Day 1 Symptoms Bouncing Around

I am a 33 year old married man living with my wife and her brother in Los Angeles. I quit my job working in a warehouse in June of 2019 because I was unhappy and I was dealing with intense back pain. I was at the same time dealing with my mother having stage 4 cancer. She died a month after I quit that job, 2 days before my 32nd birthday. She was only 60. After she passed away I reevaluated my life and decided to go back to school to get my Bachelor's Degree in Illustration which I have been doing online for the past year.

I have dealt with multiple TMS related symptoms. I have had recurrent eczema since early childhood. Around the age of 18 I started to experience back spasms and occasional debilitating back pain. I also started to have severe panic attacks and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder which I have dealt with previously through medications, therapy and mediation and is pretty under control at this point.

About a month ago I happened to have a painful back spasm while lifting a weight up to begin exercising on the same day I had listened to a comedy podcast and heard about about Healing Back Pain from Taylor Goldsmith of the band Dawes saying that it healed the band's drummers back pain after he was entirely skeptical. I read the book immediately and while I was skeptical about some of it a lot of it made perfect sense to me.

The back pain I attributed to doing art projects for long hours slowly started to go away and I was happy that I was able to resume exercising without worrying about permanent damage because it is really important for my mental health to work out. After the back pain was completely gone for a while I had worked on my final project for art school for the year, the Sunday before Christmas, and had severe dry eyes. I attributed it to being strained from doing the work but it wouldn't go away for a week and it was driving me crazy.

I looked up to see if people had dealt with this issue associated with TMS and as soon as I saw that they had my eyes immediately felt better. This was replaced with itchy red eczema all over my face. That cleared up after about a week and as soon as my skin looked normal I had another back spasm. I didn't panic and reminded myself of the TMS symptoms, continued exercising and it went away in a day. Unfortunately the eczema is now back.

There are many emotional triggers that contribute to these symptoms. Christmas was a very emotional time because my mother loved the holidays and was very obsessive about them. While some may go back to normal Christmases after the pandemic, I won't ever have a family Christmas with my mom again. I also know starting art courses again this week is another anxiety trigger and that I feel worried that I am not going to do well in Art History because I am older than most of the students and haven't written an essay in over a decade. The pandemic is a huge trigger and I have the feeling of it's never going to end, and it's frightening to go out into the world for any basic errands.

Like my mother I am a middle child and she believed very much in the middle child syndrome that you feel ignored and and learn to repress your emotions in order to keep the peace. While I don't think this theory applies to everyone, being raised by somebody who believed in it definitely contributed to me having it. This was exacerbated as my parents divorced and remarried and I had many more siblings who all had various mental health issues and demanded a lot of attention.

I am feeling so frustrated at these symptoms bouncing around. The way one starts when another stops makes it even more evident to me that this is TMS but the itchiness and the affect on my appearance feels unbearable. Knowing that this is an emotional response and trying to access and express all of my emotions is not enough to make them all disappear. I am hoping using the Structured Educational program will help get rid of them all for good.