Recovery Journey Roadmap

Dan Buglio speaks about this a lot in his awesome daily videos. This statement really stood out for me from one of them, this man knows his stuff!

You must STARVE the pain of negative attention and obsessive focus!

WHUUTTT? Starve it of attention? Pain is literally screaming at me 24/7 and you want me to ignore it? Easier said than done, plus it’s not really ignoring it, just REFOCUSING your attention and changing your fear into confidence and indifference towards your symptoms. You can still feel pain and know it's there, acknowledge it from a safe place, like looking at it through a window with a curiosity of its message - WITHOUT giving it all your time, anxiety, attention, fear and focus. 

Alan Gordon - TMS and chronic pain expert, author, podcaster and psychotherapist at the Pain Psychology Center is one of the best teachers in this space about transforming your relationship to fear of your symptoms. In his book The Way Out he simply explains how our fear is perpetuating our symptoms, and how to gently reprogram our minds to stop obsessing and fixating.

He also has a fabulous podcast, Tell Me About Your Pain.

One of the clearest paths to eliminating your symptoms is to take away the their power by overcoming your preoccupation with them. ~ Alan Gordon LCSW

Ultimately your brain is just trying to keep you safel, help you and protect you by sounding off an alarm of sorts. As I came to realise this and gave in to the process and understanding of what this meant, I eventually actually started to thank it and be kind to it. You could say I even LOVE IT now it instead of kicking and screaming in frustration of what it was doing to me. That change of heart was WILDLY EFFECTIVE in my recovery story.

Switch fear to love

A BIG TIP: A real pivotal moment for me was when I figured out how to switch my feeling of fear and frustration into safety and LOVE. Hear me out. Every time I felt angry and scared that my pain was firing and ruining my life, I would quickly switch that to an image of my younger self:

I imagined little Dani hurting and holding her arms out for help, and that one thing made my fear turn to love really quickly. I practised that every time my pain became frustrating and my pain levels changed DRAMATICALLY.

This approach has worked for many other people that I have spoken to and suggested this technique. It's a real game-changer, a simple visualisation that can literally switch off symptoms within the same day they occur.

Changing the way you think about your TMS and how you treat it can create epic changes to your suffering. Dan Buglio can switch your thinking from desperately desperate, to hopefully hopeful, very quickly, but it took time and constant reminders for me to really understand this. So it’s a good job his videos are daily, it really kept me on track as I zigzagged between belief and despair. It can be really hard to not think about your pain and not be pissed off when it's still there. 

Dan teaches you to get on with your life, he teaches you how to let go and set yourself free from the shackles of TMS. I talked about mindset a little in the GET MOVING section, where you teach your brain to believe it's OK now and safe to do physical things again. Mindset matters most to your brain because ‘what you think: you believe’. I could rattle on about this for days, but Dan does it best...

Through all this learning and working and addressing your emotions, there will come a time where you might need to just STOP.

Let go of the reigns of your chaotic healing journey, stop fighting and surrender. Accept what it is, do your best to feel your feelings and soothe yourself, but LET GO. Let go of that stuck situation of constantly trying to fix yourself and switch your focus on what’s thriving in your life, things you CAN control and find joy in. Focus on your family, your hobbies, your dreams.

I had really awesome results and many many pain-free days from picturing and working on future plans, visualising my future self and life (one of them was this project actually, another was planning my yoga journey). The butterfly feelings inside seemed to flick a switch for me, as I was no longer treading water in this sea of uncertainty and desperation to heal. Work on reducing hypervigilance, get on with your life as best you can, and the healing will come...

As the saying goes, "you can't heal a body you hate". Many of us arrive here at this work with a very complex relationship with ourselves. People-pleasers that put themselves last, with deeply engrained internal narratives that are hard to shake.

Learning to trust and accept yourself along this journey is key to long-term success. The brain interprets negative self-talk and pressure as a threat and keeps the nervous system firing danger signals. The softer and more patient we can be with ourselves, the better.