Tension Myositis Syndrome
It was a very lucky coincidence that I discovered TMS – Tension Myositis Syndrome – via a frantic google search, at a moment when I had decided that my life wasn’t worth living anymore, unless I could one day have my old self back. The condition, discovered by the American Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine Dr John Sarno back in the 70s, presupposes that various forms of chronic pain can manifest due to emotional repression or anxiety, and can than be exacerbated by fear, frustration, rage, powerlessness and a host of negative emotions that are all but natural in people who have found no solution to chronic pain, and whose doctors have either told them that they have a condition that is to blame for the pain, or have admitted that they have no clue what’s causing it.
I read up as much as I could about the subject of TMS, and followed a 40-day program, which included educating myself on the science of pain, journalling, meditating and working on radical mindset changes. I learnt how to make sense of my pain, and to identify it for what it really was – a physical, yet conditioned response fuelled by fear, rage, and general dissatisfaction with my present life. And then the magic happened. As I started to respond differently to pain and to strengthen my belief that what I had was only TMS, every single symptom began to subside. Within 5 weeks of starting my TMS program, I was back to rock climbing. I was one of the thousands of people to benefit from Sarno’s discovery, a discovery which had been discredited by the general medical community, but which today is gaining more credibility thanks to the latest discoveries in neuroscience.
What I learned
Along the way I learnt that ‘being over-careful’ and hyper-vigilant does not help at all in the case of chronic pain – avoiding activities that I believed would worsen pain was only strengthening the connection between the activity and pain, as this reinforced the false belief that there was something structurally wrong with my body. Instead, I needed to build up confidence in my body’s ability to be limitless and strong, and to resume all normal activities without fear or doubt. This is a way of countering the Nocebo effect that is so pervasive in chronic pain sufferers – the belief that the slightest movement or activity (or lack of medication) may make their pain worse, and which ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy because fear and negative expectations are the worst reactions one can have in relation to pain.
By sustaining their belief that there must be something structurally wrong with them (most sufferers end up getting a diagnosis, such as disc herniation, arthritis, scoliosis or even fibromyalgia[1]), patients are simply unable to envision a pain-free life, and the conditioning in their bodies becomes stronger and stronger, like a well-coded program. Most of this takes place subconsciously, so that the pain becomes automatic, a physical response to a non-physical stimulus – just like the case of Pavlov’s dogs who always salivated at a sound of the bell, even when no food was present!
[1]Dr Sarno believed that fibromyalgia was an extreme form of TMS. Although deemed incurable, several fibromyalgics have managed to significantly reduce or overcome their symptoms altogether by adopting his approach and disowning their identity as ‘fibromyalgia sufferers’.
