| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Hillbilly |
Posted - 02/26/2008 : 08:50:54
Hello again, all!
I am a guy who spent lots of time on this forum a while back, mostly in search of an answer to my problem with pain. My pain and other symptoms hit during a period of time when I was disgusted with my work, bored at home, felt trapped in every aspect of my life and emotionally drained.
I spent months and months attempting to employ the techniques outlined by Dr. Sarno to rid myself of awful neck and upper back symptoms. I was confused and bewildered about ongoing symptoms because I was fully aware of all the stressors in my life and my own personality. I used to read his books and hope for inspiration, but I got hung up on absurdities in his logic, like the brain picking capillaries near a herniated disc to try to trick you and other such nonsense. I had to throw out the idea of distraction as the purpose of TMS and see it as a result. A result of continued negativity and stressed nervous system. Dr. Brady seems to have come closer to acknowledging the overloaded nervous system, but still attributes it to those dastardly repressed emotions that we are hiding in our mind's basement amid the cobwebs.
So I started to read about anxiety conditions. These, as opposed to Dr. Sarno's work, have been scientifically studied and well-documented in the literature for decades. The cure lies in acceptance and understanding that the symptoms are just everyday symptoms of stress exaggerated by fixation and sensitization, and calming your system down by dropping the fixation and responding to life's challenges instead of shrinking away from them because you fear failure, embarrassment, or not living up to some perfectionistic standard. This often involves cognitive restructuring and learning to think differently and stop working up your emotions into a tidal wave of adrenaline and cortisol that leaves you drained, tense, achy and in pain.
I found out how they work and what to do about them. I had been nervous and anxious all my life and only occasionally became aware of it, mostly when my body reacted strongly to some situation that sent shockwaves of adrenaline through my body. So, I sought out the cause of my problem and was amazed to discover how negative my thinking was. I had always assumed the worst was going to happen, that catastrophe lay around every corner, that I had no power to influence my own happiness, and on and on.
This is the cause and perpetuation of TMS (or more, accurately, anxiety-induced muscle tension and pain). It is also the cause of FMS, CFS, and a host of other "diseases" that allopathic medicine cannot treat at all. No intervention works other than drugging people into a stupor, which doesn't work at all, really, it merely masks the agony lying just below the surface and in many cases causes terrifying side effects or dependency. My personal choice was to look the devil in the eye, because it was me the whole time.
My GP's office should have a drive-through window for anti-depressants and call-ahead ordering. But there are people out there who have recovered from these conditions by fixing their thinking and being responsible for their lives. I sought help from one, a kind-hearted genius who explained everything that was happening to me on a physiological level in terms of how my thinking was causing it to happen and keeping the cycle going. Tensing is an active habit the you can become conscious of and let go of.
It is a tightening of the body in response to a perceived threat to your social reputation, physical health, or whatever else you "perceive" as a threat. As long as these things threaten you in your mind, you will get symptoms. Been severely embarrassed before? You tense against those feelings if you take it seriously. You feel deeply, work yourself up over it, think about it in times when you should be relaxing, but instead you are pressing the adrenal accelerator to figure out how to avoid this feeling again or how you can talk to your boss without shaking all over. And trying to impress or influence the thinking of others people with your wit and charm as though you are a puppeteer with control switches in your hand to manipulate the minds of others.
TMS is in my opinion, a byproduct of anxiety disorders, nothing more and nothing less. People with these conditions are just not honest with themselves about their insecurities when they say their lives would be great and wonderful if they could just get out of pain. Getting rid of pain means letting go of the tensing habit, but what about all the rotten ideas you had before your symptoms came upon you? Those have to be fixed. And psychoanlysis, as advocated by Sarno, has a terrible track record in dealing with nervous conditions. The psychiatric community has all but abandoned this type of treatment.
Lastly, I found that all labels serve no purpose when we are talking about nervousness. All the different labels listed in the DSM-IV, the diagnostic Bible of the psychiatric community, might help practitioners, but they don't help us. They get us thinking about conditions instead of solutions. Symptoms overlap. Look at the symptom list for FMS. All of them are common stress symptoms experienced individually or en masse by people with entrenched anxiety. And all are caused by a rampaging nervous system and adrenal exhaustion. Do you really think a disease can be accurately diagnosed if 11 spots are tender to touch? What happens if three go away, does that mean you now have myofascial pain syndrome? What causes that, doctor? Well, we don't really know. Why do we stay tight and tense and unahppy? That is the $1 million question that must be answered and addressed for long-term peace.
Many of you know how you struggle with anxiety and yet are here to try to get rid of physical pain. Some are in therapy trying to process childhood emotions with the help of a psychotherapist on the recommendation of Dr. Sarno. If you want a small piece of advice if you are struggling with his theories or even got out of pain but are still unhappy, depressed or just never relaxed and comfortable, help is out there. You have to let your nervous system calm down (this could take months, even without new "stress responses") and this means giving up the most stressful thought of all, "I won't ever get over this." If you coddle your symptoms and feelings in this way, it is likely you will be right.
Remember, TMS, like anxiety, is a diagnosis of exclusion, which means there is NOTHING wrong with you physically. Your body is capable of normal activity. Your nervous system is not, however, cooperating because of your mental state. Fix this and let your body do its designed functions.
Lastly, many do get better simply by understanding there isn't anything wrong, getting back to physical activity and forgetting about their back or neck or whatever, so in that regard, I applaud Dr. Sarno's work. But I can't believe he has overlooked or brushed aside the obvious history of so many of struggling with anxiety and not addressing it at all other than to call it an equivalent of his discovery.
Here's to your health and recovery! |
| 20 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| hriffe |
Posted - 03/14/2010 : 11:24:23
Hello to all,
I am a new member and immediately found this post very interesting. I have suffered from anxiety and physical pain for most of my 48 years. I have tried the Lucinda Bassit program (still have it somewhere), Claire Weekes, Relaxation response and so on. Not only can I say I got zero results, most raised the anxiety levels in me.
I found Sarno's book a while back and though it has offered no cure, I do notice a difference when I try to focus on the inner rage. I believe I need psychoanalysis but have no idea where to start. So that is why I am here. I have enjoyed Hillbilly's posts and everyones reply's. God Bless you all!
Rufus |
| johnnybill45 |
Posted - 03/11/2010 : 18:03:02
The tensing habit. That is me in a nutshell. I think you are on to something there Hillbilly.
As a kid, my brother teased me due to my "nervous habit" of tensing, twitching, etc. My mother would just say I was nervous. I grew out of it but grew into back pain instead. I get up in front of people and play in a rock band, perform magic, and do presentations at work and this doesn't bother me one bit. But something is bothering me, and I can't figure it out!
I've tried for years to follow Sarno's methods, and have had some relief, but it always comes back and a small part of the pain is always there.
I like your advice. I think you might have a missing piece of the puzzle there. Gives me something to think about. |
| PRCalDude |
Posted - 03/10/2010 : 16:01:07
bump |
| csmoon |
Posted - 03/01/2008 : 11:58:46
Edited. |
| armchairlinguist |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 17:49:23
quote:
evolved to posseses a protective mechanism that selectively targets soft tissue areas and reduces blood flow, to create a distraction from unpleasant repressed emotions.
Why would we have to have evolved this capacity for the purpose of having this capacity? It may rather be a byproduct of other capacities.
There is no rule that all lines in a row of checkout stands must be approximately the same length; it's an emergent phenomenon that occurs as a result of other behaviors and facts (people seek the shortest line, there are observable measures of length of line, etc). Similarly, TMS may be an emergent phenomenon, probably partly caused by culturally-learned behavior, that takes advantage of the fact that our emotional and physical states are closely linked.
Honestly, I think it's important to look for the real explanation for TMS, but I think it's much more important for everyone who's obsessed with finding the 'real explanation' that they learn that continually analyzing, searching, and nitpicking the theories is not going to help them.
Accepting the concept is what gets you places, and Sarno says this. He formulated the other stuff as a possible explanation and his own books say that he has doubts about it. Looking and looking for more explanations honestly strikes me as a manifestation of the distraction explanation itself. It may be your smart brain that's generating nitpicks, but the motivation to generate them is coming from somewhere else -- maybe from the part of you that wants to avoid actually accepting a theory that means that the pain will have to be acknowledged as coming from the mind. And it's when you finally decide to stop being motivated to nitpick whatever theory you decide on that you succeed. Because all theories can be analyzed to death. None of them will be truly satisfactory.
--
It's not 100% belief that's required, but 100% commitment. |
| alexis |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 16:03:32
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
Alexis, have you read anything at all about anxiety disorders?
Yes. And I'm not by any means convinced anxiety is a TMS "equivalent" either. I'm actually less convinced of the whole "equivalency" idea than the distraction component, but I am open to change my mind there.
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
You have posted about alexithymia, which from my admittedly scant reading describes some sort of inability to feel, identify or express emotions.
This doesn't describe me very well at all. I won't generalize and annoy you, but it doesn't describe the 65 people that I have worked with so far either.
It describes a lot of people I've seen (at least in part), but so does the anxiety disorder explanation. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different people. And it's going to be a hard diagnosis for anyone to accept (I'd certainly rather have anxiety or depression or almost anything than be "lacking in emotional experience"). But the estimates I've seen indicate a prevalence between 2 and 10 percent of the population (different studies, different meansures, different populations) so it's not that rare.
But there's a lot of research on somatization in people with alexithymia, and I think it's something like this that Sarno was getting at (hence his whole focus on supressed anger). I don't think I'd describe myself as having had full blown classic alexithymia either - but neither did I have classic anxiety. There were, however, alexithymic components to my personality. And anxiety components.
quote:
Originally posted by HillbillyIt certainly doesn't make sense in the case of cancer patients. They are most certainly distracted by their pain, but I don't think we would say that is its purpose.
You're not going to find me arguing that either cancer or cancer pain are caused by a distraction syndrome. However, if a person with cancer related pain found that they hurt more when they tried to think about a taboo emotion or subject, and focussed intently on the cancer in those situations, I would say the increased pain may be serving a distraction purpose.
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
I can more easily accept distraction as the RESULT of the pain in both TMS/anxiety, no differently than in cancer, arthritis, broken limbs, and dyspepsia.
I definitley think there's plain old pain from organic causes (and in contrast to some here I think there's a lot of that) and I think there's also pain or illness which serves as a distraction. And I think that can be related to an organic and real pain like cancer or arthritis -- which would also be distracting even if you didn't need a distraction. I certainly agree that distraction can, and often is, just a result of organic pain. And it can (and will) be primarily the result of anxiety, depending on the origin cause(s) of that anxiety. But distraction itself can also, I believe, be the cause of pain and other physical syndromes. And nervous system disorder (or "overload") can itself be a part of the distraction process (I tend to see it more as a mode of operation, than an equivalent). But the use of this system and it's resultant symptoms do not negate the existence of "distraction" itself as a causal mechanism in many cases.
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
The organic diseases that have pain commonly associated with them certainly use the pain as an alert that something isn't right in the body.
Agreed.
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
Could you accept that the pain of the tight tissues in TMS/anxiety signals that something is wrong with the nervous system?
Well I don't think there's a single unit called "TMS/anxiety" so I can't answer that question exactly. The brain is the nervous system and that is where the matter of thought exists (unless your an old fashioned Descartes follower or something). I'm basically an eliminative materialist -- but I don't think we want to go into a treatise on cognitive science here. So in short, I think anxiety could be focused on either from a mind or nervous sytem perspective. The best mode of understanding for the primary "cause" will depend on the individual case.
TMS (as distraction theory) is best causally understood from a "mind" perspective, although and understanding of the nervous system and brain can shed light on the possible mechanisms of the syndrome.
|
| austini |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 15:22:23
quote:
Originally posted by skizzik
... I would really like for you to get into the details of your recovery, post a success story perhaps. ...
I agree - that would be fantastic to see and of immense benefit to many I'm sure.
I haven't been here that long but I have read quite a bit of archived material and in the vast majority of cases I detect an incredible amount of underlying anxiety. Call it the tension in TMS if you will. But get rid of the tension (which is just anxiety), accept that hurt does not equal harm and get back to living by floating (not fighting) past your symptoms and eventually they will go away.
Again, Hillbilly please consider posting a bit more detail in the form of a success story as it would take a lot less of your energy and time than debating with those who want to argue about your views. That way those of us who can see the anxiety link can benefit greating from your experience. Then you can happily get back to your life and those of us still here who have benefited greatly from you can direct others to your story.
Cheers - Gordon |
| Odrog |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 14:40:23
Again with all due respect MK - I think the problem is that you don't understand what "anxiety" is, or the definition in your mind is not the same as what the rest of us are talking about. Its not "TMS" vs. "Anxiety". TMS=anxiety disorder. All of the things you have described, people with childhood trauma for example that have mind-body problems, suffer from anxiety. No one here ever said things from your past can't or don't contribute to anxiety in the present. No one said dealing with issues from the past isn't important for some people.
|
| swmr1 |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 11:22:19
Lots of interesting reading in this post. I consider myself very lucky that getting rid of the fear of injury (and resulting inability to do the things I love) was all that I needed to cure me. I spent 8 years with piriformis syndrome and various foot and shoulder and knee pains. As soon as I had someone validate my internal feelings that this wasn't about my body suddenly becoming so fragile (and somehow all of this had to do with my mental/emotional state) I got better.
I've actually never done the journaling because when I get started on something like that I get bogged down and can be obsessed with doing it right. Maybe for some of us the journaling can lead to more stress for fear we won't do it right and will still have some kind of pain. The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach is what I'm taking. I'm sure there are different ways of recognizing and battling TMS for different people. |
| Hillbilly |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 10:36:50
quote:
Everybody is different; what works for one may not work for someone else.
Hi, Dave. Thanks for the opportunity to play here again. I just checked the thread and wanted to see if there was anything I could respond to to wrap this up. I am not leaving because I am angry. People disagree with me frequently, and while it used to be a source of enormous stress for me, it now provides me the opportunity to face my old, automated thinking processes that led me here in the first place, dismiss it as nonsense, and go on.
You make a great point about overanalysis. That is why I started this thread. Please reread the initial post. It contains my story and my hope that others could find relief if they, like a few here who have been stuck in the analysis mode, were offered something that they could more easily grasp. The most important thing remains accepting that there is nothing wrong, which many times alone can break the stress cycle and lead to cure. Sarno's first book offered all this, and the letters in the back of Healing Back Pain, which I dug out of storage yesterday to find a note I wrote way back, prove this to me.
These people were all able to accept that stress and nothing structural was causing their pain and regain their physical health. This simple theory cured very close to the same percentage as his follow-up studies, which means that prior to the suggestion of defense and distraction, the theory of stress, not structure, was able to cure at relatively the same rate, improve at the same rate, and have relatively the same failures. His own published success rate through psychoanalysis in his own office wouldn't look good to me on a sales brochure.
The letter that proves what you say about simplicity to be true for me is the guy who writes that he was scheduled for surgery, read the book and got better, then wrote a letter to his doctor saying Dr. Sarno's theory was to get up and move so the blood could flow to the effected tissues and relax. Well, if you've read the book, Sarno says neither. He certainly advocates movement, but in order to feel normal and to combat fear of disability. So this guy, though he gets an F in reading comprehension, gets an A in application.
But mode of how this works is still very important in curing more people because seeking plausible explanation remains critical. Why? Because people who are prone to these disorders are of above-average intelligence. If this theory were practiced around the world in GP offices, some patients would feel relief in the doc's office, go home and be fine soon. Others, like me and many of your current board members, would seek alternative answers because of the power of the symptoms and would reject immediately the idea that my brain sought my demise because I repressed my anger. Please visit forums on anxiety boards if you need evidence of this. The themes there are identical to the ones seen here day after day. "Hi, my name is ____. For the past year I have had this "unbearable" pain in my side that comes on at the oddest times. I was diagnosed with anxiety 10 years ago, and since then have had all sorts of weird things happen in my body. For the last six months, I have had this pain in my back (or tingling in lips, or wekness of a limb, or fatigue) that I can't get rid of, and I have been to physical therapy, tried trigger point massage, nothing helps. I have had thirteen tests and they can't find anything. Every time the doc says nothing is wrong I feel better, but then it doesn't go away so I keep thinking they've missed something, I can't believe anxiety causes this, but that is what my doctor says it is. Does anyone else get this?" You will see it every single day, here and there, no difference.
There are also people who have completely cured themselves who try to reassure them and tell them how they did it. Why I choose not to correspond through this forum is because I already volunteer my time attempting to help others get past functional illnesses, nervous conditions, TMS, AOS, CFS, IBS, and other BS in their lives. The label isn't important, but the correct treatment sure is. The most important part of the treatment is getting the person to accept that nothing is physically wrong and to stop thinking that way. Most can't accept that until they experience something counter to their feared outcome.
But when someone attempts to convince someone of the mode of what is happening, I believe it is better to look at scientific research into brain function than to posit and stick like flypaper to a theory that has all but been entirely rejected by his own proselytes, which no doubt grew out of their concern for their patients and desire to offer plausible, documented explanations. I applaud the courage of these physicians.
Lastly, I have an assignment for someone who talks to Dr. Sarno. Please ask the man himself why he thinks that TMS operates outside the world of anxiety disorders (again, not the emotion anxiety, but the identified, accepted labels in the DSM-IV, just to make it easier for understanding). What research has he done to reject that explanation? Ask him why Dr. Brady and Dr. Schubiner are explaining the physiological aspects differently and if he has seen their research and to give his opinion. Why the change to myoneural in the syndrome name after all these years of amazing success? Why does he now think the nerves are the primary tissue? Ask him if he can record your conversation to be played here or on your website so that the presumptive bias is not at play. Others may add to this list. This would be a very good use of this forum in my opinion. The goal is healing for sufferers, not defense of theories. I would love to hear his reactions. If Dr. Sarno won't cooperate, perhaps one of the others will. I would love to hear it.
Dave, you are right. This all complicates the process. But for people who need all the i's dotted and t's crossed before drinking the Kool-Aid, and you can see concrete evidence of such right here on your site, filling in the holes to these and other questions might be the only hope they have for regaining their health.
Please take this request seriously and thoughtfully in the spirit of improving results. I didn't come here with a heart full of hate for Dr. Sarno. I love this guy's personality, and his dedication to his patients is unbelievable. That characterization of me as the angry man isn't accurate. I am angry at suffering and the inability of the medical and psychological professions to reach common ground on how to treat these patients without them having to go through what I did. I have now and always have had a great life, I just couldn't see it before.
Alexis, have you read anything at all about anxiety disorders? You have posted about alexithymia, which from my admittedly scant reading describes some sort of inability to feel, identify or express emotions. This doesn't describe me very well at all. I won't generalize and annoy you, but it doesn't describe the 65 people that I have worked with so far either.
And distraction can happen not just in TMS and other psychogenic disorders. The distraction by pain can only be accepted generally to be the "purpose" of the syndrome where no other explanation makes sense. It certainly doesn't make sense in the case of cancer patients. They are most certainly distracted by their pain, but I don't think we would say that is its purpose. I can more easily accept distraction as the RESULT of the pain in both TMS/anxiety, no differently than in cancer, arthritis, broken limbs, and dyspepsia. The organic diseases that have pain commonly associated with them certainly use the pain as an alert that something isn't right in the body. Could you accept that the pain of the tight tissues in TMS/anxiety signals that something is wrong with the nervous system?
Lastly, skiz,
I would agree with everything in the last post, but when I read that thread the first time with Sensei and fbn, I didn't get the right vibe. What you have taken from it seems like how I would interpret it. And sure, it isn't the present pain that is so bad, but the thought of it getting worse, making us collapse, embarrass ourselves and other games we play in our mind that perpetuates the stress cycle. This is what Claire Weekes calls second fear. |
| armchairlinguist |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 09:42:01
quote:
But scientific overanalysis is not very useful in recovering from TMS.
This was something I noticed in the original post. There was a lot of talk about nitpicking the theory. It's a common tendency that in what I've seen on the forum just doesn't help anyone at all.
--
It's not 100% belief that's required, but 100% commitment. |
| Dave |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 08:24:19
Nothing like a good old fashioned debate sparked by an old member coming back to dispute Dr. Sarno's theory, only to get personally offended and leave again. Reminds me of the good old days of this forum 
I haven't read this thread in detail (the title alone was an indication that it was not worth my time) but it is interesting to see the same patterns emerging over and over on this forum.
Many people overcomplicate things when it comes to TMS. Those who don't get results are quick to dismiss the theory entirely and come up with alternate ideas. In effect they blame Dr. Sarno for their lack of results.
Time will tell if Hillbilly has really found his "cure." I hope so. But scientific overanalysis is not very useful in recovering from TMS.
None of the details of Dr. Sarno's theory really matter. Much of it can be viewed metaphorically. Is there really a "pool of unconscious rage"? Is our brain really trying to "distract" us? Is the mechanism simply "oxygen deprivation"? Who knows.
Dr. Sarno's theory is something that makes sense to us, something we can relate to, something we can understand. But just as modern medicine is naive to assume that real physical symptoms cannot be caused by psychological factors, it would be naive to assume that Dr. Sarno has all the answers about the TMS process. Humans really have no clue about how the brain works. 99% of it remains a total mystery. The exact mechanisms behind TMS may be far beyond our comprehension.
The important thing is that we acquire the knowledge to accept that our symptoms are psychogenic, and then the courage to recondition the way we think about them and react to them. Everybody is different; what works for one may not work for someone else.
Understanding the scientific details of how TMS works is not important. The fact is, we will never know in our lifetimes if the details of Dr. Sarno's theory are accurate. But what we do know is that tens of thousands of patients have been helped by following his treatment suggestions. Those suggestions primarily serve to recondition us -- to take away the power that the symptoms hold over us -- to disarm the fear and allow us to get back to leading normal lives without obsessing over the symptoms or searching endlessly for a medical diagnosis and "cure."
Maybe Hillbilly found "his" answer, but it is quite arrogant to think that it is "the" answer. I do not believe there is such a thing. |
| skizzik |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 05:46:28
hill,
hopefully you have an encore post in you. Would you agree however, by flybynight's thread that I linked earlier that "having any expectation of what the pain will do, or will still be there will perpetuate it?"
That no matter what the original cause of the TMS was, fustration from lack of recovery is the main perpetuator, period (for those not recovering w/ journaling), would you agree w/ that?
Also, you've created an excellent thread here, and re'cvd commendations for it, yet it seems you feel your'e being chased off. I don't see anyone here doing that.
I would really like for you to get into the details of your recovery, post a success story perhaps. What is pure Sarnoist theory anyways? The "daily reminders" are CBT, the quotes that you must have "distain for the pain" and "TMS must occupy the concious mind to work" w/b CBT.
|
| mk6283 |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 04:56:32
Nearly every patient I have ever seen with a chronic pain complaint has some underlying unconscious conflict that they have repressed. I have yet to meet a fibromyalgia patient that was not sexually or physically abused as a child. To deny that the pain's presence is at all connected to these psychologically, but not physically, forgotten traumas is incorrect. Whether the function of the pain is to distract is a matter of debate (a better argument is that many TMS symptoms are often trivial so how can they serve to distract from what are often painful emotional issues?). Don't know why you feel the need to reiterate the role of the amygdyla, hippocampus, hypothalamus, frontal cortex, etc. Overanalyzing brain structures is a waste of time. Thinking physically is a waste of time. I don't know whether we agree or not, but if we don't then that is also fine. There is nothing wrong with using another approach! You are not a heretic for finding success outside of TMS. I'm glad your approach has worked for you, but my experience has simply taught me otherwise. Congratulations and best of luck.
Best,
MK |
| alexis |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 04:48:12
Hillbilly writes:
quote:
"MK sealed it for me by restating exactly what I said and then saying it was wrong."
Actually, what MK said was:
quote:
"TMS may or may not function as a means of physical distraction from psychological conflict"
While Hillbilly stated:
quote:
"I think his whole notion of targeting and distraction is all nonsense."
and
quote:
“I had to throw out the idea of distraction as the purpose of TMS and see it as a result."
MK’s argument left room for both possibilities while Hillbilly's argument has been to reject distraction theory outright, for everyone. Certainly if you haven't experienced the distraction phenomenon in its obvious form, moving on to a new theory for your own condition may very well be the right idea.
For those of you who haven't had the experience, it is a really obvious and straight forward phenomenon once one identifies it. You try to think about a normal topic and can concentrate a normal length of time (whatever normal is for your attention span). You try to think about the taboo topic, and your mind wanders instantly and uncontrollably -- you think about other topics, obsess on unrelated and trivial things, or, and this is the important part, you generate pain. The pain is in a particular location or locations, and when you deny it, it jumps, instantly, to a new location. You can chase it around, watching as the pain jumps from spot to spot ... it's actually kind of funny once you've got a grasp on it.
This experience isn't, for those of us who have actually experienced it, a deep, mysterious or cryptic thing. I've always been surprised by people who haven't had this obvious experience and yet have stayed on this board trying to prove to themselves that they have TMS. Sure, it’s conceivable that they might be so overpoweringly distracted that they can't identify the experience at all. But it seems equally plausible that they don't have a distraction syndrome at all. Really, if this isn't working for you and doesn't, within a few weeks, ring true to your experience, move on and investigate other possibilities. You can always come back to this one if you suddenly do have a change in perception.
Hillbilly probably falls into this category of those who never had a distraction syndrome at all. He would, given all his personal research, know his own psychology best. What just stuns some of us here is his presumption to know our psychology as well -- when most of us have done at least as much research in a wide variety of fields. And, more importantly, when we are the ones in our own heads experiencing our own pain syndromes.
Hillbilly's skepticism of the experiences of others reminds me of doubts I once had in another area. I had never experience lucid dreaming and when I heard of it, I actually doubted its existence. I mean how the heck can you be conscious when your dreaming??? It went against my very definition of what it meant to "dream". I didn't go around saying it, mind you, but I did doubt. And it was only when I experienced it myself that I knew for sure it existed. And my definitions changed.
And I recognize that if Hillbilly doesn't have a distraction syndrome the fairly obvious and straight forward experience of watching your own distraction may not be available to him. Like synesthesia isn't available to me. But I don't go around saying the experience doesn't exist just because I haven't had it. And I don't post on synesthesia boards that the idea of tasting colors is "nonsense" (to use Hillbilly's words about distraction theory).
Edit: I noticed the next two posts address Hillbilly directly, and I want to point out, if you are there Hillbilly, I'm not ignoring you. I just assumed you weren't coming back when you said you were leaving. Sorry if I took that too literally -- I just stop reading threads myself when I get annoyed so understand other people doing the same.
I did read your response to my post and have some disagreements with it -- mainly because I think you missed the point I was trying to make and appeared to assume you had offered "proof" of your position by demanding "proof" of others (when what you actually gave is anecdotal stories about yourself and some quick summaries of others theories). I wrote an earlier response and deleted it immediately beause many of the issues seemed tangental to the point of this board. Anyway, I am glad the anxiety approach works for you and hope that those to whom it does apply have learned from your posts. |
| mcone |
Posted - 02/29/2008 : 01:23:39
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
All my best to everyone here. Now back to my life again!
A very encouraging exchange of ideas here. Before you exit for good, might I ask you to shoot me an email for contact info? In my book, anyone who successfully works thier way out of the matrix earns the status of an authority - and I definitely could benefit from a consult with a like-minded person.
Thanks for considering,
mcone
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| Hillbilly |
Posted - 02/28/2008 : 23:19:25
OK, folks,
I am outta here. MK sealed it for me by restating exactly what I said and then saying it was wrong. The amygdala (please see the post above) is part of the brain that is outside the conscious part, call it subconscious or unconscious. The entire process of symptom creation happens on the subconscious level in response to conditioned happenings in the HPA axis. Has anyone read Dr. Brady's book or watched Dr. Schubiner's video before attempting to refute everything I put out here? Please do it. After all, they are "TMS docs,"
Your example of knee pain is easily brought in with all other bodily discomforts for which no tests find a major problem. The fact is that we focus on it, fear it, analyze it, get angry about it. amplify its effect, and it stays like a stray dog that you keep feeding. That is the case with back pain, headaches, and every other common symptom that fall under the rubric "anxiety disorder." What has to happen is a conscious change must be enacted by the person's will to no longer view the ailment as a danger or impediment, and the nervous system can then relax. I have seen this in countless people with whom I have worked since recovering.
I, like Odrog, cannot make sense at all of the psychological statement. The follow-up about a person with no overt stress/anxiety with pain is completely outside of Dr. Sarno's theory as well as mine. But I suspect there are people who are so completely out of touch with their own thought life and emotions that it is possible. If you have a name, perhaps that person should post his success story.
I appreciate Dave's letting me play here the past three days without threatening to shut me down as he did before. I was angry then, but I got past it. I came with a message of hope for many of you to regain your normal physical health and even find peace with yourself for the first time in your lives. That, in my case, is no exaggeration.
Mcone, boy! Are you sure you and I aren't from the same parents? I read your post and went and read some of your old stuff. Sarno has you balled up just like he did me. You are twisting yourself into a ball of tension. You and only you can determine if you are suffering from emotional tension, but just your tone in your posts suggest mountains of anxiety -- pressure to recover, angst over career issues. I was in the same spot, only with little kids (you don't mention any, so pardon me if you do have them). What finally got me to surrender the fight was reading about surrender from Dr. Weekes. Fighting adds tension, whether it is fighting your situation, your feelings, or symptoms. I needed help from someone who had lived it.
I hope you are in counseling, and if not, I hope you find someone who will scream at you when you start to analyze or fight back. My coach had to tell me 10 times an hour to stop thinking about what she said or how she said it and follow directions. If you suspect from the timing of onset of your symptoms that you were just overwhelmed and out of control, you probably can safely treat it this way.
A small aside: the quote you attributed to stanfr was mine.
Ashok Gupta is a name I only know from a site about CFS. But his theory supports the scientific research of a haywire nervous system that needs to be reprogrammed. The part of the brain his research targets is called the amygdala. I have mentioned this several times in the thread. Is anyone NOT seeing all these connections?
All my best to everyone here. Now back to my life again!
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| miche |
Posted - 02/28/2008 : 21:44:07
Hillbilly, I am a work in progress,thank you for asking, like you and Peter I am applying what seems to work for me,a lot of it is in sync with your methods. Sarno has helped me recognise emotions from my past that I needed to look at, however it became obvious to me that current stresses and my reactions to them were and always have been my downfall. I think of fibro as total body bracing, a difficult habit to break , my body is so used to tensing up, but knowledge is the key. |
| mcone |
Posted - 02/28/2008 : 21:16:27
quote:
Originally posted by Hillbilly
I had to read and read and analyze and reread and analyze and finally make the connection, accept what my six doctors were telling me was right. There was nothing clinically wrong.
* * *
When my coach finally was able to point out these flawed thinking patterns and help me understand the stress my thoughts had kept me under for most of my life, I saw quick changes in my body.
* * *
I think this was a function of my desire to get better, and my confidence in the person who was leading me to recovery. I lost my confidence in Sarno when I tried his exact program to the letter, yet continued to suffer. This is my whole purpose in starting this thread.
I don't claim to have invented the cure for TMS. But I do know that struggling to understand this theory, for analytical people especially, can lead to more frustration, more stress, and more symptom entrenchment.
This is one of the more intelligent topics I've seen in a long time. Hillbilly's articulate posts demonstrate *a* (but not necessarily *the only*) thoroughly coherent, well-documented and properly integrated understanding of the process.
I've also faced enormous frustration trying to assimilate the notion that the human organism evolved to posseses a protective mechanism that selectively targets soft tissue areas and reduces blood flow, to create a distraction from unpleasant repressed emotions. Which isn't to deny the fact that these elements (local hyper-sensitizations, restrictions in blood flow, and psychological issues that aren't being addressed) are observed occuring together. It's just that I don't believe the relationships are well-understood. This frustration definitely undermined my belief in the process.
And I have to surmise that for many of us BELIEF (and the resulting freedom from FEAR and inhibition) and getting it processed deeply into your subconscious or automatic nervous system responses is the key to reversing this process. Hillbilly's experience supports the idea that achieving a confidence-inspiring understanding of how the symptoms are the product of anxiety/fear is the necessary antidote to the contemplation of physical damage or unidentified disease process.
[Of course, for every rule, an excpetion - as there are folks for whom belief followed only after commitment to the process].
Nate McNamara, who recoverd from a serious "RSI" also seemed to placed the emphasis on overcoming the fear conditioning (while neither dismissing nor embracing the idea of a psychological cause):
quote:
Nate McNamara http://conquerrsi.com/handout.html
The most difficult key to accept is the second one: your autonomic nervous system is inappropriately turning off the blood flow to your arms. It is part of your body's freeze response, one of the primitive fear responses. Why is your mind doing this? Is some part of your mind afraid? If so, what is it afraid of?
I am aware of two theories. The first, proposed by Dr. John Sarno, states that chronic pain is a defense mechanism against unpleasant thoughts and/or emotions. The second, described by Ashok Gupta, suggests that chronic pain is learned at a more primitive level, like Pavlovian conditioning. Considering that the brain is so complex and interconnected, there may be many ways for it to learn the unhealthy pattern we call RSI, and multiple mechanisms may be at work simultaneously.
The good news is that we don't care. Your conscious mind is able to override the inappropriate response regardless of how that response was generated - and once adequate blood flow is restored to the arms, recovery is quick, complete, and irrevocable.
quote:
Originally posted by stanfr
The explanation Sarno gives is probably what keeps him a pariah in the medical world. He didn't bother looking for alternative explanations (or gives no attribution to them anywhere) other than the defense explanation offered by Dr. Stanley Coen, a Freudian.
[cynical rant]
I've also stated elswhere that TMS theory cannot advance as a credible medical discipline unless and until it becomes open to acknowledging all the available science of relevant disciplines (psychology, neurology, physiology, etc.) and making efforts to harmonize and reconcile it's theories with other models of chronic pain. I suspect however, that, at least one reason this isn't done is that the complexities of the mindbody interaction are so daunting that (even if a comprehensive understanding were developed) it would be clinically prohibitive: A fairly successful method with easy-to-understand concepts which hits the highlights for most people, most of the time, can do much more good than a meta-model that deals with complicated relationships between thought patterns, and a large constellation of effects in the brain, nervous system, and the bodily organs. In all fairness to Sarno, he does concede (here and there) that the process isn't well-understood[/cynical rant]
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| mk6283 |
Posted - 02/28/2008 : 19:40:28
If I understand correctly, Hillbilly is trying to disprove Dr. Sarno's theory as to the underlying process of TMS. He thinks that stress/anxiety alone lead to physical symptoms and if they are addressed properly, then the pain will follow. That may very well be true in certain situations. However, I guess I should be a little more clear about what I mean by "psychological." Hillbilly seems to disregard the Freudian elements of TMS, and I think that is wrong. There are clearly unconscious processes and phenomena involved. TMS is not simply a problem of having too much "tension," "nerves," or "anxiety." If that were the case, how does one explain the patient w/ longstanding "tendonitis of the knee," who is not overly stressed or anxious, but cannot seem to get rid of the pain (experimenting w/ numerous therapeutic modalities), until he learns about TMS and is suddenly able to cure himself of it? Or what about the tens of thousands of patients that Dr. Sarno has permanantly cured of their back pain, many of which required his services to understand that hidden emotions may actually be playing a part? Or what about the patient that has allergies that disappear (as they did in my case) by simply understanding why they are there? This is not the same as getting anxious and having your heart race. TMS may or may not function as a means of physical distraction from psychological conflict, but regardless it is still a means for our unconscious feelings to express themselves. I hope I'm being clear.
Best,
MK |
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