How Neuroscience supports the TMS approach

“If your personal reality is creating your personality, you are a victim. But if your personality is creating your personal reality, then you are a creator.” Dr Joe Dispenza.

Back when Dr Sarno discovered the ins and outs of Tension Myositis Syndrome, there was little talk of neuroscience, at least in the media and among common people. Sarno himself didn’t ever mention the subject, although he was (un)knowingly tapping into the workings of neuroscience to come up with the best approach for his patients. Sarno received a lot of criticism from his peers with regard to his ‘unscientific’ methods, and although he tried to explain what was happening in the brain to cause TMS, he didn’t conduct any research when it comes to how people’s brains and their stress chemicals changed as they underwent the deconditioning necessary for TMS healing.

Luckily, today neuroscience validates Dr Sarno’s discoveries, hence this blog post, where I’ll try to link the basic principles of neuroscience to TMS. In very simple terms, what neuroscience says about the brain is that it can learn new stuff, which then becomes habitual. The example of learning how to ride a bicycle is very common; when you first mount the bike, you may not be able to balance, but once you learn how to cycle, it is very difficult to forget it; in fact, you may be able to cycle without any problems even if you stop and restart 10 years later! Once you’ve mastered how to balance yourself on a bike, you don’t have to consciously think about the activity - you just kick off and start cycling! The same goes for other activities like driving, skiing and typing.

What is actually happening when you learn something new is that you’re activating new neural pathways in your brain. These neural pathways are kept alive and strengthened through repetition, so that the more you repeat an activity, the more second nature it will become. This principle also applies to feelings. The more you feel the same kind of emotion, the more you’re strengthening the neural pathway associated with emotion, so that you end up producing that emotion, at times even if there are no external circumstances to justify it.

In short, each neural pathway is linked to a specific action or behaviour, and that pathway is strengthened through repetition. But if someone decides not to keep on repeating the same habitual activity or feeling, the neural pathway linked to it can actually weaken. This is the basis for transformation.

TMS and neural pathways

So what does this have to do with TMS? Basically, people with chronic pain have ‘learnt’ how to produce the pain through a process called conditioning. Conditioning is actually the strengthening of specific neural pathways. In people with TMS, the brain has actually learnt how to produce the pain, has turned that into a habit, and as we know, habits are hard (but not impossible) to break.

But how does pain turn into a habit? I think a lot of practitioners would agree that pain becomes conditioned once a person starts to feed it. And we feed the pain by giving it attention, by expecting it, and by fearing it. So unconsciously, people with chronic pain are ‘expecting’ or fearing the pain too much. Since their brain and bodies already know how the pain is supposed to feel like, they can very easily reproduce that pain, even when they’ve healed from injury. This is precisely the reason why chronic pain tends to recur at the sites of old injuries. The pathway is familiar, and therefore it’s very easy for our brains to ‘activate’ it.

But what about emotional repression?

Sarno linked rage and other repressed emotions as the true cause of TMS, and he was of course right. These unconscious feelings that are threatening to break out manifest themselves in pain, because the brain is producing stress chemicals that chemically alter the body. In fact, according to Sarno, what actually caused the pain is a form of oxygen deprivation; as we enter a state of fight or flight, a bit of oxygen drains away from the tissues in our muscles as the body tries to preserve its most vital organs - hence, the lack of oxygen and blood flow creates the pain in the first place.

The theory of mild oxygen deprivation as the cause of pain still isn’t accepted by the wider medical community these days, but it is confirmed that people in a state of stress produce the stress hormone cortisol, and that this is detrimental to our bodies’ optimal functioning. What’s more, studies in Neuroscience have shown real physical changes in the brain when a person undergoes meditation. As meditation helps decrease stress, not only does the person feel more relaxed, but there’s actual evidence that the brain waves are different, and more conductive to a healthy state*. So whether you believe in the theory of oxygen deprivation or not, the important thing to remember is that our bodies are constantly being chemically altered depending on our emotions.

What Sarno may not have emphasized enough is the fact that once the pain is manifested, it is kept alive through conditioning, or what neuroscience calls ‘activated’ neural pathways. This is why so many people are still in pain, even after they feel that they’ve overcome the initial trauma. Unfortunately, for most people the pain has become the new ‘problem’, which is kept alive as they constantly think about it and wonder whether it will get worse, or if it will ever go away. What people are doing are strengthening the nerve pathways connected with their chronic pain, and that is the reason why the pain never seems to go away.

How to use neuroscience in your TMS healing

So that brings me to the ‘solution’. What can you do if the nerve pathways associated with your pain are so strengthened that the pain has become habitual? The answer is simple, but the task at hand is very difficult - you need to change the way you think.

If you stop reacting to the pain as if it were your worst enemy, if you stop massaging that area in a desperate attempt to treat it, if you stop believing that there is something terribly wrong with you when there isn’t, you will start diffusing those emotions that are associated with the pain. If you keep repeating this new behaviour, and not revert back to wallowing in your self-pity, then the newer, more positive emotions around your pain will start replacing the old ones. And since your pain is associated with these old ingrained emotions, it too, will start to dissipate.

Being pain free also means being fear free. This is why Sarno recommends resuming all physical activity. If you teach and convince your brain that walking/cycling/climbing/football or any other activity is not bad for you, and you practise what you preach by moving your body without fear, then the brain will eventually get that new signal and will no longer associate physical activity with pain.

So if you’re reading this, ask yourself, what are your emotions around your pain? Are you acting as if you’re in defence mode, avoiding this or that activity, for fear of your pain getting worse? Maybe you cannot stop the pain yet, but you can always change the way you think about it. Only then will the magic happen!

• Dr. J. Dispenza, You are the Placebo, 2014.

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