Healing From TMS – Detaching From The Fear Brain

Healing from Tension Myositis Syndrome involves detaching from your fear brain, or detaching from your primitive brain. Another way to put it, is if the fear brain is equivalent to your “inner child,” or younger self, we need to stop letting her run the show. We need to access our rational brain more in order to do this.

The home I grew up in was unhealthy to a certain extent but not the worst. However, my mother had terrible anxiety and my fear brain took over at a very young age. Let’s say hypothetically that my home was very dysfunctional and I had to go live with my aunt and uncle. My aunt and uncle were very loving and met all my needs. However, because I was attached to my mom and dad, even though it was unhealthy, I still wanted to go to them. I couldn’t detach.

The TMS Way

For good reason, this is how our fear brains operate. We know that self-care, and peace and calm is best for us, yet we still run from it back to the TMS way. Self-care doesn’t feel familiar to us. That is not our coping style, so we follow the same neuropathways repeatedly to our fear and pain.

Hypervigilance is what seems safe. Being on alert. That way we don’t miss
anything. We keep everyone around us happy to keep us safe. We do more than our
share to keep us safe. We have very high standards for ourselves to keep us safe. We beat ourselves up for making mistakes. We must be on time, we must do everything one hundred percent, we must keep up our exercise routine, we must watch everything we eat, our homes must be clean and organized, we can’t spend too much money, and we must be the best.

This way of life is exhausting, and is far from self-care, and peace and calm. It’s hypervigilance. Hypervigilance keeps us safe. We think that if we stay in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode we will stay safe. We run back to what is familiar because we are desperate for safety.

The Self-Care Way

But if we choose self-care people may be mad at us, people may leave us, we may not be the best, we may gain a little weight, we may lose a little more often, we may have a little less in our savings account…but we are free. We stop caring so much. We let go and slowly, but surely learn to choose ourselves. Our experience matters. We matter. We learn to live in the gray. We are less rigid, we have more joy, we can feel again. We talk nicely to ourselves. We have compassion when we make mistakes. We can either go the self-care way, or the TMS way. If we don’t learn the self-care way the TMS way is our default.

A New Way

So eventually my aunt and uncle give me so much love and care and it starts to feel so good that my nervous system starts to relax. I learn that it is safe there. I’ve lost some people, but I’ve gained healthier people. I don’t win as much but I enjoy things more. I can play again. I am no
longer hypervigilant. I am only in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode when there is a true 911 danger.  I am safe. I have created new neuropathways. 

My rational brain is in charge and I no longer need to send out pain signals to my body. That is not what keeps me safe now. I love my parents but I choose the self-care way. I detach from my parents and I can see that the whole time they thought they were keeping me safe.

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