TMS update

So, a short update from me. About 5 months since I got my TMS diagnosis.

I'm now learning all I can about TMS. I'm working with an excellent psychotherapist called Alan Gordon, and he's teaching me how our human systems work from a TMS perspective.

The best way so far that I've been able to understand it is through using two movies as metaphors. The first movie is the Matrix. Basically, our physical symptoms, ie pain, hair loss, candida, etc. and interestingly enough also our emotional symptoms like anxiety, depression etc. are simply agents there to arrest us. It is our job to stop seeing the agents and instead see the codes that make them up. The symptoms are there to grab our attention. They keep us preoccupied. So long as we are preoccupied we can't feel our feelings. TMS is essentially a very powerful repression mechanism. But really all the symptoms, the physical and mental, including our negative thoughts, are agents and they are made up of ones' and zeroes. For me I have two basic codes:

1. Things that make me feel scared. (pain, anxiety, depression, worry thoughts, OCD etc)
2. Things that give me low self worth (self critical thoughts, unhealthy compulsive relationships)

Those two codes keep me so preoccupied that I can't feel whatever feelings I may be feeling, ie I repress the feelings this way. Cause I'm so wrapped up in fighting the "agents" that are trying to "arrest me" from consciousness and put me back in the "jail of repression" see below. So, with TMS it is my job to see the agents for what they are: codes there to scare me or to make me feel bad about myself.

When I learn to think "this is just TMS, it's trying to grab my attention by making me scared. It's not real, it's just a code." Then the symptom gets less energy from me and they fade away over a shorter time period. I stay out of jail.

Getting the correct diagnosis has already led me to get to experiences in my life:
1. The first pain free period of my life!!!
2. Working full time again!!!
3. A lot fewer symptoms, including almost no anxiety, nor migraine, digestive problems or depression. A lot better joints.
4. I am able to eat any food I want to eat including dairy without any reactions. I still mostly stick to eating whole foods though just cause I believe in whole foods over refined foods.
5. I am able to be around fur animals without any reactions.

I began to enjoy the above after only a few weeks of treatment and now after 5 months I'm still very stable, some period cramps have returned but that is to be expected because I'm not a psychological ninja....yet....lol. The treatment is essentially getting a better understanding and learning not to get so sucked into the symptoms.

Then there is another aspect to this. That is where the Shawshank Redemption movie enters. When the main character (Morgan Freeman) finally gets out of prison, he feels so uncertain about regular life, that he considers doing something illegal in order to get back into the prison again. Not because he liked being in prison, but because prison had become so familiar to him. It had become his point of stability and safety. Dangerous and unhappy an environment as it was.

It's the same thing with TMS. Feeling scared and bad about myself is definitely not a happy place to be, but it's very familiar to me. So, it's where my system tends to go in order to create some sort of equilibrium for itself. Now, to break free and stay free, it is my job to see the codes and not the agents. Much like when Keanu Reeves saw a woman with a red dress. He was to learn to see that she was just a code, an agent in disguise, instead of getting seduced by her.

As I understand it, that is also the idea behind Buddhist enlightenment. So, I'll have to become enlightened and feel my feelings instead of running back to jail through my symptoms. That's obviously not an easy task and I've only just begun that journey but I do feel more hopeful than ever before.

The above way of functioning is supposedly human and completely normal. It's just when it becomes so commonly used on a daily basis that it's hard to function in life that it becomes a "syndrome", an illness that requires treatment.

It's also a challenge to sift out what is healthy and worth continuing to have in my life, and what is contributing to continuing the symptoms. Some of that has got to do with an attitude change too. For example, yoga is healthy and still something I keep in my life three times a week. However, I don't go because I thin yoga will "cure my endometriosis" or anything like that. I go for wellbeing, to feel good about my life and myself. I also sometimes go to cranio sacral treatments but also not to be cured of anything, not to lessen any symptoms, only because it feels good to feel that relaxed.

I hope to continue becoming enlightened and more and more free from symptoms. A part of me knew all along that I was experiencing a psychosomatic situation. I was never able to separate the two parts of myself. lol.