If you are reading this and thinking, what is TMS chronic pain and why would I be stressed out about it? I suggest you start from the beginning with my TMS pain recovery story. Most of my previous blogs were more geared toward the TMS newbie. However, I suspect that some reading this might already be very aware of TMS and the mind-body approach to healing chronic pain and other ailments. But, if you are like a lot of people, including me, first you learned about TMS, then you considered that it might be the source of your chronic symptoms, and then you experienced some amount of initial relief as you started to shift your thinking from a physical root cause to emotional. That helped you prove to yourself that your issues were emotionally rooted instead of physically. You likely became very good at no longer chasing the physical and at instead identifying your day-to-day stressors as a more likely source of your pain. As a result, your symptoms improved, but you might still struggle with symptom recurrence especially during very stressful times in life.
Or maybe you aren’t under any obvious stress and have discovered that your pain or symptoms come from your past. The truly repressed emotions, that can only be found with deep digging and inner analysis, journaling, or other therapies which you have also done to successfully treat some TMS flare ups. These are important steps that everyone goes through and it’s part of how we release the idea that a physical problem is causing our chronic symptoms.
But ultimately, even if your symptoms have improved, there is a good chance you are still battling chronic pain or other TMS physical symptoms on a recurring basis. Maybe when you are not feeling any negative emotion you believe the TMS symptoms must be a signal that you are repressing something. You may also have adopted a belief based on experience that pain can only be relieved by ongoing TMS emotional therapy techniques. You also may have given up completely on searching for the illusive “permanent cure” based on others including TMS experts insisting there is no such thing. After all, life will always bring you stress or emotional unrest that will have to be found or solved or meditated on to get TMS relief. Ultimately you just want and need to do something to self-soothe and make yourself feel safe. But all the TMS “work” is adding to the stress and emotions. Sound familiar?
I am now going to let my readers in on the biggest secret in TMS learning that can lead you to the illusive permanent cure that everyone wants but most believe is not possible. Drum roll please…
Stress and negative emotions are normal and do not cause TMS chronic pain symptoms any more than typical physical “abnormalities” like disc herniations do.
Go ahead and read that again a few times if you need to. The primary root cause of the TMS symptoms is a subconscious distraction rooted in your expectation of the chronic symptom. Or more accurately, rooted in the unconscious loss of expectation and confidence that your mind has the innate power to control the chronic symptom recurrences. Read that again a couple of times too.
But if you have a big gig with your band coming up and your body immediately “throws your back out”, doesn’t that confirm TMS is caused by stress and emotions?
Or if you feel physically great during a relaxing vacation but your pain returns the second you enter the door to your house upon return, isn’t that proof that rest and relaxation is what you should seek when in pain? You can’t always be on vacation, maybe Calgon can take it away?
Or if you are feeling depressed and in pain, and do a bunch of journaling about your past, and feel better mentally and physically as a result, doesn’t that indicate that identifying repressed emotions is the key to both the depression and the associated TMS pain or symptom?
Did the torque of my golf swing throw my back out or did my stress about my bad golf game throw it out? Does regular chiropractor care cure me or does regular journaling cure me? Do either?
The truth is that any or all of these sources can absolutely cause me pain, and any or all of them CANNOT possibly cause me pain depending on the mindset I carry around each.
Even if the contraptions at the chiropractor and common TMS emotional therapies do feel good and do result in short term chronic pain relief, these pursuits can lead to bigger, long-term issues if done with a faulty mindset. You cannot solve physical or emotional typical abnormalities to cure chronic TMS symptoms. At least not if you are seeking a long term permanent cure.
Sarno quickly discovered the issue of using physical therapists for TMS. He knew his patients desperately needed to get moving again, but any time he prescribed PT it was a psychologic setback that he could see. Prescribing PT kept his a patients locked mentally on therapy to fix a problem when the only problem was psychological and based on lack of knowledge. There is nothing inherently wrong with these physical or emotional exercises unless they get prescribed in a way that leads to a phycological misconceptions about the nature of the condition being treated. That is happening frequently in both doctors’ offices and in the online TMS support circles.
Once you have firmly let go of the possibility of a physical root cause to your TMS chronic symptoms, chasing after stress or emotional relief to solve TMS chronic pain directly is a trap that should be avoided.
How do you keep stress and emotions from causing a TMS chronic pain attack? The exact same way you learned to keep a physical event from causing a TMS pain attack. You develop a firm and unwavering expectation that they can’t. Based on your TMS learning, you now know that there is nothing physically wrong with you so the physical loses its ability trigger TMS because you lost your expectation that it can. You changed your psychological mindset, and your body followed your lead. That is how mind body medicine works or doesn’t work when it fails. You no longer spend time thinking about the physical things you are doing to cause the pain because you learned that this type of mindset brings on pain instead of stopping it. You don’t write down a list of everything heavy you picked up this week that might be causing back pain because that causes back pain! Instead, as a mind-body savvy TMS pain warrior, you scoff at heavy lifting, bad office chairs, or golf as a potential pain source, while you ponder emotional but ultimately equivalent alternatives.
Unfortunately, you have likely gotten a completely different message about stress/emotions as they relate to TMS compared to physical as it relates. You now have adopted a firm expectation that lifting a heavy amount of stress equals pain in the body. Or possibly, you adopted an even stranger expectation where not feeling any emotions triggers pain because you are now mentally linking not feeling negatively to emotional repression. Your subconscious locks onto those mindsets simply because that is what has your attention presently. The subconscious will tailor its mental “movie” to the taste of the audience it wants to attract and distract. This is the most common thing I see with those that discover and believe in TMS, have some success, but fall far short of a more permanent and stable cure. People trade physical for emotional but don’t fix the root thinking and mindset and they fail to recognize the distraction still playing out in front of them. They simply trade the bad mattress for the bad day at work as the known and expected cause of the pain, and they trade physical treatments for emotional TMS therapy as the short term cure. But at the end of the day, they are still in a lot of recurring pain and treatment, a lot of the time.
TMS emotional therapy cures were not my cure and they are are not the kind of cure that this blog is going to spend time on. If that is the type of TMS approach that appeals to you, then you are in luck. The temporary, partial therapy cures are already well covered by others and you can take you pick of what modality suits you best. A permanent cure to TMS chronic pain is much simpler and more complicated for those interested. Stay tuned for my next blog where I explore how to deal with these healing roadblocks in a little more detail.