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ivanw
United Kingdom
2 Posts |
 Posted - 09/20/2009 : 10:11:26
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One for people with medium to long term back pain:
Some years ago I “put my back out” in the gym and soon after I got shooting pains down my leg. I went to a physio who did some work on me but even though it helped a bit, thereafter I got intermittent but incredibly painful back pain. Over the following 2-4 years, it got to the point where whenever I bent down to pick something up, or sat awkwardly, drove in the car too long and so on, I would start to worry about getting back pain. And hey presto, minutes later I would be cursing my back with the pain.
Then two things happened: one year, whilst on holiday, I helped lift someone’s suitcase into a car, immediately thought uh-oh, bet I get a bad back now and within 15 minutes I was walking up the road doubled-up like a cartoon old woman. Seriously, no exaggeration. I had never had such bad pain. Then, back at work one Friday afternoon, I got bad back pain again and started to slowly hobble up the office stairs – at which point, someone else bounded past me up the stairs, which for some reason made my furious! How dare he feel so good when I was in so much pain!
So I turned to my girlfriend. She had been trying to persuade me to read Fred Amir’s book but I had completely dissed it. What the heck is TMS?! But enough was enough, I was desperate. So I read it. And at first I thought it was nonsense: I am British and all I thought I was reading was yet another American rah-rah things-can-be-great book. But slowly as I read it, I started to see things which I identified with, and I realised that TMS might actually exist. It was a slow burner which started to make more and more sense to me.
And I can remember so clearly when it all finally fell into place in my mind – I can see it in my mind now, walking through my local park and suddenly, absolutely realising exactly what had been going on: how I had been programming myself, how an initial incident which might have genuinely been a physical problem then became a mental issue, how it moved around my body, the issue of the “inner child” (see below) and how I was causing the pain. It was truly a light bulb above-the-head moment!
And that meant I could address the TMS using Fred’s techniques. (It probably helped that I fully believed already in visualisation). So I set myself a goal and three months later I ran a half-marathon – and ran it hard, no dawdling on the way. Since then, I still occasionally get pain but I have now reached the point where I recognise it as TMS and can simply tell it to go away – most of the time that works. (I should say that I don’t tell my pain to go away politely – I swear and curse at and tell it I am not going to let it win; if I am at home I do this out loud, but I can do it silently in my head now).
One of the most interesting things I recognised was how I constantly got pain on a Friday and at week-ends. The “inner child” which one keeps dormant all week when you have to work and push through, is released when you start to relax and that means that he comes back and reminds me I am going to suffer from my pain again. This is quite common and recognised far more widely now, especially with “holiday illnesses” when so many people get ill on holiday even though they are fine all the time they are working.
To sum up, there are two points which I think were key for me:
- I had to be quite desperate before I would allow myself to believe that TMS really did exist; I had to have gone through a lot before that before I was truly open to it;
- For me, there really was a Wow moment when I suddenly, absolutely and 101% truly believed that I had TMS – and it wasn’t until then that I could follow Fred’s advice on how to overcome it. My partner wants to believe in TMS but she still can’t quite do so, and as a result, the exercises don’t have the same affect for her.
Ivan
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How Fred Amir's book helped me overcome back pain
