Check out part 1 and part 2 of this story to read how I began the process of taking responsibility for my story about my health.
I cried, I journaled, I prayed about how crappy I felt about my relationship to my health. Which is where we left off yesterday and where I was feeling some measure of clarity about a next step. Ready for it? Cool. Here is the thought that immediately popped into my mind:
Get online and intuitively google.
Huh? Wait. Screwing around online has become my default avoidance technique. I think I may have actually rolled my eyes. Surely, this was me just trying to get out of taking further responsibility, right?
Now, I don’t really understand how intuition works. I just know that it does. And that I rarely regret following a gut instinct. So I took a deep breath and hopped online, deciding simply to stay awake (in the spiritual sense) and see what I discovered.
There are a few important background notes worth mentioning here:
1. I’m a skeptic. It’s a family trait. And it’s extremely valuable. It’s what keeps me from being cultish about religion, new age fads and myriad ideological camps. It’s also what makes me a late adopter to everything from useful technologies to useful ideas.
2. I’ve increasingly become attuned to the fact that we see as though “through a glass, darkly.” In other words, the longer I live and the longer I study and the longer I walk alongside my clients in their own processes of discovery, the more convinced I’ve become that very little (if any) of life is black and white and that we have no choice but to move forward in partial blindness.
3. I’ve tried a lot of different things. In the realm of health, I’ve seen chiropractors, neurologists, voice pathologists, surgeons, physical therapists and an acupuncturist. That’s probably a short list.
Back to the internet.
So I’m googling away, feeling my way from site to site, following my intuition. And I come across a page that mentions something called Tension Myositis Syndrome, coined by a Dr. John Sarno of NYU’s Rusk Institute. TMS is a psychosomatic disorder, and the theory behind it states that the brain seeks to distract the individual from painful, unconscious emotions so it uses the nervous system to restrict blood flow to specific body parts and this mild oxygen deprivation causes pain. The focus and attention to the pain keeps you from experiencing said painful emotions. Apparently, these painful emotions can be pretty run of the mill stuff but for whatever reason the individual finds them unacceptable and therefore represses them. The brain wants to make sure it stays this way.
While TMS is most often diagnosed in back pain – of which I have none – it has also been connected to almost every chronic, idiopathic problem I have ever had. I ordered the book, The Divided Mind, by Dr. Sarno and while dragging my skepticism through the muck of it, became even more convinced that this syndrome is worth exploring. Part of what has convinced me is actually physical: my arm pain has decreased by about 30% since first reading about TMS and I notice the pain spikes whenever I’m angry or irritated. And then all I think about is the physical discomfort.
But reading the book also leaves me feeling depressed. I am aware that I’d much rather deal with physical problems than psychological ones. That awareness depresses me even more. I like to think of myself as emotionally attuned and open to dealing with whatever issues I have.To help me sort through all of this, I made an appointment to go see a doctor who specializes in TMS to see which of my chronic conditions might stem from psychological factors and which of them might, say, result from a need for new orthotics.
Quite frankly, the long and short of this has very little to do with whatever is causing my physical problems. It has to do with my relationship to them. It has to do with my story about my health and my willingness to take responsibility for it. It reminds me of when I first began an effort to change my financial picture. While a desired outcome may have been more money coming in through my business, it really boiled down to whether or not I could develop a healthy relationship with my finances, whatever they looked like. For richer or poorer, right?
The same is true with our bodies, with our health and wellness. And whether I have TMS or Parkinson’s or have just hit an odd rough patch, I am responsible for how I respond, for what I bring to the table, for how I act in relationship. Will I obsess over what’s not working? Will I go through long periods of not doing anything to address my problems? Will I remember that the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone, that there is a interrelatedness in all things? And if the cause of my symptoms is psychological, will I be brave enough to follow through?
I don’t know if I’m anywhere near resolution to my chronic health concerns. I don’t know if the path will be easy or hard. What I do know is that I am no longer out of integrity. I can get up in front of a room of people, share with them about how to craft their own powerful stories about health and wellness and know that I’m along for the ride, too. That I have begun changing my own story.
