Conditioning - the Process behind Chronic Symptoms & TMS

If your chronic pain or symptoms have persisted beyond what is deemed to be a reasonable period, then this may be due to a process called conditioning.

In fact, conditioning is the reason why symptoms persist even when there is no biological or structural explanation for them.

Pavlov’s dogs - the classic conditioning example

Every explanation of conditioning usually starts with the story of Pavlov’s dogs, which may have become a cliche by now. To avoid a lengthy retelling of the story, what happened to Pavlov’s dogs was that they started to salivate whenever they were about to be served food (obvious, isn’t it?).

But the interesting bit is this: Pavlov used to play a metronome when he served the food, and then decided to play the same sound without serving any food. What happened was, that the dogs started to salivate at the sound of the metronome, even when there was no food around. Their bodies had developed a conditioned response - a physical response (saliva) to an intangible suggestion (the metronome).

In the same way, we can be conditioned to generate negative symptoms, including back pain, stomach pain, IBS symptoms, allergic reactions and a host of other ailments, due to our memories and expectations, and the associations that our brain makes on a daily basis because of these memories.

We ALL experience conditioning

Conditioning is such a common phenomenon in people that we often fail to notice it in our everyday lives. We normally feel hungry and tired at the same time each day, we may fear certain places or situations (such as closed spaces) because our brain has developed a conditioned fear associated with a particular place.

In the case of chronic pain sufferers, most of them have been conditioned to feel pain either after a certain activity (walking, running, you name it), or at a certain time of the day (hence the change in intensity when it comes to pain in the morning vs. pain in the evening for some people).

However, conditioning doesn’t ‘just happen’. Just like the case of Pavlov’s dogs, there is always a trigger. The dogs’ trigger was the sound of the metronome and its association with food. But the trigger in people with TMS can also be an emotion or a thought, and its link with pain.

Day after day, we keep having the same thoughts and the same feelings*. These same thoughts generate the same emotions, and these emotions drive us - they can either make us feel fantastic, or they can keep us stuck in our misery. Emotions and thoughts, even unconscious thoughts, are like an addiction. The brain loves repetition and hates change, so once you’ve entertained an emotion a number of times, you will find it easier to keep feeling that same emotion, even if it is detrimental to your well-being.

If the fear, anger and helplessness that you feel regarding your pain have been kept alive through repeated thoughts, and these emotions have become the triggers to your pain, then you can end up in a chronic pain cycle that’s very hard to break.

But how does this happen? Let me try to simplify it with an example.

How TMS starts and becomes conditioned

Imagine you’ve got a buildup of anger and stress. As I explained in my article about TMS and Emotional Repression, this can trigger the onset of symptoms. All hell is threatening to break loose and you feel that it’s unacceptable for this to happen. And so you get pain to alert you to ‘danger’, in an area where your brain thinks it’s logical to get it (such as the site of an old injury or your back, since you’ve been carrying stuff around).

This is a classic case of how TMS starts.

Some people may get better after the episode, if they manage to relax or solve the problem that caused the pain in the first place, or if they go through a treatment that they completely believe in (could be a drug, surgery, a wonderful physiotherapist or even prayer).

But in several people who have been in pain for months or years, the reason why TMS persists is due to conditioning. They now have something else to worry about besides the initial trigger of TMS - the pain itself - and they start fearing the pain, wondering whether it will ever go away. The painkillers and other therapies might not yield their expected results, so they start having doubts as to whether any treatment will work.

The problem is, each time they fear the pain, or wonder if it will ever get better, they are actually anticipating the pain. They are reminding the brain of the pain, reviving a memory, and therefore reinforcing a neural pathway.

Breaking the TMS pain cycle

So how do you break this dreaded cycle? How do you weaken a neural pathway that is being kept alive, day after day?

The answer is simple, but can be very difficult in practise: you’ve got to change your emotions, even your unconscious thinking. This means that you have to stop anticipating the pain, even on an unconscious level. Basically, you’ve got to teach your brain a new way of thinking, a new habit, one which doesn’t involve pain.

There are various ways to do this, but I’ll sum up the process up below:

1. You’ve got to convince yourself fully that what you’ve got is simply mindbody in origin, and not in any way structural - this will help eliminate those emotions related to doubt and fear of a broken body.

2. You’ve got to stop fearing the pain or getting angry/feeling helpless when it strikes. Instead, you need to react to it with more neutrality, and even humour. Yes, I’m telling you to laugh at your pain.

3. You need to stop anticipating / expecting the symptoms, even on an unconscious level. This is the most difficult step for most people because you can’t control your unconscious expectations unless you make them conscious.

4. Finally, you need to put your new beliefs into practise. This means that you’ve got to resume normal activities without fear of pain, eventually stop taking treatments that support a structural reason for the pain and doing anything to ‘prevent’ the pain from occurring. Also a very difficult step, which shouldn’t be taken lightly.

One of the reasons why I decided to become a Pain Coach and provide TMS therapy was to help people who get stuck, especially in steps 2), 3) and 4).

It is one thing to believe in TMS on a conscious level, as you keep learning more and more about it, but another thing to change certain emotions and reactions that have been programmed in your unconscious through conditioning. That said, it can be done, either on your own with sheer willpower, or with some additional help.

* The works of Dr. Joe Dispenza can be extremely illuminating in this regard. See Dr Dispenza, How to stop Being Yourself & Reprogram Your Mind