| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| scottjmurray |
Posted - 01/09/2008 : 22:35:19
Hey, I just wrote this article. I thought it was a pretty good one, so I decided to post it here too.
A few nights ago I was thinking about how to communicate fully recovering from TMS to people, and I came up with the following analogy. TMS resides on top of a support structure. Certain components go into the generation of TMS symptoms and if you remove those components the entire structure crumbles. The subconscious mind, where TMS is created and controlled, operates on rules that can be altered through conscious intention. If you have the right “rules” in your head, you can actively destroy the process which creates the symptoms in the first place. This also has interesting implications for study of the placebo and nocebo effects, which I will get into a little later in this article.
Here is a graphical representation of what I’m talking about:
http://tms-recovery.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/support-structure.gif
What you can see looks sort of like a water tower with four pillars holding it up. The pillars read Doubt, Fear, Nocebo, and Ignorance of Conflict. I’ve ranked these in order of how I feel they are important to the generation, and consequently, the elimination of the TMS process from the human body. I will now address the four components individually.
Doubt
Doubt is bolded for a reason. It is next to impossible to completely recover from TMS if doubt remains lingering in the subconscious mind. Like I stated earlier, the subconscious mind runs off a set of rules which you have conscious influence over. Before recovering from TMS, people usually have a whole bunch of bad information and misdiagnosis running around in their subconscious minds. Those are the rules that I’m talking about. You think certain things about your symptoms, and thus they match up with your expectations. The decision-making ego uses this set of rules to outline what it can and can’t do to influence the body and create pain and other symptoms.
Conquering TMS requires taking a strong hold of how your brain is operating. You must be fully convinced that there isn’t anything wrong with you. You must be fully convinced that everything your doctor’s told you was wrong. You must be convinced that your brain is generating all of these symptoms, and that they are harmless. You must be convinced that the only possible explanation for your experience is that it is full-blown TMS, and nothing else. This is paramount to making a complete recovery, absolutely paramount.
Like I said, you can influence this set of rules. We do it all the time without even thinking about it. The first time we learned that when we let go of an object it tends to fall toward the ground we set up the rule of gravity. If we put our hands on a hot burner, we learn very quickly that it is painful and we shouldn’t do that again. We make these connections every day so we can better interact with our reality. The problem with people who get TMS is they have been constantly fed the wrong information by doctors, the internet, books, and the people they’ve talked to about their particular disorder. Because TMS is a highly-functional, efficient and easy distraction strategy, the ego employs the tactic and completely bypasses the conscious mind’s authority.
Affirmations are particularly helpful in eliminating the doubt. If you are still experiencing symptoms, that means there is still lingering doubt somewhere inside your subconscious mind. You must affirm to yourself over and over again until it becomes integrated into your psyche. TMS theory must literally become a part of you. Then you will know the truth, and you will be cured.
Fear
Fear often comes hand-in-hand with doubt. The two are interlinked. If you suffer from some mysterious disorder that no one can seem to help you with, you become very afraid. You start thinking that perhaps you’ll never be better again. This creates an incredible amount of anxiety. I can certainly attest to that. I lived in that world for close to two and a half years. It was near-constant panic.
Fear is a support structure because it tends itself toward doubt. If you are still afraid of your physical symptoms, that means somewhere inside your mind is a little inkling that you might be wrong with all this TMS stuff. If you knew absolutely that there was nothing wrong with your body, indeed that nothing is even damaged in the least bit, you would have no fear of your symptoms. You might be very angry that you have to put up with all the pain. You might be really distressed that you have to put up with some annoyance like acne or psoriasis, but you would not be afraid anymore. That is the attitude you want to adopt. You want the ability to stare the beast in its eyes.
As you work on affirming your belief in TMS as an entity, your fear will begin to subside. You will no longer take a flare-up as a sentence to further suffering, but rather a reminder that you need to continue to work on your belief structure. Once you can face your symptoms without sweating or tensing up, they will begin to back down. If you can’t be intimidated anymore, the brain has a very hard time continuing its current distraction strategy.
The Nocebo Effect
A lot of people have heard of the placebo Effect, whereby people get better from diseases simply by believing they are receiving the proper treatment, but not a lot of people realize this process can operate in the opposite way. The nocebo effect, intuitively, means that you can get sick if you believe you will. There are a lot of ways this can blockade recovery from TMS, and again it ties back into how our mind operates based upon our beliefs about our reality.
Let’s say you suffer from knee pain, and you associate it with a running “injury” you suffered a while back. Because of what you believe about the nature of your injury, you are frightened to run even after learning your disorder is actually TMS. By the time you screw up enough courage to go out and try it the conditioning you’ve gone through is still strong enough to recreate you exact symptoms. The pain becomes too distracting or intense to continue your run. Defeated, you return home. The nocebo effect “got you sick.” This is addressed in the same manner as any other erroneous belief, through affirmation of the truth.
Ignorance of Conflict
By conflict, I mean the emotional conflict that gives rise to TMS symptoms in the first place. I placed this last because from what I’ve discovered and learned over the past half year, you can recover completely without resolving any emotional problems at all. However, if you do not recognize that conflict is the driving force behind TMS, you have missed a critical part of the theory. Becoming aware of our individual conflicts helps to minimize the pressure that spawns TMS in the first place. So while it is barely necessary to make a full recovery, it is an important insight into how to live a life more in line with your true needs and desires.
Affirmations as the Way Out
Now that you’ve learned about TMS, and you would like to recover, it is time for you to take responsibility for your own brain. It is up to you to eliminate all of these support structures so that your individual TMS process can no longer run. You must clear out all that mental garbage and replace it with the truth about your condition. Like I’ve stated above, affirmations are one of the best ways to do this. I developed a special and effective way of doing this by combining a bunch of different methods I’ve tried. Here’s what the structure looks like:
For doubt: Even though I still have lingering doubts about TMS, which is a harmless disorder caused by my own mind, I deeply and completely accept myself.
For those of you who are familiar with EFT, this might sound a bit familiar to you. I use this structure because it helps you come to terms with your present state of mind regarding TMS, it affirms what you know to be true, and it throws in a little self-love too (which is always a good thing, but you don’t have to do it if you don’t want too).
For fear:
1. Even though I still allow myself to be afraid of TMS, which is a harmless disorder caused by my own mind, I still deeply and completely accept myself.
2. Even though I still allow myself to be distracted and preoccupied with my symptoms, I understand that my brain is the sole cause of all of this, and I deeply and completely accept myself.
3. Even though I still tense up whenever I feel a little bit of pain, I understand that my brain is only trying to distract me from my emotions, and I deeply and completely accept myself.
4. And one of my personal favorites: I absolutely refuse to be intimidated by my own brain.
And so on. I think you get the point.
Be creative with these, and tailor them to suit your individual needs. It helps to be as specific as possible, because chances are you have a lot of mental garbage to take care of. This technique should help you start to clear out the clutter. Set aside a little time each day to rail through all of the affirmations you come up with. Maybe do it before bed and after you wake up, to set the mood for recovery. Keep in mind that it takes as long as it takes, depending on how receptive you are to the ideas of Dr. Sarno. Don’t push yourself. Your beliefs must be genuine to make this work, so start working on convincing yourself. Knock out those support structures!
Author of tms-recovery.com
A collection of articles on emotions, lifestyle changes, and TMS theory. |
| 6 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| scottjmurray |
Posted - 01/10/2008 : 11:38:58
Lol @ QSO. Always insightful. I'm glad you hang around this board.
@ Austini - EFT is a strange phenomenon. I don't necessarily believe in the common explanation for why it works (involving the energy meridians and all that), it seems to initiate some sort of processing mechanism inherent to the human mind. It's like DIY EMDR therapy or something like that. Where you tap is completely irrelevant. I think it works because it exposes you to what you're actually doing over and over again, and that direct awareness on the inter-workings of your own mind allows for real change.
Author of tms-recovery.com
A collection of articles on emotions, lifestyle changes, and TMS theory. |
| qso |
Posted - 01/10/2008 : 06:39:12
Scott -
Yes, your theory is entirely consistent with my experience.
Also, I agree, some poeple are coming around to the fact that many human illnesses that do not go away after ~3 months are created by the brain, and all of these different healing techniques, including EFT pretty much work on the same principle of reprogramming the brain.
Something that helped me bring the doubt down to 0 was reading non-Sarno stuff on similar topics and seeing the connections. It is bizarre how the mainstream medical profession has to beleive in the placebo effect in order to design "studies" to sell drugs, and then denies the brain's power to cause and correct illness which is completely self-contradictory. Their "studies" have little scientific basis and are designed mainly to sell drugs-make no mistake folks!
I like the 4 pillars idea. Talking of analogies, here's an idea of how to explain TMS to your friends and family:
Suppose you are in a room that is too hot.
Conventional doctor would say: "Put loads of ice boxes in the room to cool down. We have heard that there is a thermostat but there is no scientific evidence that it works."
Alternative therapy: "Why don't you try taking off some clothes?"
TMS approach: "Let's try to find the thermostat and see if we can fix it if it is broken or change the settings."
QSO |
| austini |
Posted - 01/10/2008 : 02:13:47
Hi Scott,
Excellent article thanks very much.
Do you ever use EFT along with your affirmations? The basic EFT tapping procedure is very simple but I have never really given it a good try to date. Perhaps I should given that it seems to work for a lot of people.
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| scottjmurray |
Posted - 01/10/2008 : 00:37:45
quote:
And even for myself, it is challenging, as many of my physical problems have never been mentioned by any "expert" as TMS. But really, for me, any bodily dysfunction can be approached this way.
It's interesting you bring that up, because I'm starting to believe that the bulk of every "disease" I have experienced in my life was due to this process.
For instance, today I was out running. Totally normal activity for me, just a little half-hour jog around the indoor track at my university. I got nailed hard by some sort of massive stomach and lower intestinal track pain. Instantly I thought it was my brain trying to screw with me, so I pushed through some of the worst pain I've experienced running in my entire life. Man, it hurt sooo so bad.
I figured... well, if it is TMS I can slam it by killing any doubt or lingering physical thoughts inside my brain, and if it isn't the worst that could happen would be that I would have to chill at my apartment for the next few days and eat crackers and drink ginger ale. So I did it, started attacking the thoughts...
Among them, my friends had recently come down with a similar stomach ailment, which I was suspicious of its physical origins from the beginning. As I continued to battle with my brain and eliminate all the little alleyways of doubt that I had about the psychosomatic nature of it, my pain lifted off of me. I sat down and ate a huge meal in kind of a kamikaze sort of gesture toward my brain, and within about an hour the pain disappeared entirely.
I'm sitting here in no pain, not even a trace of the ridiculous cramping and discomfort I was experiencing. I'm still amazed my brain tried to pull that on me. It was real convincing, for sure. I'd be pissed off at my brain right now, but I'm still kind of in awe that I stopped it in its tracks.
Just had to share that little story. Good luck continuing your work, Wavy one.
Author of tms-recovery.com
A collection of articles on emotions, lifestyle changes, and TMS theory. |
| Wavy Soul |
Posted - 01/10/2008 : 00:04:39
Scott - I REALLY like this. In reading the section on doubt, I am struck by how much it is taking me to walk this TMS path. It's a huge endeavor for me, because I have complex conditions that have been going for 30 years. And right now I have "real" flu and dangerously low blood pressure blah blah blah... Trying to sort it all out is difficult sometimes.
The odd-yet-true thing is that I agree that you have to have a complete belief in the TMS diagnosis, yet for myself I need to also be fluid enough to not believe it in certain circumstances. This sounds like doubt, but feels more like fluid thinking, and I am still intensely doing this work.
I have tried encouraging friends and clients with chronic illness to try this path, but have found very few of the many people I interact with truly willing to make the cognitive effort. And in fact, as far as they are concerned, I have had a miraculous recovery. I don't tell them all the details of how I still am working with symptoms, because my initial TMS awakening was like a resurrection and I have never gone back that far. Yet they think it's something to "try," but it isn't. You have to actually do it.
As you describe, I see how thick and webbed in a matrix of consensus reality are all the memes of illness, and I don't have the energy right now to take it all on except for myself. But I am saying this because I can relate to your efforts to spread this information. I have a passion to do the same - I just have to give myself some space until I am more established in good health.
And even for myself, it is challenging, as many of my physical problems have never been mentioned by any "expert" as TMS. But really, for me, any bodily dysfunction can be approached this way.
Thanks again for your articles, website, efforts. One more suggestion: very short paragraphs are much more readable and inviting online.
xx
Love is the answer, whatever the question |
| Wavy Soul |
Posted - 01/10/2008 : 00:01:01
Scott - I REALLY like this. In reading the section on doubt, I am struck by how much it is taking me to walk this TMS path. It's a huge endeavor for me, because I have complex conditions that have been going for 30 years. And right now I have "real" flu and dangerously low blood pressure blah blah blah... Trying to sort it all out is difficult sometimes.
The odd-yet-true thing is that I agree that you have to have a complete belief in the TMS diagnosis, yet for myself I need to also be fluid enough to not believe it in certain circumstances. This sounds like doubt, but feels more like fluid thinking, and I am still intensely doing this work.
I have tried encouraging friends and clients with chronic illness to try this path, but have found very few of the many people I interact with truly willing to make the cognitive effort. And in fact, as far as they are concerned, I have had a miraculous recovery. I don't tell them all the details of how I still am working with symptoms, because my initial TMS awakening was like a resurrection and I have never gone back that far. Yet they think it's something to "try," but it isn't. You have to actually do it.
As you describe, I see how thick and webbed in a matrix of consensus reality are all the memes of illness, and I don't have the energy right now to take it all on except for myself. But I am saying this because I can relate to your efforts to spread this information. I have a passion to do the same - I just have to give myself some space until I am more established in good health.
And even for myself, it is challenging, as many of my physical problems have never been mentioned by any "expert" as TMS. But really, for me, any bodily dysfunction can be approached this way.
Thanks again for your articles, website, efforts. One more suggestion: very short paragraphs are much more readable and inviting online.
xx
Love is the answer, whatever the question |
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