Educational Program Day 36

Today, you are starting on the last week of this 6 week program. Doing emotional work and knowledge therapy can be challenging, so be proud of yourself for making it this far. This week begin to pay attention to how your personality traits are affecting your symptoms and start to identify areas where you may need to do additional work. This can range from dealing with anxiety or addressing fear. Just because you finish with this program does not mean you have to stop doing the work. Continue to explore your emotions and if you have any questions feel free to post in our forum.

Educational Activity: Of all of the emotions that can affect our symptoms and recovery, fear can have the most significant impact on us. If a person can overcome fear of their symptoms, they will be able to overcome doubt and prevent future relapses. In today's educational activity, Howard Schubiner discusses fear and how to handle it. To access the article visit, Understanding and Overcoming Fear.

Journaling

The way in which we handle certain situations, issues, and stresses depends, in part, on our unique personality traits. By understanding why we have certain personality traits, we will begin to handle and address futures stresses more successfully. While we do not necessarily need to change who we are, it is advisable to understand our personalities and how they affect our reactions. For today's journal activity spend several minutes cluster or spider writing about one of your personality traits. Write down one of your traits, i.e. perfectionism or goodism, and begin to write words or phrases that come into your mind based on that trait. It is advisable to do this on a scrap piece of paper.

From the Forum: It is very easy for people with TMS to put a lot of pressure on themselves to recover quickly. This can lead to frustration, doubt, and "calender watching" all of which can slow a recovery. In this excerpt from the forum TMS/PPD recovered peer turned author, Steve Ozanich, addresses some of the common problems people have in recovering. To read the full thread with all of the responses please visit this thread.

Finally, I would like to quickly convey a common problem and typical complaint I hear regarding mindbody healing. Typically it is stated, “I finished reading Dr. Sarno’s book last month and my pain is still here, what am I doing wrong!?!” Pity me that the heart is slow to learn. The faster you try to heal the slower you often heal. Healing is more of a transformational process through self-individuation; a series of steps forward often followed by a few steps back. The concept is not to take the pain away but to take the reason for the pain away through the expansion of natural knowledge. Dr. Sarno stated in the 2004 Medscape interview, “I do not have an approach to dealing with pain but rather the stresses that cause it.” Trying to take pain away is once again focusing on the pain by monitoring progress. A watched pot never boils and a monitored back never heals. People try to heal too fast and the anger and frustration that accompany the feeling of failure generates more anger and tension which further slows healing, and the pain loop continues. It is the paradox of healing. We spend every waking second focused on our health to our own detriment. Every TV ad and most of the health websites are set up to keep people in fear. They are marketing experts playing on the fears of everyone who is in doubt. One website headline recently read, “Your current good health and wellbeing could be hiding a very serious disease!” It’s the business of marketing sickness. If we could only learn how to live instead of how not to die we could be much healthier and happier. Good luck, and know that healing can take place if the belief is deep enough. It’s not always simple knowledge that heals people; it often takes much work and repetition, and patience. I’ve helped hundreds to heal and you can heal too. Sometimes lives, lifestyles and perceptions must change, but in the end it’s worth it. Pain has no place to hide in a person who is deeply happy and fulfilled, absent of conflict and armed with the correct information. Click here to read the full thread

Question To Ponder

Is there anything in your life you feel like you can’t control? How does not being in control make you feel? Can you connect this feeling to a personality trait?

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