Introducing myself and asking for help

Hello!

I am very grateful to have found this work and am finally also starting to really do it.
I have two main stumbling-blocks at the moment, which seem to be the ones many people have:

1. Despite overwhelming evidence, my repression still shows up as hopping around for physical explanations / solutions. It would be very helpful to me, if an expert could read my story and tell me that my case of TMS might be one of the most obvious ones. I know that in my rational mind but still get hijacked back into structural ideas.

2. Another way my repression shows up is as HUGE preoccupation. Monitoring, thinking, reading, talking about my symptoms a lot. All the time. I am working with a great psychotherapist who mainly does psychodynamic and Erikson-stlye hypnotheraphy with me. I rationally understand how actively obsessing (i.e. googling) stuff around my symptoms is hurting me. Still seem to be unable to stop it. To clarify, I don't google in fear of having something serious. Rather I google massage-trigger-points to press, random stuff about somatoform pain disorders, jaw-exercises and, and and.
How to stop this addiction? Any advice will be appreciated.

My story:

I live in Germany and worked as a high-school-teacher. I had a good life in the recent years, hiking a lot, enjoying my job, friends, reading, meditating. Very privileged and actually very content. I had a psychological crisis with gastro-intestinal somatization and big-time insomnia around 10 years ago, but it seemed that had found good, stable and balanced ground in the years after.
Last fall I finally was able to commit to a 3-month-meditation-intensive at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, which I wanted to do for a long time.
I had the most beautiful time there and among other things fell in love with an American woman, who lived there. (BIG, idealized love-story, we wanted to marry...) So decided to wrap up my life in Germany and move to the US and live the Zen-monastic-life together with her for some time.
Just in the process of doing that, while my new partner was visiting me for some weeks, I learned in January of 2023 that my father, with whom I was very close (I am a single child) had stomach-cancer.
My psyche really went downhill from then. I felt so ripped apart between love and soldiarity for my dad and staying with him and my mum in this time and also wanting to get back to my new love and my Californian dreams as soon as possible. Definetly some narcissim in there as well, since what I had experienced in California was just so fulfilling and, well, validating.
I decided to stay in Germany until my dad would have surgery after his chemo, which would be much longer than I had planned, but still seemed doable. While having my relationship with my new partner via skype, it became cleaerer to me that she was actually more ambigous about our relationship then I had thought. I repressed that. I also repressed fear about my dad's condition by obsessing about different things in my body and heavy onsets of insomnia. (I just had had covid, so there was some room for that)
OK, to wrap things up a bit: While all the doctors told us that since my dad didn't have any metastases, he would be fine, he unexpectedly went to the ER one week after his surgery and was put into a coma. Something had gone horribly wrong. To see him in the ER - with full intubation - was really, really hard. In the weeks leading up to his stomach-removal I had developed heavy reflux-symptoms that abosuletly didn't respond to any medication or treatment.
My dad never got out of the ER alive. After two weeks there, with many, many, many events and ups and downs which I am omitting to not make this crazy long, he died in the beginning of June, while me, my mum and my new partner where there.
Two weeks later I flew to California, which seemed like a flight but also the only move possible, since my reflux just didn't leave me and I was so sure it would, once I was back in the monastery.
It actually stopped there but was immediately replaced by ongoing pain, that kept on wandering around on the left side of my face, jaw, throat, neck and chest.
It completely freaked me out and I went deep into repression, only talking and thinking about this all the time and aksing my partner 50 times a day whether she believed it would go away again. The pain was mainly hard because it never stopped and also because it had these huge flare-ups in my upper left chest, that felt really crippling.
Over my regression and my partners growing obsession with her ex-partner my new relationship (which I had thought was the love of my life) collapsed and after a horrbile month alone in another monastery (where I really started to go wild on googling symptoms in all my free time, assuming that I had 'silent reflux' and did a ton of weird thing to alleviate that condition), I flew back to Germany in the beginning of September and moved back in with my mum, as a complete shipwreck.
I started psychotherapy and visited a ton of doctors to have my condition checked out. (I was quite sure it was TMS / mindbody, but a pain-therapist told me I needed to do some more check-ups...)
MRIs of my face and upper spine came back normal, a test for lyme (...) came back negative and even two dentists, who told me that I probably have bruxism and made me nightguards said that they believe strongly that the most important treatment for my pain is psychotherapy. Also, an MD and accupuncturist who specializes in pain and psychosomatic issues told me he is a hundred percent sure that while I have issues with my posture, they are not the cause of my supertight muscles. (Which I am not sure whether these tight muscles are the cause of my pain...)
Anyhow, I spend a crazy amount of money and time on osteopathy, myoreflex-therapy, massage, accupuncture and trying to work with my posture. Didn't help. Also, no pain-medication has any effect, not even an opioid called Tramadol.
I am only working very little right now and am really scared of going back to teaching fully, because the pain is just so all consuming, first thing I feel in the morning, last thing I feel in the evening, constantly moving around, with a tendency to get stuck at my jaw, ever since the dentists told me about 'my TMJ-issues...' It is not very strong pain but it is ALL CONSUMING.
I did journalling and have been using the Curable-app rather incosistently without seeing any results.
Yesterday, after having a silly and expensive facial apparatus to relax my jaw-muscles delivered to my home, I finally made the decision to REALLY do this and stop all my futile attempts at solving this stuff physically. It's just stupid and it's stealing my life from me. And I don't want to live like this anymore. I want to be able to listen to my friends again about their problems, I wanna not be living with my mum anymore, I want to feel the grief and anger and sadness and fear that has piled up in my system. I wanna work again with kids. So I am commited to accompanying my psychotherapy with actual and consistent mindbody-work.

And I need help. Any useful, CBT-like advice on how to stop my googling obsession will be much appreciated.
And, please, even though it should be clear as light to me: Tell me that I have TMS.

 

Hi @DavidStrindberg
First off, welcome, and second off, I did not read your story.
There is no need to read your story - because it does not matter. YOU matter, but your story is just a story.
Now I will say that telling you that you have tms will do no good. You will need to learn to accept what tms is and how the REAL true science of pain is created in the body, and take time to digest that.
TMS work actually works when we believe with our hearts that this is the true cause of our pain, and that the pain is INTERNAL emotional pain which we have not recognized (stress, anxiety) and that the physical pain is purely just a manifestation of our body crying for us to finally realize what is happening.
Just stop googling.
Just stop it. That's how it ends.
The most interesting thing I heard about how to begin training your brain into these new approaches came from a youtube interview. A neuro scientist was asked many of these questions, and his answer was - why would you let an organ in your body take control and boss you around. Do you let your liver tell you what to do and think? Do you let your kidney tell you what to do and think? Your brain is an ORGAN, it is not you, it is just a functioning organ yet we've been lead to believe that our brain is "us" and we believe it.
When you break it down like that, it surely makes some sense, and it was re-assuring to me.
You need to learn to stop being a victim to your brain, and your thoughts (thoughts are not you, and not all thoughts are true). The science of TMS is described as creating new neural circuts to circumvent those which do not serve us. It's not just pain they are talking about but also psychology, thoughts, who we were lead to believe we are (which is not who our subconcious thinks we are). There are layers, and you just work through them. It can take time.
So just stop googling. You can talk to yourself "googling makes me feel really unsafe, and it's just my brain's attempt to "fix" when now I truly know I am not broken, and don't need to "fix" my body, I just need to get in touch with how my inner self works". THINK PSYCHOLOGICAL.
Dr. Hanscom talks a lot about the difficulties you have (free reading on his blog) - including the intrusive repetative thoughts. You just need to retrain this, and you include getting back into the things you love about life and your interests. It's not easy to start with, but these things will help distract you in a GOOD way, where as the googling and obsession with the physical distracts you in a way to keep you from your inner self.
Start spending time with your inner self. It might start with only seconds or minutes. Meditate, go for a walk (without headphones), or just sit and breathe. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable and learn to accept yourself as is - in a good or bad mood, in a happy or sad or angry state, with pain or with comfort.
If you have not yet read a book by Dr. Sarno, or educated yourself about TMS, begin doing so instead of googling about the physical. There are two free programs at tmswiki.org (scroll down page) and the structured educational program will help you learn the skills which can assist you in your journey through understanding your tms. It is a beginning, and do it slowly just a 1/2 hour a day. It may take time to learn to get through all the distractions and obsessions - congratulate yourself when you find small successes and don't stress the challenges..you are LEARNING and learning is both success and struggle.
Good luck!