What else is there - Seriously

Yes, absolutely! All TMS really is, is anxiety...somatized anxiety (anxiety expressed through the body). When we focus on the symptoms and pain (which is human since our brains are designed to alert us to danger), what we are really doing is warding off anxiety and the threatening/uncomfortable feelings underneath. Preoccupation with symptoms soothes unconscious anxiety. The question is, what is the driver of this anxiety?? Usually rage, sadness and guilt. Guilt about having rage towards loved ones who may have traumatized us in some way (whether it be criticism, pressure, high expectations, abuse or neglect, dysfunction, tension etc). TMS is merely a symptom that is calling out to you to feel those feeling...allow them to pass through and get discharged (without the judgment and with self compassion....compassion towards the part of you that is rage-ful). We get caught up in this loop and TMS takes on a life of its own...the loop of fear/anxiety - symptoms - fear/anxiety about symptoms and so it goes. How do we intercept the loop then? By losing the fear about the symptoms. Recognizing them for what they are ....messengers from the brain (false signals that want to wake us up to the truth of who we are). Caring more about our lives than getting rid of symptoms. Most of all, disabusing ourselves of the false belief that our body is somehow broken or damaged. Dismantling all those core beliefs we have about ourselves, that have now formed our prison of the mind. Beliefs such as "I'm fundamentally flawed", "My past went like this so therefore my future will be just as bad", "I can't get better or be happy", "I don't deserve to be happy" , "I deserve to be punished because I harbor these horrible feelings and impulses that are not aligned with my self image", "If I'm not perfect, I'm a failure" etc etc etc....

 

What a well thought out answer Miffybunny. You are such a wonderful asset to this site. Thank you! I’ve been going through this for a long time now, and I’m extremely drained and tired of it all. Pain and anxiety at the same time is overwhelming. Sorry to everyone for taking this thread in a different direction, as it’s not my thread.

 

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-locus-of-control-2795434 (Are You in Control of Your Destiny, or Are You at the Mercy of Chance?)

Been wanting to post something on this concept, maybe this is the thread for it. You can see TMS on both ends of the spectrum: either the person who gets symptoms when he/she can't control everything they want to, or the person who starts to think they have no control at all. Problem TMSers, especially with anxiety and depression, are maybe having more issues with the latter. I don't get pain anymore, but a persistent and distracting neck tension had started to really bother me when I found this. Finding things I can control -- even very small ones -- gets me back to thinking more accurately about my life rather than letting things overwhelm me in a catastrophic style.

And now, something I can't control: your responses... Hope it helps though.

 

Not at all! That's what these threads are for.

I'm personally going to try and be a bit more active here because I finally have a little free time, and I'd rather you be honest with where you are 'at.' So fire away when you need to.

I'm going to try and explain TMS slightly differently than @miffybunny, although I do completely agree with her general assertion. The first part will be basic info to many but it needs to be re-visited first (long, wordy post(s) incoming!).

We all have 2 aspects to our involuntary nervous system: the parasympathetic (the 'auto-pilot' of resting and digesting), and the sympathetic, which is our primal survival mechanism. Normally the body is parasympathetic dominant, and things function normally (metabolism, sleep cycles, digestion and elimination, muscle tone, etc). Note that there is A LOT going on in your body every second you are alive that you have absolutely no conscious awareness of.

When the brain perceives a threat (this is a key concept we'll return to shortly), it causes the sympathetic to take over. The result is a stress hormone release that changes the physiology in order to help you fight, hide, or run away. The heart rate increases, the pupils dilate, and blood flow to the skin decreases (in case you get wounded, so you'll bleed less), etc.

The brain activity heightens, we become hypervigilant, condense our general focus onto the threat, and try to predict the worst-case scenario (if we prepare for the worst, we have a better chance of survival). The brain also closes itself down to new ideas, and it's creative center shuts down. During survival mode, pondering, creating, etc are too risky, so they get closed off. Ever try and explain something to someone during an argument? Good luck!

Also, blood flow, resources, and energy are diverted away from digestive and reproductive organs, because the last thing your brain is concerned about when there is a threat is digesting food and reproducing.

These changes are meant to be temporary! Then the threat either ends your life, or you escape, your body cleans up the stress hormones, and your physiology normalizes. Or that's how it's supposed to work.

But as the human brain has evolved over time, we now have a 'problem.' The frontal cortex is now about 40% of the total brain size. This is why humans are able to do human things, like art, music, speech, higher thought processes, etc. There are animals with far bigger brains than us, but their frontal cortex is nothing compared to total brain size. But because of this, the human brain quite literally doesn't know the difference between real and imagined (there are plenty of studies out there backing this up!).

So why is this bad? Because the brain doesn't differentiate between threats. 5000 years ago we would only have this system triggered every so often, and usually only when our lives were actually threatened. But now, ANY stressful situation or 'threat' will cause the changes I mentioned above. So as we try and predict the worst-case scenario, our brains can experience that as if it's actually happening, and cause more stress hormone release.

We condense our focus on the problem because that's what we are programmed to do, and now comes another wave of stress hormone release. Very quickly an anxiety state can occur, and start to loop (stress -->physical/emotional symtpoms --> stress and on and on). The loop can continue for days, months and even a lifetime. It may not always be present, but it is often sitting under the surface IF we don't do anything to diffuse it.

So a body in a sympathetic-dominant state will have dysfunction, simply because we are not designed for it. Our brains have evolved to a point that they can produce an intense physical reaction by thought alone, and once the stress/threat process starts, our thoughts change in a way that would normally help us if our lives were actually threatened, but now cause the 'loop' IF left unchecked.

Anxiety is simply, quite literally, a body/mind stuck in a survival mode.

If you can't understand how you got there, a good therapist can help. But in my professional opinion, most of Western society is living in some level of chronic fight or flight, which is why chronic pain is so common now. Our muscle tone gets over-stimulated and the thickest, most partially contracted muscles in the body, the postural muscles, are prime targets. If the tension is high enough in the neck, it can also cause headaches of various types.

Life moves quicker now, and we are bombarded with bad news and all types of stress daily, and we stay stuck. Especially if we endured stress in childhood, the body gets very good at maintaining survival mode. Practice makes perfect, right? It's like a car that is stuck in a low gear trying to do 80 on the highway, and yet we can't often act on the stress ("I want to yell at my boss but I can't!), so it's like we are stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time.

I am repeating these things for people that haven't heard it this way before, and to help the rest with a stronger understanding and acceptance through repetition.

What makes this even more difficult is that newer science is showing we can actually become somewhat addicted to stress hormones, so our brain/body will unconsciously try and drive back into survival mode if that's what it's used to, even if it's uncomfortable, painful, or whatever. After all, the survival state is created by chronic release of stress hormones, and just like any substance introduced into the body repeatedly over time, the physiology will eventually change to accommodate that substance. So trying to change one's physiology away from a TMS (or survival state), can be a bit like trying to break an addiction to any substance, which is one of the reasons people who have 'cured' themselves from TMS can have relapses. Biochemically it's not very different than an alcoholic relapsing. Reading and studying TMS is like going to rehab, and people are often good for awhile, and some for life. But sooner or sometimes much later, boom, the 'addiction' reasserts itself.

Second post about what to do about it incoming

 

I hope the previous post makes sense! If not, please ask questions so I can clarify.

Also, before I write anything else, I'm still assuming those of you reading this have been thoroughly checked out by a medical professional, and have ruled out other causes of pain.

So now I hope it's clear that TMS is an off-shoot of a body in constant, subacute survival mode, which is really just a state of chronic anxiety. I'll used the terms interchangeably. I personally don't believe the brain is doing anything to punish us, distract us, or show us anything. It's just stuck in fight or flight as a result of our brains and environment evolving over time, resulting in an overstimulated sympathetic nervous system.

The body is stuck in a sympathetic-dominant state, and many types of dysfunction stem from that, TMS being just one. Pain is due to overstimulated muscle tone, and oxygen-deprivation is the result.

This is also why most TMS sufferers usually have other chronic problems besides just pain. As I mentioned before, blood and resources are diverted away from digestion and reproductive areas, so problems in those areas are common for TMS sufferers. A body in survival mode can often have sleep problems as well, because it can't go into deeper rest states. The brain obviously wouldn't want you to fall asleep if your life were being threatened! There are for more potential problems that can occur, but that goes beyond this post.

So now it should be more clear why TMS occurs. And when we add the idea of stress hormones being potentially addictive, the changes in our thinking when in survival, and our modern brains' ability to cause physical changes by thought alone, is it any wonder chronic pain is such a massive issue now?

As a quick aside, Dr. Sarno was also correct as to why modern medicine is so bad at treating it: because of imaging technology, docs almost invariably blame the problem on structural issues, because that's what they can see. Very, very unfortunate, but it is extremely difficult to talk patients out of a structural diagnosis once they've seen their scans and had a doc tell them that's why they are in pain!

The fundamental way to cure TMS is to stop the chronic survival mode. As @miffybunny said, it's actually quite simple, in theory. Some people can just accept that and move right through it (those are the 'book cure' people), but for someone like @BloodMoon, who seems to be quite intellectual and headstrong, it can be harder, because they will tend to analyze ever little aspect (which can easily cause more stress). And/or if you've dealt with stress from a young age, the survival mode will be more hardwired in, and will require more effort to break.

But this is why Miffy's advice of 'just go live your life' is so simple, yet profound. Acceptance of suffering will end it eventually, because that alone will break the loop. When you stop reacting to the pain with despair, stress, anger, etc, you will shut off the mechanism that is keeping it going.

YOUR BODY WANTS TO HEAL. Period. And it has fantastic mechanism to do so, but we are inadvertently getting in the way of that recovery.

Let's frame this another way, to anyone reading this who is still suffering: If you really truly accept and understand TMS for what it is (painful but quite harmless) why are you still here??

I realize you still have pain, but you are here because you keep focusing on it, ruminating about it, hoping, searching......remember what I wrote in the last post about the brain in survival mode constantly focusing on the threat, looking for a way out, and trying to predict the worst-case scenario? Yup, you're doing it right now. And you keep doing it, probably throughout the day, more than you realize.

You really have to live, think, and feel in a way as if it's a complete non-issue, and just keep doing that for as long as it takes. I asked the question before as to why some people can be cured by reading, and my opinion is that it's because they lose their fear of TMS by understanding it for what it is. It's not 'calling the brain's bluff/distraction' as Dr. Sarno thought, but rather learning it was harmless/curable caused hope to suddenly appear, and that completely breaks the stress cycle.

Pain, stress, depression, anxiety and the hormones and neurotransmitters that accompany them cannot co-exist in a body with the same substances that produce gratitude, joy, relief, etc.

The ones you feed are the ones that will win.

And with the 'win' comes the state of the body. Stressed or not, pain-free or not..and so forth.

HOW you feed the good ones is up to you. For myself, success stories, reading many of the things I've listed before, and meditation in which I just imagined how it would feel to by symptom-free were key. But other people do it differently. Ultimately you are trading one state of being for another by putting as little attention of the old one, and all the attention on the one you want to be in. There are many techniques for this, but the simplest on is stop giving a shit. Really. It's very difficult to do sometimes, but water will penetrate rock sooner or later. Just be consistent.

Forget about the pain, and observe how often you are focused on any stressor throughout the day. Again, the brain doesn't differentiate between stressors, so if they are the constant focus, how can you expect a different result in the body.

The average adult has 60k-70k thoughts a day, and 80-90% of them are the same as the day before. The same thoughts produce the same words, actions, and chemical releases in the body. We get stuck on the hamster wheel, and it becomes groundhog day, every day, and that includes physical symptoms.

The problem is we wait to feel better to change how we think, feel, and act. But we have that backwards. If we acquire true knowledge of what TMS is, really lose our fear/concern about it, live, think, and speak differently, and as a result shift our body chemistry permanently, the pain will disappear.

 

Last post about this for now, promise A long-gone poster here by the name of Hillbilly really helped me out when I was at my worst, and I saved everything I could of his. I'm posting a few things he wrote about recovery from TMS, and I didn't want to take credit for his words. But they saved my life, so here are some of his gems:

-
"few weeks passed in which I walked through the motions of living. At night, suffering from terrible insomnia, I would ponder the things I'd read that gave me hope. I got out a pad and paper and began to write down the things that I wasn't doing that I knew I needed to. This was an epiphany for me. I wasn't following the simplest advice of all, which was to let the pain come and go or stay or whatever it chose to do, which both Dr. Weekes and Dr. Sarno prescribed. The problem was that I was still allowing my symptoms to control me. I wasn't in control at all in my life. I made room for rest, avoidance, paced myself too much. I decided I needed one thing, and that was courage to push through the pain and doubt and go back to living again. I took a break from all forums, all internet searches, and decided on one goal: I would live fully again, and I would be stronger and more resolute than before. I didn't need a hero. I needed to find the inner strength for MY journey.

I was introduced to a lady who had gone through what I had through a mutual friend. She agreed to take me on as a pet project. She told me to buy a book called “Mental Health Through Will Training” by Dr. Abraham Low. I began to read the book in the two weeks before I met with her the first time. I got the feeling that I was listening to a football coach while reading Dr. Low rise above the complaints and whines of his patients and calmly, assertively tell them they were wrong. They were simply giving in to their stress symptoms. Even though none of them mentioned back pain specifically, I knew what he was saying spoke directly to the way I was behaving, overthinking, avoiding, mentally manifesting tumors and bleeds where there were none. TMS? Schmee Em Ess. Broken will and cowardice was my diagnosis.

When I met with my therapist, she was always so sure of what she was telling me was correct. That was impressive. It was also a stark contrast to those on forums I used to listen to give advice even though I knew from their own accounts that they were unable to find their own solutions, they could advise me on mine. She gave me homework. Some of it was strange, like washing my wife's feet, but some things were just plain, everyday activities that I didn't do because of my symptoms like going for a walk with my daughter. But it all made sense in retrospect. This was living in which you took chances and impacted the people in your life. No more hiding. I increased my chores around the house tenfold. Within weeks I stood on a ladder for three days and stained my deck. I went to ballgames and sat on bleachers and talked to people around me. I was not ever comfortable, but I was OK and began to feel human again. This is the main point. You have to behave like a person who is healthy because in reality you are. You only think there is something wrong because of how you feel. One evening after cleaning up our dinner I went outside to build a fire in our firepit. I was bending over and over to pick up wood and sort of noticed that my back was moving freely and easily. It was the last I heard from my pain. It has been several years now.

You are going to get better. You will restore your health to normalcy. There will be times that you will feel reluctant to do something, pressured, conflicted, but you will experience no more than normal fight or flight reactions that every human being on the planet experiences.

After reading the above, you either had one reaction or another. You either believed it or you didn't. The dividing line between those who recover from nervous illness, and those who don't is what they actually believe. You can write or chant affirmations until you are purple in the face, journal your life's story colored with lots of offensive words about your parents or ex-spouses or children, do yoga with eastern gurus, sit in sweat lodges, beat pillows with mini baseball bats, or many, many other interventions people have undertaken to overcome their problem, but until you do absolutely nothing except understand what you are doing wrong and fix it, nothing will improve.

What you are likely doing wrong is avoiding life. Specifically, you are avoiding discomfort. You've probably had this discomfort since childhood, but that isn't important. You were born sensitive, and you have little resistance to stress in your nervous system. You get powerful symptoms when stressed. You have difficulty concentrating, can't organize your life well, avoid social interaction, avoid any activity you think might cause embarrassment, avoid doing the most basic chores or daily living because they are boring. Instead you fill your time with things that command your attentive energy. More probably you do more than one. The biggest one I see is staying on this forum or another, posting your thoughts or those of others, getting into arguments about things that don't matter to anyone, including you. If you are an adult, you need to work. That is what adults do. Even if you don't do it for money, volunteer. Read some Thomas Carlyle. He'll inspire you.

Meanwhile, there are people who love you who are watching you do this, have probably sought many times to encourage you to get back to living, but have met with such resistance that they have stopped altogether. The choice to stop is yours. You are no different in that respect than a drug addict. The decision has to come from inside you. It is a simple act of the will. It is not complicated and does not require the intervention of a counselor or guru. You have to be so tired of being miserable that you decide once and for all to fix this, to live courageously, and to stop coddling your precious feelings. Everyone alive suffers embarrassment at one time or another, and you are not so important that you can't accept it. It angers you, perhaps to the point of temper tantrums, that there are demands upon your time. You must stop seeing your failures or upsets as anything more than normal, average occurrences. Because objectively, that's what they are. Ask a few people what they've struggled through, and you're likely to be surprised. Then think to yourself, “Wow, if that person can do all this after going through what he has, I should be able to also.” You can, of course, if you believe it.

Lastly, there are many people who offer advice on this forum. Many of them are well-intended when they offer their advice, but their advice is limited to their own reading, life experience, and ability to understand. Mine is no different. I was terribly excited about helping others and for several years worked with those whose problems couldn't be seen on an MRI but wouldn't resolve. The ones that got better stopped excusing themselves and went about their lives. Those that didn't continued to malinger, blame childhood trauma and look ubiquitously for treatment programs and methods that were expensive and untested.

Here are the most common pitfalls I see with recovery:

1) Believing that you must do or not do something because it was written by a doctor, especially Dr. Sarno. I've read scores of threads here that make me shake my head because people actually erect mental barriers of warning that if they were to stretch to relieve their pain that they "send a message to their unconscious that there is a structural problem." Really? If this is a benign condition, how can you hurt yourself? Stop worrying. That's the real issue.

2) I have read the advice of those who advocate psychotherapy (Freudian, Jungian, etc.) for dealing with these problems. Trace those statements back to their origins, and you will find someone with a financial interest in those practices with 100% certainty. If a person has labored through what I call getting their Freud patch at psychology camp, they're damn well gonna make it worth their while. Avoid these people and their advice and please, please, please stop buying their books and DVD's. You have a shelf loaded down with them already and here you sit reading the words of an educated moron.

3) You and your experience are unique, but not exceptional. In other words, stop seeing impediments to your happiness in every act of life. Expect and accept discomfort, disappointment, even grief. It won't kill you. Fear is the jailer of your life. You might even be fearful of your own anger with yourself or someone else. That's OK too, just stay determined to get the things done you need to in order to feel like a productive adult. If you can stop letting your "feelings" influence your life in any way, you will recover fully and not look back.

4) Finally, although it is not a requirement here or elsewhere, you need to understand and even ask for the experience of someone who offers advice. Never ask for or accept advice on finances from a homeless beggar. Use the same reasoning when getting advice for treating your anxiety or TMS as it is called here from someone who tells you with firm conviction what to do who meanwhile is suffering away, avoiding their own issues, especially those who spend the most time here. If you spend your time here, there is a tradeoff that you can't get back. Thank them kindly for their time and thoughtful offer, then ignore them completely.


"The first and final hurdle to getting well is and was and shall forever be when you no longer care how you feel because you have determined that your ailments are benign and can no longer scare you or keep you from accomplishing anything. A disciplined mental approach to thinking about accomplishing your daily tasks despite bodily rumblings is essential while you recover. Self-discipline is the no. 1 goal. You have to take it seriously and do it always. No exceptions. Despair over how you feel even for an instant has chemical byproducts that worsen the way you feel. Imagine what happens if you despair all day, every day for months or years over symptoms that are created out of despair to begin with. Ironic, isn't it?. The worst thing facing you is emotional chemical releases, which are nothing at all, really. They will burn up in time if allowed to without cycling through the additional negative reactions to how you feel."

"Here is something that you can do that will help, I think. Go to google and download the free ebook The Freedom of Life by Annie Payson Call. This was written over 100 years ago. It is a very good primer on nervous health and how it gets interrupted. Read especially the sections on how to deal with discomfort.

Then after reading it, keep track of the amount of time that you are spending thinking about your body and what it is doing, what you are restricting yourself from. You will find that you are living in a state of constant fear, which sets up vicious cycles of fight or flight responses. This is not terribly difficult to understand. The trick is to stop the cycles. The body in this state is never at rest, and your constant focus upon it makes it remain so. When you accept the diagnosis as TMS or anxiety or whatever benign condition, there should be a conscious effort then made to accept or ignore the pain and related sensations as transient, normal stress responses that will resolve when you no longer react to them fearfully. This will take some effort. Be patient with yourself. If you are impatient, that will trigger the stress response. If you get upset because you can't do something and want to, that will trigger it as well. Problem is most if not all of us have lived so stressfully and so reliant upon adrenaline to get through the day for so long that we think that is normal.

The thinking you just posted will lead to more illness. I have seen countless people whose refusal to accept the symptoms as stress related suffer endlessly, going from doctor to doctor and having them find nothing at all clinically wrong or getting some nebulous diagnosis like myofascial pain or fibromyalgia or CFS, which just led to more suffering because they read lots of scary stuff on the internet and didn't follow a set program of recovery. Anxiety conditions can last a lifetime if not interrupted on the conscious level. You must understand what is happening, accept that it is the ONLY thing causing your problems, and make a constant effort to stop fearing your symptoms. Simplify everything to prevent worry and you are on your way to lasting health.

If you allow yourself to ruminate about physical explanations, you are doomed. There is nothing that you can do to set your mind at ease even for a moment. I know. I was there for two years. You have to break this habit of self-diagnosis right away to get on the way back to health.

------

There is a point at which a person becomes willing to have their pain or gurgling gut or dizziness or weak legs. This is the point at which they go away. It is an amazing thing to allow yourself to suffer, which by definition is its antithesis, which ends it forever. The reason you suffer is because you are unwilling to have these symptoms. If you were, you wouldn't have them. This isn't some mantra chant from eastern religion, but a fact that you can live in your own life. Be willing to suffer and you end all suffering. Think that over. Invite your pain to increase, and you will see that it will diminish.

Once you have reached a point where nothing can affect you in the way it now does, you will be rid of the pain forever. It will have no purpose in continuing. You won't dread it. You won't pine for it to be gone. You will have figured out that it is, as Art states, a manifestation of stress, which only grows as you add your own reactive stress to it. Without this reaction, it is a normal occurrence, no different than sweating out a sports game on the couch.

 

My sincere and genuine thanks RogueWave. Marls

 

^ Absolutely beautiful. Thank you for taking the time to share this.

 

These 3 posts might be the best description of TMS and the healing process I’ve ever read.

 

This is something that particularly resonated with me as I had no idea fight or flight had this effect and it explains so much about some of my current symptoms!

 

There is a point at which a person becomes willing to have their pain or gurgling gut or dizziness or weak legs. This is the point at which they go away. It is an amazing thing to allow yourself to suffer, which by definition is its antithesis, which ends it forever. The reason you suffer is because you are unwilling to have these symptoms. If you were, you wouldn't have them. This isn't some mantra chant from eastern religion, but a fact that you can live in your own life. Be willing to suffer and you end all suffering. Think that over. Invite your pain to increase, and you will see that it will diminish.

I love this paragraph and will definitely give it some thought.

Rogue Wave, thank you so much for these reassuring and elucidating posts. I know a bit about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems etc. but there is still a question about it that my mind tends to go to. It would seem by definition that a person would have symptoms when stressed and that they’d dissipate when relaxed. My symptoms fluctuate and seem to have little to do with my state of mind. ( prickly leg sensations, hypersensitivity to clothes and weird emotional anxiety surges in my chest) I’ve pretty much exhausted the medical route, including neurologists, tests etc. So really the only thing that makes sense is mind/body. I don’t really experience them while exercising or in bed. Does the fact that my sensations don’t seem to directly correlate with my state of mind make sense?

Also, if you wouldn’t mind addressing this as well, I’d appreciate it - I’ve been dealing with this for a long time (it went away twice, but this time it just won’t leave). I will admit I have spent a lot of time being totally mortified by these symptoms and what they could mean etc. But, there was a point last year that I feel I really let it go and tried not to focus on it for months. My mental state seemed better but it still didn’t go away. Could it be that I didn’t give it enough time and returned to being fearful of the symptoms again? One thing I’d like to add, is I’m very adventurous and have never really put my life on hold while feeling this way. Do you think possibly, I live my life travelling and so on, but may do this with a constant underlying state of fear about the pain/sensations? Maybe I am trying to intellectualize this too much? Hillbilly said he was stubborn, and unfortunately, I might be too.

 

After I read this, I have to say that I felt an immediate profound sense of relief, @miffybunny...I am indeed always living in my head and, for some reason, I hadn't associated my pain with my heart; it's been like it wasn't there. My heart's gummed up with a lifetime's worth of hurts; when I now direct my attention to and specifically think about how I feel in my heart it makes me teary, whereas no amount of journaling about this-that-and-the-other happening to me in the past has had that effect...Blimey, this is progress @miffybunny - thank you!

 

The former is definitely a problem for me. I hate being at the mercy of anyone. I for one will try taking a leaf out of your book and will endeavour to generally make a mental note of the big and small things of which I am in control as I go about my life; it might help me to weather the times when I'm not.

 

Good points! I'm sure other people reading this have experienced this too, and it can be confusing.

The first thing to keep in mind is that just because you make a change, even a big one, does not mean the body is going to change immediately. It can happen, but it often takes a bit of time and 'chipping away' little by little. So as much as pain can be supremely annoying, be patient and kind to yourself

Secondly, I'm going to try and explain the 'addiction' idea a different way, and I'm going to use my dad as the perfect example. He is a Vietnam vet, and has been been through tremendous stress in war, where his life was threatened almost continuously for well over a year. This put him in severe, chronic survival mode (for good reason!). Out of 40 guys in his platoon, he was one of only 6 that lived, and I'm sure his ability to stay hypervigilant in survival mode for so long was one of the main reasons he lived.

So imagine his body, assaulted with high levels of stress hormones over a long period of time. As I explained before, when this happens, just like an addiction, the body's physiology changes to accommodate the extra 'substances.' Except in this case, it isn't alcohol, it's stress hormones.

So he finally gets out of Vietnam, but ever since then (since I've been born), he's far more aggressive than most people, even at an older age. He can be calm for awhile, like driving on an open highway, but he'll find a car and tailgate them. Or argue with the cashier at a store over something stupid, and get extremely heated about it.

Why?

Because the body has been 'wired' or conditioned into intense survival mode. But if you take away the environment that causes stress hormone release, how do you get your 'fix?' You can't buy stress hormones in a bottle like alcohol. So his brain unconsciously seeks out reasons to 'fight'. It might not be with guns, but it can be with words, with actions (like tailgating someone for no reason and getting super frustrated), etc. The view of the world, thoughts, and actions are driven by the body's incessant need to get its fix of aggression. But oddly enough, once the need is met, and the chemistry is balanced (in an unhealthy way), the person can think/act more clearly, just like a drunk who after drinking thinks 'why am I doing this again??' But until that need is met, the thoughts and behaviors will tend to drive towards fulfilling that chemical need.

It is in this way, then, that the body lives in the past experience. The environment may change, but the person doesn't. As the saying goes 'wherever you go, there you are.' You can go on vacation and feel more relaxed for awhile, but using my dad's example, sooner or later the 'need' rears its head, and he'd be arguing/tailgating/fighting, whatever it took to get that stress hormone release.

So even if he moved to a tropical island and felt super relaxed for days or months, eventually he'd find some reason to get fight or get frustrated, because that is what the body has become accustomed to.

Just keep in mind, this is almost entirely unconscious, and will just continue until you learn about it, start becoming more self-aware, and work in the moment to change it, over and over, until it sticks.

So something in a person's life gets them to a certain point of stress, and if it's long enough, intense enough, or both, it starts to change the physiology into a chronic fight or flight mode. This starts to loop, and all our energy goes into our thoughts, constantly analyzing, dissecting, etc....which only causes more stress. Dr. Abraham Low, the founder of CBT, referred to 2 personality types that get TMS (he identified this in the 20s and 30s, he just didn't call it TMS): the Romantic (who over-dramatizes everything), and the Intellectual (who over-analyzes everything). Or the Romanto-Intellectual, who does both. These ways of being just serve to keep the body in survival mode, and keep TMS coming.

So if our life experience eventually shifts our physiological state of being, and those stress hormones change how we proceed in life (and become addictive), you can see how we just end up repeating ourselves, and the body gets locked into a state of being, independent of its environment.

As I mentioned before, the average human has 60,000-70,000 thoughts a day, and 80-90% of them are the roughly the same vein as the day before. So maybe you go on vacation, and you stop thinking about your pain, your boss, etc. Most likely, if you are paying attention, you are probably shifting your attention to something else and just worrying about that.

Again, it's not the specific thought that's important, it's how that thought/word/action affects you. It doesn't matter WHAT you're worried about, it's the worry itself, done repeatedly, that causes the problem.

This is how the body lives in the past experience, and then reproduces that experience day in and day out, no matter where you go. The feelings create the thoughts, and the thoughts re-introduce the feelings, over and over, until we step in. This is also why therapy doesn't help a lot of TMS sufferers. It's great to understand HOW we got to this point, but after that, the work needs to be done to change ourselves on a day to day basis. Just talking about it, meditating, beating a pillow, etc isn't usually enough to enact lasting change.

And all the while we are looking at the symptoms, thinking those are the problem!

And this is what @miffybunny is referring to when she's talking about getting into the emotion/heart. That's ultimately where the problem starts, and the only place it can be fixed for good.

Oh and one more thing to make understanding why we get stuck a little more understandable. Since the deeper part of the brain is only concerned with survival, once it gets used to a certain way of being, it tends to want to stick to that way, even if it's unhealthy/painful. This is simply because if your behavior is more predictable, it has a better chance of keeping you alive. New ways of thinking mean unpredictable outcomes, which would normally make survival more difficult.

 

Hi @RogueWave ,

Yes Joe Dispenza delves into this topic in "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" and "You Are the Placebo". I definitely took away a few gems from his work while going through the process.

 

Thank you Rogue Wave and Miffybunny for your posts. They are posts I will try to absorb. I guess I will have to figure out how to get into the emotion/heart of all this. At this point that concept seems a bit nebulous, but I understand how it can’t be written out in a to do list. I have been incredibly reactionary over the years and I think this has done me a disservice regarding these symptoms. Thanks again!

 

Hi @tgirl ,

I promise not to add anything more to this thread as I'm sure some are sick of me lol, but I do want to emphasize something that may be getting lost in all the archives, ...Do not make TMS this big deal. Don't get hung up on "approaches", machinations of the brain or the science of addiction , chemicals etc etc etc. All that does is give far too much power and meaning to this thing called "TMS". It ALL comes down to our emotions so you may as well embrace the nebulousness of that. Rather than thinking about the emotions, start feeling them. It was a long, hard road for me. I didn't just read a book and "accept" and skip along my merry way. I had to change my way of being and my life. TMS was merely a symptom calling out to my true self. It's a lifelong journey and one we have to be wiling to take.

 

No one would ever get sick of your posts, so please post all you want. They are nothing but helpful.
I think all day long about whether I’m approaching this TMS thing correctly, but I understand what you are saying, feel emotions. I’m slowly getting this. Slowly! Thanks again.

 

I used to paint pictures - landscapes mainly. When my symptoms came on full pelt, I suddenly couldn't paint anymore; each time I tried, everything came out as a muddy mess...I haven't painted for 23 years. So, as with @m8888888, this aspect of the closing down of the creative centre also particularly resonated with me.

You saying this about me, reminds me of when I was diagnosed with 'fibromyalgia' by a consultant rheumatologist. With his 'conventional medicine' hat on he diagnosed 'fibromyalgia', but with another hat on he suggested I see a psychologist if I were "prepared to open up a can of worms", but he added that he thought that I "might be too clever for my own good"...I didn't ask him what he meant by the latter (I didn't want to know what someone who had only just met me thought of my mental state as, at the time, I didn't know about TMS) but I surmise that he was progressive and believed in the mind/body connection...Anyway, I think I now know what he meant: I'm just too analytical for my own good (and that is likely to apply to others on this forum who are also struggling to get better).

@RogueWave how does one carry on doing normal activity and get back to living in circumstances such as the following?: My leg started to ache and then I suddenly got a pain in my right thigh; the pain was so excruciatingly painful that I couldn't weight-bear or move my leg at all without screaming out loud. I was like that - bedridden - for 7 months, despite believing that my thigh pain was TMS and even refusing to go for a scan to rule out anything structurally sinister because I truly believed that it was TMS (which, of course, is something I'm not recommending others should do). When bedridden with pain due to a 'fight or flight' stress hormones addiction, what can one do to get out of the loop? I got on with what I could from my bed, but it took so many months to be able to get out of bed and walk again.

 

Not a 'to do' list, but someone on the forum recommended to: "Ask yourself several times each day when working, walking or performing daily tasks, “What does my heart think about this? How does my heart feel?” You may ask this question about people, situations, or changes in the flow of life. Eventually, you will “feel” or hear an answer from your inner self. You will know that this is your answer. (Truth is simple so your answer will probably be short.)". And, I don't know what @miffybunny might think about the suggestions on this website re getting into one's heart space https://bemorewithless.com/heartspace/ (How to Create Heart Space (and why it's a big deal) - Be More with Less), but they seem to me to be gently profound/helpful, so I think I'm going to follow some of those things to open up and move down from my head and into my heart space.