TMS Theories vs Practical Applications - Kitchen Sink Edition (retitled 6.19.24)

Ok. Perhaps it's my mistake then.
I thought this was a forum about TMS as in Tension Myositis Syndrome not about general approaches to psychosomatic symptoms.

Yes, I am being highly purist because I thought that is what we were all here for.
There are a thousand places for other discussions on the more general topic. I thought this was a specialized forum.

Either way, I wish you good luck in your journey whichever forum it might take.

 

Love this conversation because I’m torn between all three methods- Dan Buglio (calm down. Live your life); journaling and therapy. I also recognize that life circumstances can and do cause TMS. I think I’ve had TMS 3 times from bad bosses. It left when I left that job. In those cases, when the stress lifted, it was just a matter of time until I calmed down. Usually about 2 months. Part of me thinks there is something in my current life really bothering me that needs to be adjusted. Journaling every night is revealing a bunch of ideas. It will be fun in the end to see what all it took to heal. I know money issues have always caused me TMS and I’m working on that, too. But I do know this: my time spent on the wiki has catapulted my knowledge about TMS. And I believe without a shadow of a doubt I have TMS.

 

I never said this forum is here to discuss general approaches to psychosomatic symptoms (though frankly I don't see why not? Sarno devoted portions of his books to discussing past contributions to psychosomatic medicine, which he then built his framework upon), I am suggesting that TMS/PPD has, for many, become a broader and more subjective term and is not merely limited to the concept Sarno put forth in the 1970s. To demand as a prerequisite that everyone who wants to have a discussion about these concepts be strict adherents to the Sarno framework is unrealistic, in a thread titled Kitchen Sink no less.

 

Why not take a look at things differently.
Therapy might not be what you need to tackle physical symptoms, but it might be needed to tackle your mental health that gets you to the mindset of letting your brain know you are well, confident, can handle stressors, and deal with life.
Mindfulness is just a tool to calm the mind, and to separate ourselves from the daily stressors. To essentially shut off the chatter of that brain that tells us we are unwell, unworthy and can't deal.
Dan Buglio (and others) tell us how to heal from TMS.
I think you are wise to adopt a mindset of curiosity. Within that mindset, also consider that "bothering me" means "Something is wrong" and that it might just be another TMS ploy to keep you in a box of safety. If you recognize there is nothing wrong with you, and you simply go out into the world and do, think and be whatever you want - danger might befall you.
This is exactly why I adopted my circle method. Put the "thing" in the middle of the circle and walk around and look at it from every angle because perception can absolutely change the way with think and perceive things. However, none of the "something wrong with me" fixed the pain - it absolutely changed my suffering. I just decided one day that although I had messages (from my brain, and occasionally from others) that there is something wrong with me, that I like me just as I am. They can go *F it! The little book "Taming Your Gremlin" helped very much in this area.

 

Have you ever written a post on the circle method before? It sounds interesting, I'd like to learn more.

 

@Cactusflower, I was just going to ask that, too!

 

This is heavy duty! I love it and bookmarked it. A lot to think about. I especially like the entirely new (for me) point of view that maybe nothings wrong. And also, maybe therapy is just very useful for calming me down and creating a sense of safety.

 

As I see it, this forum is about what Sarno called TMS and TMS equivalents, but it is not solely about Sarno’s views on that subject, which are grounded in Freudian theory.

There is a header a the top of this page and many other pages on this tmswiki.org website that clearly indicates this forum is not intended to be solely about Sarno’s views. The header reads: "Alan has completed the new Pain Recovery Program. To read or share it, use this updated link: https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/painrecovery/ (Pain Recovery Program)” Alan’s Pain Recovery Program is grounded in modern pain science, not Freudian theory and not Sarno’s theory that the brain creates TMS pain as a distraction to keep repressed emotions repressed. Alan’s Day 2 lesson reduces to the formula: Pain = Danger. He explains that this means your brain will create pain when it concludes you are in danger, and that is the case whether the danger is to your physical well-being or your psychological well-being. Under Alan’s view, there is no need for, or room for, Sarno’s distraction theory to explain why the brain creates TMS pain.

 

Yeah see this is exactly the kind of scenario that always led me to question the unconscious rage-as-sole-source-of-symptoms theory. I also had a terrible boss once, that shit will infect you. Dread going to work, always on edge at the office, spending time off ruminating on it, thinking of all the ways your life can be upended if you get fired or rage quit, its like existential almost, all of this was in the middle of Covid so add mass health anxiety/hysteria to it. And that made me physically ill, I developed raynauds, alopecia on my beard, excema on my thighs, ultimately erupting in a debilitating neck pain flare. Thats when I found Mindbody Prescription, I knew instantly my boss had triggered this, I didn't need to dig any deeper than that - its a hell of a lot on its own. My beard slowly grew back, excema faded, neck pain faded, had 0 Raynauds flares the proceeding winter. I had about a year of no symptoms until another enormously stressful/terrifying/traumatic life event threw me back into the boat i'm in now. I think symptoms that don't neatly disappear when the stressor is removed or identified can just as easily be explained by the pain-fear-pain loop that Schubiner describes in his book, as they can by a repressed emotion or elusive childhood memory - but I'm also not saying that it can't be those things. I'm just saying I don't know and I refrain from drawing any definitive conclusion. I keep an open mind.

 

Sarno disciple Steve Ozanich has a discussion about that in his book The Great Pain Deception. He wrote in part: “All parents, including myself damage their children in some form. Most do not purposely do so, but it still occurs as a natural part of life. . . . I don’t advocate blaming parents. My parents were good people, they loved me and my brothers--they perserved, tried to do what was right with what they had and knew--and they did. As free-willed adults, the choice is up to the adult to learn and to heal any unintended harm handed down to them.”

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On hindsight, my mother handed down perfectionism to me. What I did was very often not good enough for her. I never doubted that my mother loved me, but there was something lacking. I did not have a name for it until many decades later when I read Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says No. That was attunement. He wrote: “For the satisfaction of attachment needs in human beings, more than physical proximity and touching is required. Equally essential is a nourishing emotional connection, in particular the quality of attunement. Attunement, a process in which the parent is 'tuned in' to the child’s emotional needs, is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive but easily subverted when the parent is stressed or distracted emotionally, financially or for any other reason. Attunement may also be absent if the parent never received it in his or her childhood.”

Strangely, I never (as far as I can recall) blamed my mother for not being a good a parent. At any rate, I never then or in my adulthood wanted in my imagination to crush my mother’s skull. At a pretty young age (I can’t be precise), I just excused her deficiencies as the product of a horrid childhood. I don’t know where a young child would have gotten that idea; it was probably planted by my dad. When I said horrid childhood, I was not kidding. My mother’s father was an alcoholic who had trouble keeping a job. Her mother was a psychotic who resided for as long as I was aware of her existence in a state-run facility that back this those days we called an insane asylum. It is a reasonable guess that my mother never received attunement in her childhood.

I wish I had known about attunement when my offspring were children. It is too late now. Fortunately, it is not too late to try to practice attunement as I care for my wife during her Alzheimer’s disease progression.

 

This is a touching story, Duggit. So sorry to hear about your wife. I share many of the same circumstances— the generational damage that is passed down. You are forgiving of your mother and hopefully your children are forgiving of you. And in the meantime—we heal ourselves.

 

Wow, Rand. You went through the mill. Looks like Covid sent all your troubles into overdrive like me. I think it did for a lot of people. As far as what in the world is to blame for our symptoms and can we root it out and magically fix. I was hoping so for awhile until I came onto the wiki. Now I believe it is most likely about 100 things. Big and small. Buried and obvious. . And if I keep working long enough the healing will start to take momentum.

 

Oh, yes, as adults we can see this. But when we're children we rely on them for survival, so their weaknesses and flaws scare the sh*# out of us.

 

This is quite beautiful and profound @Baseball65 . I love it when you get all spiritual on us.