I like to think about how easy it is for our brain to cause TMS. Kinda takes the mystery out of the whole process. I think about this a lot when I'm soaking in a hot bath, because that tends to make me whole-body aware.
TMS commonly strikes the lower back area and/or the neck/shoulder area. Both of those areas are hubs for blood vessels, nerves, etc. Our bodies are efficient. They don't send blood to a quadrant through 10 different super highways. They send in a supply on a main line and then the main line splits off to various substations. Same thing with nerves. Main nerve to the hub, then splitting off to substations. Take one of your upper back/shoulder/neck quads for example. The cervical nerve runs through the C5 (or maybe C4, irrelevant)neck vertebrae, across the top of your shoulder, through a complicated mass of muscle and tendon, with branches down alongside your scapula and such, and down your arm. Look how easy that makes it for the autonomic system to mess with an entire quad, or two whole quads if it works both sides. From a single hub you can get neck and jaw pain, shoulder pain, upper back spasms, rotator cuff pain, RSI...
You can do the same exercise with the lower back hub.
I like to think of these hubs as big warehouses. The question is, is there a madman in a secret lab in the warehouse, making designer pains to send out on the network, or are the standard signals being hijacked by terrorists outside the warehouse? Or maybe there is a special ops group at the warehouse, and when the autonomic system starts going wacko, everybody clears out of the warehouse except special ops, and their job is to send the overload out over the line of least resistance to keep the warehouse from blowing up.
Or maybe there is a gremlin like in that old Twilight Zone episode on the airplane.
Anyway, my point is that realizing the easy physiology behind TMS helps me challenge and diffuse it. And I also think that creating whimsical representations takes the power away from TMS.
This is another weapon to use. If you have trouble thinking psychologically when in the grip of pain, then introduce some whimsical physical thinking. Just march over to the curtain and kick the wizard in the balls. |
psychological physiology
Posted - 10/31/2007 : 06:43:41
