Day 8 My Experience Thus Far

Hey everyone! Back for day 8. The program asked me to relay my experience with the program after the first week.

I am still having a big of trouble accepting the TMS diagnosis. I think it is my scientific background, but I still can't say I've 100% accepted yet. I have had some pain free days and some painful days. I can notice a direct correlation between weightlifting and my pain, which definitely messes with my ability to accept the diagnosis. I KNOW that it is simply learned neural pathways causing my pain, and that my brain associates weights with back pain, but it is difficult when you can see a correlation like that.

A few days ago, my back was bothering me a little. I have developed these little "tests" over the years to see how bad my pain is (you can see how crazy I am). I bent over a few times - no pain. However, if i put my hands on the back of my head and did the same, I had quite a bit of pain. It must be the increased loading on my back that is causing the pain right? Well, the weight my low back would be supporting is essentially the weight of my entire torso. Adding two hands to that, which are quite light in comparison, surely couldn't make that big of a difference. The pain must be learned...Before reading about TMS and neural pathways, I never would've made this connection - it is these connections that are keeping me going.

Overall, I am still very optimistic. I have actually noticed a general increase in happiness and a decrease in pain since starting, which is great for being 8 days into the program. Excited for what is to come.

 

Best of luck in your recovery. I can relate to what you have said because I always correlated exercise to my pain (although mainly cardio and not weight lifting). Exercise is one of my great passions in life and I believe that is why I would feel pain while being active, my mind knew I would obsess over recovery and not deal with my real issues.

I do the same stuff you do as well, test myself and see when I can feel pain and it never made any sense why feel pain in one position and not another. I discovered this through PT, the physical therapist would try and duplicate the pain my manipulating my joints but never could, however I could show him a position that made the pain come on and he would be baffled.

Meditation in the morning has really helped me, I love the short guided meditations from The Good Guys on youtube.

Thanks for sharing your story, it's nice to have a community of people to share these experiences with

 

Glad to know someone out there has the same micro obsession with checking their pain as me.

I actually have been to many PTs, and oddly enough my pain would always be none/minimal the day I went to get evaluated. I never connected that before analyzing my TMS...my brain was simply not producing pain those days for some reason related to the PT evaluation.