Pelvic Pain - Healed

Hello everyone,
I suffered from chronic pelvic pain since 2002. I fell on a wet marble floor and had pain since.

Following is a short summary of my journey:

-Wise-Anderson protocol
-100 sessions of pelvic floor physical therapy, Botox injections, 6 nerve blocks
-MRN Neurography "confirming" PNE (Pudendal Nerve Entrapment)
-Received a PNE diagnosis by 5 different physicians
-2 PNE decompression surgeries
-I had to quit work

I suffered for 11 years and hit rock bottom after my 2 consecutive pudendal nerve decompression surgeries, being practically bed ridden for several months. Why did I have PNE surgery? I had been completely unsuccessful with the Sarno method. I saw Dr. Schechter and I had many sessions with Don Dubin. I was simply grasping at straws at that point. I was resigned to muddling through life managing my days around pain and surgery was my last chance I thought.

I was also a moderator on pudendalhope, a forum dedicated to pudendal pain but with a somehow strong surgery slant. Needless to say, I am not a moderator on that board anymore.

My recovery started with an odd incident. In 2012, I met some old friends that I had not seen for 30 years. It was incredibly emotional and I had the surprise of experiencing my pelvic pain simply vanish for a couple of hours after years of continuous pain.

Why would emotions make the pain go away?

I got the key from Monte Hueftle.
http://www.runningpain.com/important_tms_updates

Everything I needed was on that page.

My methodology is a bit different from Monte's but below is the only thing I did to get better. I never met Monte and I did it all by myself.
You truly need to do the work consistently and not wait for somebody to heal you. You also need to stop looking outside yourself for answers. I think it is key:

1a. I kept asking all day long what emotion I was feeling.
1b. In addition, I set aside a few minutes a day to go over old trauma/emotions.

2. Once I noticed an emotion (old or new), I asked myself what negative emotion I was feeling: ex. disrespected, ignored, lonely, depressed, frustrated, anxious, fidgety, powerless etc.

3. I felt the emotion. I DID NOT THINK ABOUT IT. I simply felt it. I was feeling the negative emotion and how it was affecting me. I always experienced a strong body reaction. A shiver, a cold sensation etc.

4. I resisted the urge to avoid the feeling. Your brain will do its best to make that experience stop. It is not a comfortable experience.

5. Done. Go back to 1.

That is all I did to get better. I did not read and re-read Sarno or watch videos.

I noticed that people are confusing the thoughts around an emotion and the emotion itself. An emotion has a strong physical component.

So let me just list a few quotes that also helped me in my journey:

Mindbody syndromes are caused by repressed emotions.
Dr. John Sarno (healing back pain)

Learning how to process emotions (past and present) in a healthy way is the crux of effective Mind Body Healing.
Things like yoga, relaxation, and meditation can help, but they will usually not be effective long term on their own – unless they are combined with skills that help you to feel and process your emotions.
Lorraine Faenhdrich, pelvic pain - mind-body coach

EMOTION: THE BODY'S REACTION TO YOUR MIND
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind — or you might say a reflection of your mind in the body.
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.
IF YOU HAVE DIFFICULTY FEELING YOUR EMOTIONS, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.
To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought,
which I described earlier. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by
it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence.
If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness.
MAKE IT A HABIT TO ASK YOURSELF: What's going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.
September, 2001 Eckhart Tolle (Practicing the Power of Now)

Remember that our thought and behavior patterns are doing two things. 1. Generating inner tension and 2. Repressing or helping us deny/avoid our emotions. Sometimes we simply need to change or redirect out of our tension generating patterns/repressing activity via the practice of Think Clean and sometimes we need to experience or be with our feelings with no thinking involved first and then redirect into the present moment or into more open, flexible or balanced patterns.
Monte Hueftle

 

Thank you for sharing- I have printed this off to digest.

 

this is especially great given the duration and the fact you eschewed TMS in favour of surgery only to come back to TMS. well done and it will be of great assistance to those struggling. surely if you were a moderator at that forum for a longtime someone would believe your story?

 

Hi IrishSceptic,
I did come forward on that forum. It was very frustrating to be honest. I got the following type of comments:

- You are lying.
- Maybe it is all in your head but in my case the pain is "real". I really feel it. In addition I was diagnosed by "expert" Dr. XYZ so how can it possibly be psychosomatic?
- Surgery cured you but for some obscure reason you are ungrateful to the surgeons that helped you.
- You experienced a delayed cure from surgery (sure, 4 years later...).
- Surgery cured you but you were left with a touch of allodynia/central sensitization and that improved with your mindbody practice.

Some people contacted me by Private Messaging but most of them thought that TMS/mindbody practice is a way of coping or lowering their "real" pain. They quickly dismissed it when I mentioned psychosomatic pain or somatization. It of course could not possibly be applicable to them.
Yet, all of them had their pain start after a traumatic event but that was simply a coincidence I was told.

 

Hi Ezer, I have a question how did you get yourself to REALLY FEEL the emotion? I find that my feelings just wont go there and feel no matter what I tell it to do. How did you get your body to actually feel it, was it through talking to yourself, imagining it? I really resonate with how you healed and this is what I have started doing on my own but cant seem to FEEL them and not just think about the emotions.

 

Hi ezer,

Thank you so much for sharing your story. I'm happy that you have healed. What a journey you had !
I completely agree with you that somatic experiencing is the way out of tms. There's just something about just letting those emotions be in the body, without judgement or analysis, that leads to amazing release. When I do it, it feels like I am truly accepting myself exactly as I am. And after years of self-criticism, this certainly is a welcome change.

All the best to you!

 

Thank you so much. I have been struggling in the last couple of days looking inside and finding anything wrong (although my body tells me so)so thank you very much for this advice.

 

Hey there, I just wanted to "bump" this thread because it's giving me a lot of hope.

As someone who is admittedly avoids and suppresses feelings, the idea of "feeling" feelings feels like you're asking me to speak fluent Portuguese with no prior knowledge of the language.

I feel this does a good job out of outlining it.
I hope it can offer some relief.

Happy holidays!

 

I have Levator Ani Syndrome. Spam of the rectal muscles. How can Dr. Sarno's method help Me? Any information will be appreciated.

 

Hi missy,

The best way to describe feeling emotions (physically) is when you experience fear of heights.
Imagine yourself next to a vertical cliff and looking down. It is windy. If you step forward you fall to your death.

Close your eyes and imagine the scene. Do you feel a queezy feeling? A knot in your throat? A sensation in your stomach? Just feel it. That's feeling your emotions. In that case, the emotion is fear.

You need to feel the emotion in the body and disengage from the story of the emotion.

If we remain engaged with the story of the emotion, these thoughts tend to reinforce negativity and trauma. Rather than paying attention to it, we are consumed by it.

For example, if we are fearful, we usually focus on the story of what scared us.

We need to turn the attention away from the situation, and instead pay attention to what fear feels like. Instead of
focusing outward, we turn our attention inward.

Being mindful of our emotions allows them to unfold, process, and resolve themselves in their natural way.

 

Ok, makes sense thanks so much

 

Bump following great stuff thanks

 

Hi Ezer,

Thanks so much for sharing your story.

After being unsuccessful with TMS/emotional work the first time around, how did you keep up your commitment to it the second time around, if it took you over a year to see serious results? Did you just feel you were on the right track?

Also, some of the other pelvic pain success stories (and the pelvic pain mindbody coaches) talk about doing pelvic floor relaxation exercises. Did you do anything like this during the period you healed?

Sara

 

Hi Sara,

I had a strange incident in 2012 when my pain vanished for a few hours. That was a revelation. I then pursued a mindbody cure steadfastly. It wasn't quick as you pointed out but I realized that there is just no alternative.

12 years ago I went to a clinic/retreat (called Stanford Protocol then but goes by Wise-Anderson protocol) teaching meditation techniques to relax the pelvic floor. It did not work then. The pain relief was very short lived. I did none of it this time. IMO as long as you don't deal with your emotions, the pain inevitably comes back.

 

if you stammer or know anyone stammer, please do forward this link. i stammered for 16 years, and suffered from tms 1.5 years. i can feel the exact coherence between the both the issues. i have come to realize that when we disrupt our nature and run away from who we are, we create multiple unnatural states leading problems,pain,suffering. be it stammer or tms or anything else..

actually, when i realized tms and learned about it, it subsequently decrease tms and my stammer.

but if any stammer is reading this, hope what m going to point out may help..

stammers are numb to feeling. the moment feeling arise, they rationalize and throw it away in mental labeling. for example, i am sad, i think it is useless and ignore myself. when we run from who we are (thoughts and feeling), we will have pure physical expression of that emotion = stammer/blocking in words. every blocking/stammering moment expresses what you are trying to hide or ignore from your being.

this makes stammer aware of what they are hiding...it breaks the continuous self fueling way of living that creates stammer as outcome...

yeah emotion is reflection physical, throat and bla bla all those parts clutch and form stammer...but then stammers again run form this physical expression also..there are running round and round in hell they are making themselves..

everything else you have written heals stammer also.
thank you @ezer.

 

Hi sf,

I completely agree. It includes globus hystericus, stuttering etc. They all share a common etiology that probably stems from some form of childhood trauma.
Dr. Robert Scaer eloquently explains the mechanism (he has studied the whiplash syndrome) and suffered himself from chronic pain.
You can find him on youtube,

 

Hi @ezer

Thanks for telling your amazing story.

I'm curious, do you think PN is always a mindbody syndrome/emtionally induced or just in some cases? (Excluding major surgical mishaps etc. where a nerve is damaged. I guess I mean for the average case where nothing significant happened to start symptoms, do you think it is aways mindbody or only sometimes).

I have pelvic pain and my diagnoses range from PN to Endometriosis to Pelvic Floor Hypertension depending on the doctor. I prefer to think it's TMS.

 

I think PN is almost 100% mindbody and "successful" PNE surgeries are in the placebo realm (equivalent success rate to sham surgeries). I also think that with the negative publicity/lawsuits around hernia or prolapse repair using mesh, TMS finds a new location to manifest itself.

I know several people that claimed to have had a successful PN surgery to "correct" a prior "botched" surgery. In every case, they relapsed after a stressful period.

Also if you analyze carefully what some post PN-surgery patients write, you will discover that while they claim that their PN surgery was a success, they now suffer of FAI/piriformis syndrome/SIJD etc. Can you say symptoms imperative?

 

I think this is very important. I've been suffering from right-sided groin, scrotal and leg pain for about 8 months. I've known about TMS for about half that time, but I've always had doubt, partially from just being a skeptical person but also due to the fact I've had my symptoms for a relatively short time when it comes to TMS, so a physical cause still seemed to be a possibility.

Shortly after I began to try and engage with the TMS approach I was recommended surgery for a varicocele (a vein abnormality in the scrotum), which could, I was told, be the cause of the scrotal and groin pain (although there's no way it could explain the leg pain). Even though I knew this couldn't be the cause of the leg pain I was so desperate that I agreed to go ahead with the surgery, and a date was scheduled. I live in the UK and to have the surgery on the NHS I would have had to wait a whole year or more, so I was going to get it privately, which would have cost about £3000. I kept telling myself that perhaps the leg pain and scrotal/groin pain are unrelated in order to justify this decision, or perhaps that the scrotal and groin pain was physical but the leg pain was TMS.

Just before my surgery I went to have a pre operation assessment and a scan. They decided they weren't going to go ahead with the operation. The 'varicocele' was deemed by the surgeon to be too small to warrant the operation, and in his view was unlikely to be the cause of the pain. I felt depressed and disappointed. I thought I had found the answer to my pain, and had begun to feel hopeful, only to be told at the last minute that it was not - even though deep down I knew this all along.

The whole episode, as well as being more confirmation my pain was TMS and not physical, made me realise how despite believing in the credibility of TMS - in the sense that I believe fully the premise that suppressed emotions and psychological factors could cause real pain, I still wasn't applying the theory to myself, or in a state of mind where I could begin the necessary work to overcome it, and I still don't think I am.

I'm convinced the main reason for this is that I haven't fully accepted that its up to me to heal myself. Even since I've known about TMS, and believe that there is no physical cause for my pain, I've still been looking outside myself for help, and this includes information on TMS. I keep wanting to gain some magic piece of information that will rapidly make me better, but its not the information itself that is the cure (at least not for me) its what you do with that information. Unless I can apply it to myself, its useless. This is why I can't fully commit myself to do the necessary work to get better. Not because I don't 'believe' in TMS, but because I don't believe in myself or am too daunted by the challenge of facing my pain 'alone', when this is absolutely necessary. I find it equally daunting and encouraging that I am both the cause and cure of my pain.

Dealing with pain from TMS, with a complex emotional cause, is not like taking your car to the garage - you can't rely on someone else to fix it for you. I'm only just beginning to truly accept this, and once I have I think I will be able to make real progress.

 

Ben,

I know plenty of people that had surgery for varicoceles or pelvic congestion. As far as I know, not a single patient improved from the procedure. There is a pelvic pain specialist in Austria that seems to diagnose everybody with pelvic congestion. Some more conservative doctors feel that veins are not hard enough to put any kind of pressure on nerves and claim that the enlarged veins are simply due to the fact that we have pelvic floor dysfunction -a consequence of pain, not the cause.