This title is a little misleading because conditioned TMS responses are exactly what TMS chronic pain and symptom responses are in a nutshell. All of them. The number one obstacle holding knowledgeable TMS warriors back from a more permanent cure that does not involve recurring symptoms is conditioned responses. Another way to describe a conditioned response is an expected response. The expected response starts as a conscious expectation based on an experience, but quickly and easily becomes a subconscious and fully conditioned involuntary response. A person can’t control these conditioned pain responses any more than my dogs can stop drooling while their food is being prepared in front of them. This is quite common in chronic pain and is a consistent problem for many even after discovering TMS and the mind body connection. In this blog, I will give some examples of how this process plays out and how you can change your conditioned mental response permanently like I did.
Here is my original example. I was diagnosed and confirmed to have degenerative disc disease and had been told in no uncertain terms by a doctor that playing golf was causing extreme stress on my spine/discs and that is what was causing significant daily lower back pain. I was also told that golf and other activities were causing additional long term permanent spinal damage. Combine the golf with long workdays/weeks in front of a computer that I was also told was problematic, and I had a recipe for a significant amount of pain that did not have any expected or realized end in sight. Unless I quit my job and stopped most physical activity, I knew and expected that I was screwed with the back and the degenerative disc disease. That was my story and reality for many years and why getting a diagnosis and seeking care from a chiropractor made my conditioned, condition significantly worse.
New or bad mattresses? Forget about it. I could tell in about two seconds upon laying on a strange or new bed what kind of night or morning I was going to be having. It was never good with respect to my back neck and shoulder. Same with any kind of long sitting. Sitting, especially being forced to sit or remain seated, was an agonizing activity. Even thinking about being forced to sit was excruciating. As soon as I was invited to a wedding, I would immediately try to find out what kind. Full Catholic Mass? Kneelers? God help me and my back. Ten-minute beach ceremony then back to hotel bar? Hallelujah!
When you are under the hypnotic spell of a conditioned response, you don’t have to wait to see whether you will be in pain because you already know just based on your previous experience that was painful and far from subtle. Same with food sensitivities. If I knew I was going to eat something triggering, I would prepare for the known and expected results by carrying antacids around or other meds. Your body then responds exactly as expected and exactly as conditioned while you pop the TUMS, and the cycle repeats as conditioned. These conditioned cycles even continue generationally as you watch your parents, aunts, and uncles and how they treat their ailments that you expect are unavoidable as you age. And then you pass it on to your children, nieces and nephews. The more time you spend in your head confirming the expectation and experience, the more conditioned the response becomes. This is especially true with negative triggers and negative conditioning.
Through my years of exploring TMS and the mind body connection, I now think of all those physical triggers as laughable. The thought that sitting on a hard chair or playing golf could cause extreme chronic back pain does not resonate with me anymore because I completely changed my pain psychology using the knowledge about my back physiology and about how there is no connection whatsoever between my structural issues and chronic back pain. The spinal scans that I was convinced were causing me pain under all sorts of physical triggers are not even a thought in my mind now. Because of that firm mindset shift, I no longer have any expectation of pain in those formerly triggering physical scenarios and subsequently don’t have pain. If I even start to think about one of these previous physical triggers or scans and relate them to a pain I am feeling, I must immediately stop myself, because I know I am only creating or reinforcing this conditioned pain response that I now have awareness of and power over.
So now that I am TMS aware, if I am volunteering down at the city dog shelter walking dogs, I can’t blame the hard concrete city sidewalks for my plantar fasciitis throbbing foot pain, because I no longer even believe in the plantar fasciitis physical diagnosis. I now immediately recognize and completely accept this chronic foot pain as nonphysical and pure TMS pain. I know with TMS you must think emotionally not physically about the symptoms. I feel sad for these poor dogs and that profound sadness can be overwhelming. Especially the old ones that get dumped at the over-crowded shelter or the young ones spinning in circles with all that trapped energy that has no outlet. Then there are the dogs that aren’t there the next time you show up to walk dogs and you know they didn’t get adopted. They deserve better. That is probably what is causing my foot pain recurrence right? Deep sadness and empathy for these dogs combined with my sensitive personality. But the foot pain is not budging so through some additional journaling that night, I also came to the revelation that it is not just feeling sad for those dogs that is causing my foot pain. I am truly pissed! Who the F**** dumps a 13-year-old dog at a shelter? Who buys a dog at a puppy farm when a million incredible dogs a year are getting euthanized at shelters across the country? What is the matter with people? Rage. That is now what I understand, know and expect was my source of foot pain. And now that I have identified that and expressed my true deep down rage, as expected, my foot pain subsides and I mentally chalk that experience up to TMS work success!
What I describe above about uncovering rage and curing symptoms is considered a success by most in the TMS world and sharing a story of rage discovery such as this would even get me more than a few “Likes” and “Way to go!” comments on the Facebook TMS group. Off to bed feeling good, knowledgeable, and emotionally reassured. Maybe I helped someone else with my emotional discovery story! I might even ride that wave for a few days feeling good!
This is where it gets tricky with conditioned responses. A few days later, I wake up and I have the stiff locked up zombie neck thing again. I no longer allow any thought of physical like “sleeping wrong” so I must now figure out the emotional trigger like how I figured out the foot pain was due to my rage about the a-hole dog dumpers at the shelter. I know from the last time that neck pain triggers are probably work related, but I am not really having any direct work stresses like the last time, so I better do some writing about my work and job on a deeper level. That night I journal and bingo, it is not day to day work stress that I uncover but it is the much deeper work dissatisfaction that I start to discover. And through that work, I discover that it is actually fear that is holding me back and keeping me stuck in my dead-end job that I hate but that does pays the bills! And just like that, the neck loosens up and I have another round of well received TMS Facebook group posts about my work dissatisfaction, my neck pain relief efforts, and the hidden fear I had to uncovered to resolve my neck pain!
A few days later, and yet another round of symptom recurrence, emotional discovery and treatment/recovery. This time was some weird knee pain which is strange because I never had knee pain before so I was sure it was TMS because I knew about symptom imperative and how Sarno discovered that TMS pain will jump to a new place. I was ready for this and when it happened it was no surprise. I fully expected it actually and had been warned online this was coming. This time I recognized stress after I listened to a TMS Webcast where a doctor explained that the recurring pain that keeps waking me up at night is because my ratio of anxiety/fear is higher than my level of enjoyment and pleasure in life. That made sense as I had been extremely stressed overall lately. This time instead of journaling, I finished my workday and headed out to play a rousing game of fetch with my rescue mutts and we all had a blast. Later I picked up my guitar. I played for hours on my mountain cabin porch on a beautiful warm evening, I experienced relaxation and joy and was transported away from all that work and life stress. I felt genuinely happy and worked through my pain recurrence and also made sure to go to bed early to get a good nights sleep as the doctor suggested. The next day’s Facebook success post includes a shout out to the good doctor for the excellent healing advice! More accolades for a job well done from others online, many of which are not having this kind of ongoing success.
Although riding high from my emotional pain relief efforts and online complements over my success, unfortunately, I was also unknowingly contributing to future conditioned chronic pain responses with my own actions, my thoughts, and the “story” about my pain and emotions that I was formally cultivating publicly.
What I write above is pretty much my exact early experience in the first few months with TMS Chronic Pain healing and recovery. At some point, I began to realize that my miracle TMS cure was really not a cure at all but more like my experience with Chiropractic care. It did undoubtably work in the short-term, but it was making me worse in the long term as I became conditioned to require the ongoing emotional work to constantly treat pain. I was doing the same thing all over again and was still battling chronic recuring pain, and all I was doing was trading ultra-sound electrical stimulation and manipulation at the chiropractor for a journaling pen, my dogs, and guitar. But ultimately, I wasn’t getting better long term and although doing better with physical triggers I was doing worse physically with emotionally stressful triggers which I could not ever fully escape. Same as everyone else on the TMS groups as far as I could see. I had a new pain story and treatment plan, but the pain recurrence conditioned response left me well short of anything I would describe as a chronic pain cure.
“She knows there’s no success like failure. And that failure’s no success at all.”
Bob Dylan – Love Minus Zero
Luckily, I did quickly recognize how I was simply creating emotional conditioned responses to replace the physical ones. Ultimately, I was making no meaningful progress with emotional or physical pain management because I was still under the spell of my subconscious mind that was hell-bent on keeping me in chronic pain and with some sort of ongoing sad negative pain story to keep me in line and fully distracted.
Mindful and present moment awareness along with dropping both the physical and emotional chronic pain story is what lead to my permanent chronic pain cure that is now ten years strong. Rage about a-hole dog owners has not subsided in the least. What has subsided is an expectation that rage over anything can or will cause chronic foot pain. Same with stress. I no longer have any conditioned response where I expect that a stressful day, week, month, or year, will result in TMS symptoms. Just like with the physical, if I even start to think about one of these previous emotional triggers and relate them to a pain I am feeling, I must immediately stop myself, because I know I am only creating or reinforcing this conditioned pain response that I now have awareness of and control over.
How do you change the conditioned response? With either physical or emotional this starts with dropping the “pain story” that is negative and involves finding or solving or treating issues or problems. You must recognize and fully accept that not one but an entire emotional reservoir is the cause of pain and not specific triggering events that will undoubtedly repeat. The new story and conditioned expectation is a story of being cured of all chronic pain permanently and regardless of the never ending and obvious psychological triggers that you can learn to recognize and avoid.
Instead of looking for and writing about times when specific and identified physical or emotional triggers caused pain, you instead start to recognize, highlight, and reward yourself when you identify physical or emotional triggers but do not develop chronic pain symptoms. Just like how I pushed and challenged myself by walking and carrying my bag on my back while golfing, I had to start challenging myself with the emotional triggers that had taken over as my conditioned triggers. You reward yourself for exercising your power over pain from the start not for treating ongoing pain recurrences that you start to recognize as no success at all. What you will find when you do this consistently and mindfully without a conditioned and expected pain story, the correlation that you were certain existed only existed because of the conditioning toward the negative which you unknowingly manifested.
Learning to instead lean on empowerment, gratitude, and a strong limitless belief in the innate power of the mind over the body is the conditioned mindset that resulted in my permanent healing. Challenge your engrained and limiting belief around what TMS chronic pain success looks like, and you will fulfill the expectation. It might not happen over night, but if you remain committed to a permanent cure mindset, your conditioned expectation and end results will change, and you will be free from chronic TMS symptom recurrence permanently. Then, free from the recurring pain distractions, you can more effectively explore those emotions and day to day stressors that you are only perpetuating with the pain and emotional treatment cycles.
I acknowledge that a permanent psychological cure like the one I describe on this website may not be overly appealing to some. For some there is a sense of community and belonging among fellow sufferers and the thought of being permanently cured and not having the ongoing soothing therapies and the soothing accolades of fellow TMS emotional support warriors is not appealing. Same as the drunk that is afraid of losing the good feels and comradery associated with their bad habits at the bar. Ultimately, a person must decide for themselves if and when they want to break these conditioned responses and to move on to a higher level of success presently without recurring chronic pain and treatment.
And when you do you will not miss your former conditioned habits in the least!