Many teach and advise emotional work to treat TMS chronic pain. This never made complete since to me and it never worked for me either. From Sarno, I learned that TMS chronic pain symptoms are a subconsciously created distraction protecting me from emotions I subconsciously couldn’t deal with. If TMS symptoms are a distraction from emotions, why would I treat my emotions to eliminate a distraction from them? Wouldn’t I want to eliminate what was distracting me so that I could work on the emotions without the added distraction? Am I the only one that does it that way?
If I am driving down the road and I am distracted by my cell phone, how should I handle that? Should I keep looking at my phone and driving so that I can put my phone down when I arrive? And just because I have completed my driving, if I never dealt with learning how to put the phone down won’t I still be distracted even after I am done driving? Or should I maybe deal with the phone distraction first by learning how to put it away, so that I can deal with driving the car in a more effective way? How does that scenario play out with a subconsciously rooted pain distraction from emotions?
I was able to eliminate the pain distraction so that the emotional work could be more effective by changing my mindset about the pain. But what about those emotions? What if you have had success eliminating the pain distraction, but now you want to tackle, why I feel stuck in life, or why I am questioning my purpose, why I am sad all the time, or why I am afraid of death. You know the big stuff that the back spasms were protecting you from. How do you deal with those types of emotional issues?
I want to start with a short disclaimer. I appreciate that my advice and personal experience with chronic pain management has helped people in some way, but I do feel a bit like a fraud talking about emotions. I have spent most weekends for the last 30 years whining into an empty bottle of beer about how much I hate my job and how stuck I am with work and wondering what my purpose in life is. And now just a few days later, I am writing blogs and am giving emotional health advice like I am Deepak Chopra or something. To answer the question, about how I handle emotions and stress, or more accurately how I know I should handle emotions and stress, here goes nothing.
I think one of the reasons that I was successful quickly with the TMS pain recovery is that once I received the information that TMS pain was a negative sensation associated with my emotions, I knew exactly how to treat it. I had been on a meditation and mindfulness journey for a while, and I had already spent a lot of time learning how to feel my emotions without putting a mental story to them. I battled and overcame some mild depression, long before I battled and overcame TMS pain and reading books and learning about mindfulness around depression was my cure. This may seem odd because of how strongly we attach stories to negative emotions, but the emotion itself does have a physical feeling in your body that is independent of what we are thinking about. Like a pain sensation, when you separate the story from the emotion, the negative emotion feels very different. So, the short answer about how I deal with negative emotions is the same as how I deal with an onset twinge of pain that I talked about in the last blog. I sit, feel, drop the dialogue, and move on in the present.
Some would say that this is repressing emotions. I would say this is the exact opposite of repressing emotions. I am formally releasing them. Kind of like my dogs (that don’t struggle with chronic pain or depression). They don’t have stories around their feelings, they just feel them, react to them, and move on in the present moment. The difference between me and my dogs is that I can consciously look at myself and my feelings and my reaction to them as an observer and they certainly cannot. When I sit with my feelings and emotions, feel them directly, strip away the sad, exciting story, and observe my reaction externally, I often notice that the squirrel that just ran in front of me should not be quite as emotionally upsetting as it was. Or the work email or whatever else got me going in that moment.
In addition to the formal mindful process that we have been discussing, I think there is also a knowledge component to dealing with negative emotions that can be very helpful. I read a lot of Buddhist books and mindfulness books, and a common theme is that emotional triggers are illusionary in nature. Much like TMS pain, negative emotions and stress are a distraction more than an actual symptom. Especially if they have become chronic in nature. What I have learned is that most everyday negative emotions and what we feel as stress are an imprint of a lifetime of that same stress re-occurring over and over. Buddhists might take it a step farther and say that it is accruing over and over through many lifetimes, but I am not sure I am onboard. Regardless, I have learned to identify that when I am Up-set it is really a subconscious Set-up. That work email from my boss this morning sent to 30 people that points out a couple of typos I made in an otherwise flawless 2000-word engineering report is not actually what I am feeling upset about. What I am upset about is every single boss or teacher I have ever had in my life that publicly slights my larger accomplishment and highlights minor errors in my work. It is a Set Up and a trap. Nobody that received that email cared about my typos but me. My boss didn’t even care and it took 2 minutes to fix. What am I upset about again? Oh yeah, I am not, that was just a Set Up and being stressed was a choice I decided not to make today. Is it 5 o’clock yet?
Obviously, not every stressor in life is petty, but regardless the process is helpful for me even for bigger life and death types of things. Anyway, that is my general process with mindfulness, although I am far more successful with TMS pain management than emotional management and they are completely separate processes for me, so take this advice with a grain of salt.
I would also like to point out that for me, there are absolutely times that it is appropriate and healthy to dig deeper into emotions, look at your past, face your demons etc. I think that should be a conscious intentional effort, but I don’t think it should be done for TMS or short term stress relief specifically. I don’t have major incidents from my childhood, I wasn’t abused, I had a relatively typical upbringing etc. But that does not mean I don’t have trauma and stress that dates back a long time. I carried emotional baggage and quite a bit of anger/rage on my back for many years. Still do from time to time. That is what made Sarno’s TMS rage so relatable and plausible to me. I have made mistakes in life and there are times that I have had to look or dig in a very introspective way where I examine those recurring stressors or fears that keep coming up repeatedly in my life. I might even write or journal about things, and I have done some reflecting to counselors in the past too. Keeping the recurrence of depression at bay is a far larger task for me than staying pain free.
All of this emotional work has been healthy for me, and I should probably do more of it. Especially if I want to get myself out of the trap I feel with work life balance or if I want to make some more progress on generally living a more meaningful, purposeful life with less stress and anxiety. But if I am smack-dab in the middle of a back or neck spasm, or on the verge of a panic attack due to stress, or can’t get out of bed due to depression, then I am not going to have any success in that inward journey and the attempt to force myself into it may even make me feel worse not better. Even nagging chronic foot pain can derail me from being able to have healthy, objective reflection because the physical negative feelings and unwanted negative thoughts/fears around the pains can take over and distract my effort.
I have more success when I use the mindfulness practice and the mindset I have described to quiet the mind and release the physical pain first, (or keep it from ever showing up in the first place). Then I can dig and reflect with a stable mind working on my terms and less distracted by negative feelings and physical pain in my body. A lot of the things people are suggesting online to Solve TMS sound great for long term emotional health but terrible as a TMS or short-term stress relief tool directly. This is because associating stress and emotional pain relief with physical TMS chronic pain relief sets up a never ending cycle of pain and treatment. Same as physical therapies.
Hopefully that clarifies my position on emotional work so that I don’t have to spend too much time defending my positions or being told that I am repressing my emotions. In my next blog I am going to discuss mediation and whether it can cure your TMS Chronic Pain.