TMS and sources of rage

Dear forum, I have posted a few times before and want to write down my TMS and sources of rage and ask some questions.

I am a 41 years old immigrant woman. I learned about Dr. Sarno from a friend, whose colleague read his books and cured their back pain. My friend sent the links to me because my husband suffered from backpain for a couple of years and none of the specialists or alternative medicines worked. My husband read the books and cured his backpain, which was described in his post.

My understanding of TMS is that basically all physical and mental ailments are psychosomatic in origin, they may or may not be reversed by acknowledgmgement of unconscious rage alone. Backpain is more obvious , but autoimmune or cancer maybe more subtle, maybe the emotions are buried deeper.

My TMS symptoms: reactive depression, anxiety, acne, gastrointestinal symptoms, hormone fluctuation, addiction to internet, insomnia.

My background: conditioned to grow up to meet societal and parental expectations: advanced degrees, STEM jobs, spouse with similar background, kids and raise them to be high achievers, so on and on.

I don't really know what I want to do. I do all this to be accepted, look good externally, I don't particularly hate or love what I do for a living. I like to hang out with friends and chat and share whatever with friends. Back in my home country, i felt being the top student made my social life so easy and it motivated me to study hard.

I don't like to feel lonely. That is my desire to start a family, to have close company in a foreign country. That desire partially fulfilled parental and social expectations, but also became the strain of my marriage because my husband never really wanted kids.

Also my parents lived with us for several years to help take care of my son. Without covid, things may have gone along for a little longer. When covid kicked in and my husband lost his career, my parents panicked and passed harsh judgements against him and tried to coerce him to do more (i played a part too). Eventually they left our house and would not return. Any mention of them would trigger TMS for my husband. That also brought potential TMS for our son, since he had nice attachment to grandparents but had to suppres it for his father.

A couple of years ago, I had an ovarian cyst removed. Thinking back, that was a time when I tucked my emotions away to function antotried to meet everybody's needs.

I try to find the sources of my rage and dig out emotions as best as I could:
1. Regret of moving to the US: grinding capitalism, empire in decline, mass shootings, freeway driving, and profound loneliness.
2. Marriage: emotionally drained husband who stays for the loving memory. The unmet emotional support. Feels lonely. Fear of being abandoned.
3. Trapped in responsibility: work, raising our son most of the time, chores.
4. Our son's emotional needs when I'm tired since his adult attachment dropped from 4 to 1.5.
5. Fear of nobody taking care of my son if anything happens to me. This was especially true when I was called for jury duty and my husband was out of town. I wasn't afraid of the court in particular until the moment they would throw me to jail, but I was trapped in the imagination that if I had accident on the freeway, what could happen to our son.
6. My husband's intolerance of child's misbehavior and his rage against the child.
7. My husband's and my family for our conditioning.
8. The stories of Dr. Sarno and Steve O left their first wives. I am sure they had their reasons, it just triggered the anxiety of being unwanted and unaccepted.

It sounds very messy. My questions are: 1. With subtle symptoms, how could one dig deeper of emotions? Or that may require psychotherapy?
2. I try to provide unconditional love to our son, would that reduce the chance of him having to repress or suppress emotions? Would anybody feel that unconditional love and acceptance is part of TMS healing? What if there isn't any for adults?

Thank you.

 

It sounds like part of your true anger is that your life is not the perfect dream you hoped it might be.
Hopes for moving to a new country (I get this, I too am an immigrant and culture shock fueled my symptoms), being the perfect partner and wanting to control things you honestly have no control over eg. Being in a car accident, if your son will get TMS.
This is desire to have everything perfect and controlling what is out of your control (and creates rage) maxes you very hard on yourself. Nobody can control these uncertain things in their life.
Parents are not the “cause” of TMS in children so drop that idea. It is how the person learns to deal, internally with the emotions of life - simply accepting your son as he is and modeling for him that feeling (not acting out, but feeling) emotions is ok is a great way to help him not need to repress. This can be done in real life, through books and looking at photos, watching movies, drawing, poetry, writing down his feelings. You just do your best. Not be so anxious to get it all right, just your best. As a teacher in the past, this was one of the most important things I taught my students.
Here is a podcast that addresses uncertainty and control with TMS in this post: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/control-and-uncertainty-could-this-be-your-tms-struggle.29012/ (Control and Uncertainty - could this be your TMS struggle?)

 

Hi, @louaci -
We have discussed here on the forum how much fear of abandonment plays a big role in causing TMS. (You could do a search on that.) I think the only real cure for this feeling is self love. The more we learn to love ourselves, the better off we will be.

 

Hi @louaci
I want to focus on just one part of your post that I quoted above.
That's a great list of potential sources of rage. Here's one way to dig deeper with emotions: How about taking one of them and journaling--the kind of writing where you write everything that comes up knowing that you're going to toss it. Get into the specifics. Make sure you keep going with the stuff that's not socially acceptable and makes you feel icky about yourself (if some of that comes up). Feel the feelings that come up.

By the way, thanks for that fabulous post. You're succeeding just with that. Because it's so easy to put the focus back on the symptoms and the physical with longer posts. But, you just mention symptoms briefly and spend considerable attention on what might be causing internal pressure and rage. That's part of what gets us better.