Story #2 - A Tale of Psychosomatic Tendonitis from Alex Cole
Will asked me to share my story of tension myositis syndrome (TMS) about a month ago, and I couldn’t be happier to do so. Discovering TMS, learning about it, and applying self-treatment techniques was one of the most interesting, rewarding, and important experiences of my life. It was also a lot of fun at times!
I started experiencing pain in my left knee around February 2007. I was in 2nd year university at the time. A couple of my roommates were serious basketball players and I fell in love with the game. I started playing about 3 times a week. I was in some of the best shape of my life.
Although I thought absolutely nothing of it at the time, I do remember exactly the first time I felt my TMS. I lived in the basement at that point, and had to walk up the stairs every morning. One morning I had quite noticeable pain on left knee while walking up the stairs. Little did I know it would dictate the next year of my life, GRRRR!
The knee cap, also called the platella bone, is held in place by a tendon above and below the knee: the platellar tendon. The section above the knee cap is where I felt the pain, and also slightly under the knee cap was sore. The pain wasn’t severe, so I shrugged it off as I had with a whole mess of pulled muscles and similar pains over the course of my life. I actually kept playing basketball. It would hurt at first, but once I warmed up, I felt as loose as a goose and there was zero pain.
Over the next 2 or three weeks the pain got worse, and it started bothering me in more situations than just walking up stairs. My knee would be uncomfortable when I sat for long periods of time. I had to keep my leg straight or I felt pulling on the tendon, and an aching would start. I took the hint, stopped playing basketball, and also started icing my knee regularly to try to calm down ‘inflammation’ that I assumed was there. It got better to a point where it didn’t bother me at all, but I could still feel it walking up stairs and bending. The pain stayed at this level for the spring and all summer. I played basketball on and off and never really took the ‘injury’ seriously. I assumed it was some mild tendonitis.
Cut to September 2007: I’m back in school having a great time. Right around the 3rd week of school, when the work and assignments started off, my knee pain rapidly increased. It got so bad that I had to completely stop going to classes. I simply cold not sit for that long. The aching would start after 5 minutes of being in a chair and would get worse the longer I sat. By November life was really tough. I would basically sit in my bed all day, icing my knees and studying.
Not going to class was really affecting my marks and I couldn’t even go to the pub and sit though a dinner with my friends. Part of what made it so frustrating was that I had completely ceased all physical activity that could strain my knee, was icing regularly, seeing a physio, and stretching for 30 minutes everyday, but it was still slowly getting worse. I was following to the book what conventional medicine prescribes, and the results were abysmal. My doctor said the next step was an MRI, and the word surgery entered the equation. But my MRI showed nothing remarkable, so physiotherapy continued. In Early November I decided to take a leave of absence from school, and I came back to Toronto to live with my parents.
I went to a new physio in Toronto, at a large sports medicine clinic. With no improvement after about a month and a half, they switched my to their most experienced physio on the staff. They also had me see their chiropodist, to see if the problem was in my feet or orthodics, but this turned up nothing. At this point I also started seeing a physio/naturopath, who had recently helped my dad very successfully with his back. She looked at my body as whole and tried to find areas that needed to be strengthened and/or loosened to keep the body in balance. By February I was starting to lose my mind. All my efforts everyday went to healing, with no positive results. It was hard to tell, because the pain was there everyday, but I was convinced the pain was getting worse over time. I also had mild pain in the same region on the other knee. This was not at the same level, but it was noticeable.
Enter Dr. Sarno
I had heard Will’s story a few months earlier from my older brother Mike (a good friend of Will). Basically my brother said Will had crippling back pain for ages, read this book and the pain disappeared. As practically everyone does when they hear of Dr. Sarno, I dismissed Will’s story as mumbo jumbo. However, after months of no improvements, you become more receptive to ideas, even ones that once seemed far fetched. I gave Will a call and he urged me to read Dr. Sarno’s books. I started with an audio-book of Dr. Sarno’s: The Divided Mind. I would listen to the audio while I stretched everyday. I immediately took to the ideas and principles the book spoke of. As soon as I heard the explanation of what Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) was, and how it worked, I was convinced this was what I was dealing with. There was just no other explanation. It was a weird feeling. I had been in my healing routine for months upon months now, and pretty much all I thought about was my rehabilitation program. Now according to Dr. Sarno I was supposed to completely stop it.
After finishing the book, I jumped into Dr. Sarno’s method head-first. I stopped stretching and stopped icing. Within in 2 weeks the pain was cut in half. All I had done was accept that my pain was coming from a mental process in my head, and that I had no physical injuries. It was amazing. Next I started working on the introspection exercises in the book. Trying to realize the subconscious issues I had, and find out why my brain was producing TMS. I also read The Mindbody Prescription at this point, another book by Dr. Sarno. The analysis I did was very interesting, and I’m glad I did it, regardless of my “injury”.
I realized that I used to be a very self-conscious person, and still am to an extent, but have worked hard to rationally stop this thought process. I always seek to be liked by others, and irrationally thought that people judged me, and I had to work hard to keep my social connections. Since the Sarno process, I have gained loads of self-confidence.
Deep down I was also fretting entering the next stages of my life. I was really trying to get good marks at this point, and thinking about how to start my career. Although on the surface I was excited about these prospects, I was able to see that deep down, a large part of me just wanted to mess around, watch movies or play sports all day. Basically there was an urge to do nothing. There was an obvious clash between this feeling and my drive to succeed at school that was showing up as pain in my knees.
On top of working through these issues, I started testing my knees. When the pain would act up I would do a squat and say to myself “look: there is no injury, you can do a squat”. I started running again as well. I also would also try to find things about my ‘injury’ that didn’t make sense. I would say “look man, your MRI showed perfect knees, you stopped playing sports months ago which is what caused the ‘injury’, how could the pain have gotten worse?”. I reminded myself that basically the body heals itself. When you give the body ample opportunity to do so, and it doesn’t, it becomes clear that there are mental factors at play. Within 2 weeks of reading/listening to the books my pain was half gone, and it was totally gone in one month.
The Symptom Imperative
As I was getting better, perhaps 3 weeks after reading the first book, when the pain in my knee was almost gone, I experienced the “symptom imperative” phenomenon that Dr. Sarno talks about. (ed: This is when repressed emotions manifest as different physical symptoms after the primary symptoms have been consciously recognized as psychosomatic) First it was shin-splints. Often the brain pinpoints problems that your body has had before, because it has experienced this feeling and can thus reproduce it effectively. I had gotten shin-splints from running a couple times before in my life, but they would usually dissapear within a day or two, and they would only happen when I was in an intense training period. After the shin splints wouldn’t go away I realized that they were in fact another manifestation of TMS, and I got over them quickly. Next, tendonitis in my elbow that I had had on and off for years came back intensely out of nowhere. This too disappeared once I realized it was TMS.
More recently, (this being years after my initial TMS self-diagnosis) I’ve had a new and recurring on and off TMS symptom. This latest one is quite strange and was difficult to tackle. What happens is my eye or eyes will turn red, just on the inner half of the eye, and they will feel sort of like I have been up for two days straight. I first got it during an exam period, so I figured that it was from a lack of sleep.
The brain has a real knack for picking symptoms you believe are real. Dr. Sarno says this is why back pain is the one of the most common forms of TMS. Everyone believes in back pain, there are numerous products and treatments advertised for it all the time from beds to chairs. People do not question it.
So back to my eyes: What tipped me off that this was TMS was that sometimes I would wake up after a great night sleep and would already have the eye symptom showing. After I finished studying, got home and cracked a beer, it would quickly disappear. I decided that it is clearly my subconscious reacting negatively to certain activities. It comes back on and off, like when I started my job this summer I had to battle it for a couple weeks. It’s amazing the variety of TMS symptoms out there.
Tips to Dealing with Psychosomatic Pain:
- You can’t half commit. You have to believe and know that there is nothing physically wrong with you. This can be really difficult because you have never known or thought anything else than “I am physical injured in such and such a way”. Think of any ways that your injury doesn’t make sense, and why on earth it hasn’t healed or is getting worse even though you are taking care of it, or maybe you never really had a specific injury and the pain just started and slowly got worse. All of these can be tip-offs that you are dealing with something psychosomatic.
- Put effort into the introspection process so you can deal with what is causing the pain.
- Stop referring to the pain as an injury. Call it TMS or a psychosomatic symptom. If you write about it (for example in an email) you can put it in quotes: “injury”.
- Don’t feel embarrassed or weak because you are experiencing TMS, you are not copping-out. It is a process in your brain that you didn’t create, but you can beat it fairly easily.
- Start by reading The Divided Mind by Dr. John Sarno MD. This is his most recent book and it explains in detail how he discovered TMS and created a program to cure it. It was important for me to really understand what it was in order for me to believe that I had it, and be able to realize I had no physical problems. I read The Mindbody Prescription next. This was great because it explains certain aspects differently, and has different anecdotes that I found helpful.
- You don’t have to tell everyone about your TMS. I try to tell as many people as I can, because it has changed my life and people deserve to know. But at the same time, I never told people at work, just because some people refuse to educate themselves on certain things and could think you are a little coo-ckoo. To these people I just said it finally got better.
- A lot of physiotherapists blame pain on prolonged inflammation, as was the case with my tendonitis. I think this is completely untrue. Inflammation definitely does happen, but if you take care of an injury by icing and resting it, inflammation goes away. This can be a good indication of TMS.
- The body heals itself. This is how we survive. When you give the body ample opportunity to do so, and it doesn’t, it becomes clear that there are mental factors at play.
Good Luck!
Alex Cole
Toronto Canada
June 24th 2010
