How To Heal From TMS?

Hi there,

I'm a 26 year old female and I've had chronic pain issues for the last seven years, starting in my knees and at this point, over the years, I’ve had pain in at least 12 different parts of my body that I can easily remember. The biggest issue at the moment is my wrist pain which has been extremely debilitating over the last few years, at one point I had to eat microwave meals as I couldn't even prepare food from scratch anymore as it was too painful.

In terms of ruling out anything serious, I don't know if I had all the right tests done, but I have had X-Rays, CT scans, Ultrasounds and basic blood tests and so far nothing has come up, later I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

About a year ago I started learning about mind-body pain and started to believe that my pain was at least partially if not entirely psychological, and I started to get ALOT better. However I carried on doing my physiotherapy for my hands, legs and back as I was overly cautious and didn't know if it really was 100% psychological. I think this may have been a mistake as it meant I was never able to see what was actually healing me, was it the mind-body work, or was it the physiotherapy, it's hard to say.

Over the last year my pain improved and improved until I barely had any issues at all, but just last week I had a flare up, a bad one. I think I got it from playing too many video games, but now, once again, my hands are hurting even just from doing everyday tasks like cooking and cleaning. It's extremely frightening , I can’t live like this, worrying that every time I overuse my hands a bit I could have a major flareup and be unable to function at all. So I'm feeling like something really has to change.

I'm thinking of giving up my physiotherapy and really trying to go full on with this mind-body stuff. I wonder if maybe what I did wrong before was not committing enough, as my brain was still half convinced there was a physical issue, and that my body is fragile and has the possibility to flare up again.

I’ve gone back and finished reading The Mind-Body Prescription and have re-watched a few recovery stories... but I still feel like I'm a little confused at to what to do, could anybody help me to understand what the steps are to healing? Am I supposed to go straight back to regular activities or am I supposed to wait until the pain stops? For me the pain is only there while doing activities so what would this mean for me? How am I supposed to address unconscious anger if it’s unconscious?? And do I really need to stop doing my physiotherapy or did I misunderstand this?

Any guidance at all would be greatly appreciated, thank you

 

Hello and welcome!
There are two things that will help you. The free SEP structured educational program at TMSWiki.org (scroll down page) will take you through the interpersonal work to learn the best skills for you to heal from and deal with TMS.
You may also want to read Alan Gordon’s “Way Out” these two tools should give you all you’ll need to know along with the work Sarno lays out in his books.