and horrified as I watched the list get longer and longer - wondering when it was going to include the foods I didn't want to live without. When I discovered TMS theory, I simply told myself I didn't have any food sensitivities, and that was it. I've never looked back.

Mind you, I was into "real" food long before the brilliant Michael Pollan wrote his book - but it's easy these days to avoid eating fake processed food, and still eat whatever you want - and that includes pizza and all those other foods you used to enjoy - as long as they are made with quality ingredients, and eaten in moderation. If you don't know Michael Pollan, his advice is simple: "Eat real food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables".

Remember how I mentioned above that changing your old ingrained brain patterns covers a wide range of easiness or difficulty, depending on the person and on the pattern? For me, the food thing was easy to change. I've also had very good luck getting ridding of my pain symptoms, with only minor and short flare-ups. But the symptom I can't seem to kick, the one that comes back instantly in times of stress, is dizziness. That's the one pattern that I can't seem to get past. But I've banished it in the past, I've been checked out and given a clean bill of health, and I know I will banish it again. I've only recently been learning about all of this brain pattern/neurological stuff, and it's pretty fascinating, so these days I'm really working on changing my brain.

I hope this helps! Keep working on the SEP, reading and participating in the discussions here, and be sure to read lots of success stories. The place to do that is the Thank You Dr. Sarno project (just google it).

Jan

 

Aaron put it better than I did!