Exploring the world of TMS or Tension Myositis Syndrome (see my recent posts for more on this topic) as a root cause of chronic pain forces you to look at all your chronic issues in a whole new light.

In my case, I’ve been forced to consider, could “all of it” have been a version of me having such BIG emotions stored in the body that they are considered a severe threat to my wellbeing and survival by my brain. Such a monumental threat that my brain considers it safer to me to be in near constant physical pain than to let out the emotions that have been hidden away. That it would do anything to keep them under lock and key, is even prepared to kill me bit by bit, rather than have me face the music of my emotional stockpile?

In the light of this audacious yet newly coherent mindbody perspective, one I had considered somewhat before but which only began to make real sense to me via the research of Dr John Sarno) these, below, are now just some of the things I am now looking at through the eyes of TMS. In my chronic health saga, have all of these things been expressions of TMS?

• Growing pains: those first bizarrely severe muscle pains, wipe-out fatigue and stomach issues I had as an adolescent, blamed on “hormones”
• All of the various physical symptoms that coincided with menopause (same blame applied)
• Endless genito-urinary issues over the decades
• Several decades of fibromyalgia and ME that first followed extreme emotional burnout and which have recurred with inexplicable regularity at the slightest trigger
• Frequent bouts of winter season dysautonomia (POTs)
• Sudden hypermobility crashes and severe joint pain, though I am curiously fine most of the time (a structural knee problem would not be so intermittent)
• Mid summer health crashes (corresponding with a trauma anniversary)
• September blues (flare-up) since school days and continuing
• Migraine
• Neuralgia
• Heart palpitations and arrhythmia that come and go
• IBS (widely known to be related to to emotional factors)
• Food and drink intolerances that came on suddenly and wax and wane
• Numerous other random and often bizarre symptoms that migrate around the body

As hinted above, clues that symptoms and flare-ups of symptoms are really TMS include the fact that they are inconsistent, with a tendency to wax and wane at different times. Acute issues related to mechanical issues in the body can’t just switch on or off at will nor disappear for a few days when you are distracted, only to come back with an absolute vengeance. Chronic conditions are rife with such “flare-ups” and that is why I am increasingly convinced that TMS is behind conditions such as Fibro, ME and long covid. The unwieldy emotions generated by the long-running illness itself only add to the stockpile of abhorrence that the brain then likely feels it is necessary to protect you from, and so the cycle of distraction continues.

For instance, the fluttery heart symptoms and odd sensations in my arm that saw me rushed to hospital a few months ago (yes, corresponding with a time of overwhelming stress, when it would have been “inconvenient” to allow my emotions to run amok) have not been around for weeks, but they can still pop back for a while and be just as severe at times when I have a lot on my plate. My Dad had something similar and ended up on all kinds of medications with abhorrent side effects and living in abject fear of his heart or vigorous exercise from his early 40s onwards, not to mention a cacophony of other symptoms no one took seriously. He was so similar to me in lots of ways, very highly sensitive yet prone to burying or suppressing his feelings away most of the time unless they reach an unstoppable crescendo. I now suspect that TMS might have played a major, or at least significantly contributory, role in his long-running health issues. TMS, I hear, tends to run in families, which isn’t surprising to me at all.

Not surprising, especially, given that I would suspect it is far more likely to occur when you are highly sensitive and/or neurodiverse not to mention have that certain intensity that comes with a hyperactive level of intelligence and hyperawareness (which can quickly become hypervigilance). I also suspect my hyperactive brain is extremely prone to strong feelings of frustration and impatience, especially when so many things tend not to deliver or resolve as fast or as logically as I want them to, because life can be such an infinitely laggy thing when your mind is so quick and solutions-oriented. Throw in a good dose of perfectionism and people pleasing and guess what you end up with. All of these factors have likely set me up for harbouring some extremely big, incredibly unwieldy emotions that, for a combination of factors, my brain has deemed far safer for me to hide away rather than make myself any more vulnerable than I already feel by allowing their disruptive effect “out”.

Like an extreme form of masking, I learned from a very young age to look most stoic of all when the biggest storms of emotion were actually raging beneath the surface of me, particularly during the times when I was being singled out and bullied at school.

This felt like a useful survival skill the more I evolved it, one that (for instance) helped me to pick myself up and keep going the day after I was raped in my mid 20s, yet all I was really doing was squirrelling my emotions away for a later date, to be expressed as physical symptoms any time my brain had the slightest fear that these unwieldy and highly dangerous emotions (as it perceived them to be) might emerge from the depths at an inconvenient moment. The more my emotions bubbled beneath the surface, the more necessary it became for my brain to distract.

In other words, the longer this stockpile of emotions languished under lock and key, growing year by year, the more my body became like a high security prison of many inmates, which my brain would do almost anything…anything at all…to keep safely incarcirated, even if this meant creating an endless stream of distractions. It learned to distract me most effectively through the creation of the kind of physical symptoms that frequently capsized my health…because, at least then, my attention was on these other things, locked into an endless state of fight or flight, struggling to get back onto an even keel.

In fact, it became so adept at hiding the biggest feelings away that I didn’t even catch a glimpse of some of them before they were sent off onto the dark corners of my inner dungeon where there was absolutely “no risk” of them rocking my boat, or so my brain thought. As long as my attention was fixed elsewhere, my subconscious took over the job of keeping them out of sight while, for years, I was able to convince myself I was “fine”.

Fine, that is, except for my ever worsening health, from those first grumblings of odd symptoms in my teens. So began an array of highly distressing, often quite serious, physical challenges over the years, starting with wipe-out fatigue and growing pains at school, followed by inexplicably severe back pain, headaches and circulation issues plus endless IBS and chronic cystitis in my 20s and 30s; then my big “crash” into Fibro and ME. There were years of pursuing a diagnosis, undergoing highly unnecessary and invasive tests and treatments followed by even more years of feeling exiled from conventional medical care because nobody took me seriously or had any answers. Then came countless costly alternative therapies pursued and tireless decades of personal research, only to make minimal headway or find the cycle repeating itself from one end of the range of symptoms to the other just as soon as I felt more on top of things for a short while.

Let’s be clear, none to these symptoms were in my head (TMS produces extremely real physical symptoms)…but the reason behind them may well have originated there!

It’s a sobering realisation to have but, until you accept TMS and take the necessary action you’re unlikely to move on. You have to believe in it, commit to doing the work and garner the faith that you can and will get well again. You have to let go of any negative feelings that arise from the realisation you’ve been caught in your own mind-trap all these years because it really wasn’t your fault as you had no idea and the brain is extremely good at doing this thing it does (and utterly convinced it is doing the right thing; that your very survival depends on it, thus it gives it everything it’s got). That’s a huge amount to contend with; the odds were stacked against you all along, but not anymore.

So I’m getting there, one emotion-liberation at a time. It’s not always fun; I’ve had some real moments lately over the anniversary of one of my biggest traumas, but also the knowledge that the trigger was there provoking me has helped me to observe the way my body has scrambled to distract me from it with one severe symptom after another over the last week or so. By playing the witness whenever this happens, I’ve been able to take some of the pressure out of some high-intensity symptoms that might otherwise have terrorised or depressed me into the usual patterns of fire-fighting them. I’ve been able to watch with bemusement as my ever creative mind has replaced one thing with another in an endless stream of distractions that might normally keep me focused on “fixing” some physical issue or other. Once you see it, it starts to become more obvious; like pulling the curtain to reveal the so-called wizard of Oz with all his pulleys and levers, the puffs of smoke that once kept you transfixed.

That’s not to say that acute issues don’t arise; but I now suspect that the brain uses them to its advantage, exaggerating and exacerbating situations that might otherwise be less of a crisis. Any areas of hypersensitivity, where you are triggered by sensory things that other people don’t even notice, are a classic example of this. If you are hypersensitive to begin with (a genetic trait), the brain is able to capitalise on this inbuilt propensity for you to notice minute things. I see how some of the issues I have with diet get particularly targeted in this way so I’m getting better at brushing them off with a kind of “so what” attitude, assuming them to be temporary. My ongoing issue digesting foods with high oxalate levels, for instance, is not imagined but I now strongly suspect that a propensity to accumulate painful oxalate crystals from such foods in body tissue (instead of allowing them to flush out through the digestive system as per a healthy person) is likely an issue typical of a person with a subliminal “fortress” mentality; where emotional protection has become such a fixation of the subconscious mind that it will do anything to keep you from seeing the emotions it harbours. I have new confidence that this issue will resolve best, not with obsessive avoidance but, via the newly evolved mentalities that are starting to inhabit my psyche regarding food. After all, I haven’t always had an issue with oxalates or any of the foods I have more recently “had” to avoid!

It’s been hard dealing with what feels like some particularly intense emotions coming “out of nowhere” lately but that’s because I’ve not been used to looking them so directly in the eye all these years (and then writing them out as they occur, which is the advised approach for dealing with TMS). Little by little, I’m taking the sting out of their tail and retraining my brain to realise that I’m prepared to handle whatever it’s been so diligently distracting me from for so long. Eventually, it will run out of steam or cease to see the point in replacing one distraction with another in an endless stream…just as soon as it realises I’m simply not prepared to be distracted any more!

Now my attention is on my feelings more so than my symptoms, it will learn that it’s time, and long overdue, to let those feelings out. I’m ready for them now…not so that I get to relive the traumas of fifty years but because I am prepared to deal with whatever arises as it comes up in real time (which is what post-trauma is…you’re not ever, really, back there but experiencing it here and now, which is the only place you can experience, and deal with, anything). Like a bomb disposal expert, I’m placing my attention on what needs to be dealt with right where I’m standing, no longer getting distracted by all the symptomatic ruckus going off around the edges. If I keep on working at it as diligently as this, I expect the whole field to be cleared at some point, or at least enough for me to claim a far less symptomatic life!

Knowing about TMS doesn’t suddenly turn life into a magical playground of benign experiences, not does it instantly remove a lifetime’s worth of highly ingrained triggers. Those same experiences that triggered the child version of me to not feel safe when she harboured big emotions in response to unreliable or downright harmful humans remain part of my story, though (through the over-view of TMS) I am no longer limited by that story since it no longer entangles me in quite the same way. What it does is offer you the tools for noticing age-old responses to such situations and the chance to process in quite a different way, without always squirrelling emotions into the depths only for them to come back to haunt you later. It may feel like you are revisiting the same old hurts and challenges over and over again but I prefer to think of it as a spiral…and, with the aid of this approach, you are in fact approaching those “same” situations from a more expanded viewpoint each time they come around now. With practice, you get better at staying present with emotions as they arise, even questioning “where are you?” when there is a suspicious absence of emotion, which is often the clue that your brain is up to its old tricks again. You then get to purge strong emotions as they happen, through expression of the feelings as they come up, which you learn to do in a safe and effective way in the privacy of your daily routine of journalspeaking them out. Like brushing your teeth, this simply becomes part of life.

It’s fascinating how some extremely severe and persistent symptoms can resolve quite abruptly, and stay resolved for increasingly longer periods of time, when tackled this way and without any call for other interventions. These small successes are giving me the morale to keep going day after day. It will, I tell myself, get easier with time; I just have to keep faith and do the work, one foot in front of the other. What was once fear and vulnerability over my health is turning into a sort of inbuilt superpower of increasing confidence based upon gathered evidence that my recovery lies, not out there in some long hoped-for solution but, firmly in my own hands.

Disclaimer: This blog, it’s content and any material linked to it are presented for autobiographical, general interest and anecdotal purposes only. They are not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or prescribing. Opinions are my own based on personal experience. Please seek medical advice from a professional if you are experiencing any symptoms that concern you.