Day 8 Why would it be different?

I'm still following the program, though I've missed a day here and there with travel and life in general getting in the way occasionally. I'm trying to find a balance of doing things that help my recovery but not making it my entire day. So far I think I may still be spending too much time thinking about TMS, but (one of Alan's idioms that has stuck in my head): Rome wasn't built in a day.

It continues to be true that whenever I can get to a place of thinking that there truly is nothing wrong with my body, my symptoms subside, and my attention is freed up to go elsewhere, to things that I actually want to be thinking about. My evidence list is starting to get long, but this alone is the main piece of evidence that keeps being obvious. I'm not sure why I still have doubts.

I had an episode of doubt + fear + symptoms last night, actually, when something in Steve Ozanich's book sounded a little too alternative-medicine to my cynical mind and I was set off on another stupid internet searching spiral, trying to determine "once and for all" if there was any difference between pelvic pain and back pain when it comes to TMS.

But eventually (after calming down somewhat this morning) it hit me: why the hell would it be different? There are people on forums and in comment sections saying variations of things like, "pelvic pain is particularly difficult to deal with" and "pelvic pain is one of the worst manifestations of TMS" and for some reason there seems to be a bias that pelvic pain is an exception to the rule of TMS where physical therapy actually is needed for complete resolution of symptoms.

But that doesn't square with the full recovery success stories I've read—none of which involved any physical therapy, and none of which had any major correlations in terms of amount of time it took to recover. I've read a few weeks to a year to even a few years. The same variations in healing time exist in all other "forms" of TMS that I've read about. If you actually follow the logic, it doesn't make sense that one set of symptoms would be special.

Moreover, I'm noticing that all of the symptoms I have had, I have read about from others beforehand, then developed myself. When I stopped believing I was injured and started believing that my muscles were just tight, I stopped having pain that felt like an injury, but started to have pain that felt like a muscle cramp. What's the truth? None of it is real! Or it's real, alright, but it's my mind that is determining what symptoms I will have. Learning to control it willfully is sort of like learning how to steer a car with its steering wheel on backwards or sail into the wind, but it is possible.

Anyway, apologies for yet another long-winded post that might have been better as a journal entry, but I just wanted to put this out there for myself, and anyone else having these same doubts.

I guess I should note: sure, it might be "worse" than back pain for not being as socially acceptable to talk about, especially for men, but from what I understand from Sarno, talking about your symptoms and identifying with them is actually counterproductive.

 

Excellent and insightful post!