Is Acute Withdrawal The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS)?

Apparently there is some question . . .

Sometimes people ask me some variation of the question: can acute withdrawal from psychiatric drugs be The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS)? I’ve also heard from others that apparently people are trying this approach for acute withdrawal so I thought I’d make a short post on this topic.

I think it’s first important to ask what is acute withdrawal? Well if someone takes a psychiatric drug to the point of physical dependency and then stops taking it then research on this subject and more importantly people’s experiences show that withdrawal symptoms are likely to happen. Even if a person hasn’t heard of withdrawal previously they’re still likely to get withdrawal because, again, these drugs can cause dependency and therefore acute withdrawal symptoms when they’re stopped. This strikes me as probably a purely biochemical reaction and therefore I don’t think acute withdrawal is TMS. I guess someone’s reaction or their mind’s reaction to withdrawal could make it worse and might very well play a role in who gets protracted withdrawal sensations but the acute withdrawal phase itself is probably inevitable for most people.

Now there are of course stories of those who stop taking these drugs and don’t get withdrawal. The first time I took Paxil I took it for five or seven months and I just stopped taking it and never got any withdrawal. But I wouldn’t count on that. The fact I didn’t take it for that long, that it was the first drug I took, maybe this played a role and other things as well but, really, it’s not clear why some people avoid acute withdrawal. In any case the point here is I don’t think acute withdrawal itself can be resolved through learning about a TMS approach. It probably has to run its course.

A more significant question, I think, is how long acute withdrawal lasts. The literature, even the “critical literature”, suggests 4-8 weeks is the duration of acute withdrawal—but is that really true? There are people out there who say there are very specific timeframes of acute withdrawal and protracted withdrawal, just like people make claims that time is the only healer. There are lots of claims out there where people project onto others their experience as if they’re speaking the universal truth or just regurgitating what they’ve heard other people say. But in fact this is a grey area.

Now I would suspect that acute withdrawal might be defined similarly to other kinds of injuries: it’s when “symptoms” continue beyond the expected period of recovery. Again for some people acute withdrawal could last weeks or maybe several months I don't know. Personally, I think, each person must define their own experience and decide for themselves what their situation is and what value a TMS approach may have for them individually. And sometimes it’s not clear what’s going on but people might still think this TMS stuff is worth a shot because maybe it makes sense to them or speaks to them in some way. They wonder why these sensations are going on and on and it doesn’t make sense to them anymore. Naturally it doesn’t matter what I think because I can only speak from my own experience and each person’s experience is unique to them.

Now there is another situation I want to bring up and that’s the relationship between acute withdrawal and tapering. When I first started making these videos I thought there’d be more people off drugs even though I struggled tapering myself for a long time. But most of the people who contact me are tapering or stuck. In this situation, feeling stuck or tapering very, very slowly, it can be murky as to what is acute withdrawal or adverse drug effects vs what is TMS.

I made a video about when I was slowly tapering and I thought I was experiencing withdrawal from that and yet when I came to understand TMS the “withdrawal sensations” stopped. So, as turns out, I only thought I was experiencing acute withdrawal—I wasn’t actually. I then carried on with the taper and didn’t have any more problems or feel stuck again. So without a TMS approach maybe I’d feel stuck on drugs today or feel I’m still in protracted withdrawal. So my own experience (and I know others who have had similar experiences) suggests that the slow tapering/withdrawal situation and the question of what is acute withdrawal or adverse drug effects or TMS is not always clear.

But even, just thinking back, before I resolved the “withdrawal sensations” with a TMS approach I had questions like: why would such a tiny microcut cause such powerful withdrawal? What would be the biochemical process behind that? I couldn’t make sense of it but the idea of withdrawal was the only one I had available to me —I had no other way to understand what was happening so that’s what I went with.

It wasn’t until I learned about TMS that I came to understand that my nervous system was in a stress response state and firing danger signals that caused all these sensations to persist. A big part of what put me in that stress response in the first place was acute withdrawal itself. I mean it’s a scary experience and it can kick-start a stress response that can go on and on. Or sometimes it’s an emotional stressor that kicks off this stress response that keeps the sensations going. Or both. Then what often happens is a preoccupation with the sensations themselves begins and a great fear of the drugs, of our brains, might develop. Those fears can also keep the danger signals firing and keep the sensations going. Ultimately the belief that someone has something fundamentally wrong with them can keep this stress response going. Other important factors are life stressors, personality traits, emotional tension even unconscious emotional tension about something we’re upset about—all this can contribute to this stress response or even form its basis. Now even if that’s happening we can still resolve it—sometimes people might think there’s nothing we can do if there’s an external stressful situation but the sensations come from a stress response within us so we still can resolve it and I might make another video on that later.

But back to the original question: when it comes to acute withdrawal, is it TMS? Well it depends on whether it's actually acute withdrawal, an adverse reaction to being on the drugs, or a learned stress response, that is, TMS. And again I think that’s something that people have to determine for themselves. But for a TMS approach to achieve effectiveness reframing sensations away from withdrawal is important, as is acknowledging any contributory sources of stress or emotional tension because then I think it’s possible to reprocess these emotions in a way to teach our minds that emotions are safe; they don’t need to cause danger signals that keep these sensations going. Journaling was one way that was helpful for me and I made a video on that.

I’d also just say one more thing and that’s that this TMS approach takes time to understand and for it to fully sink in and take its full effect. The idea that people tried this approach in acute withdrawal, I mean, that’s not a lot of time for this approach to even sink in, not that it would work then anyway. It took me five months for this to take effect, it took others shorter, and others longer. But sticking with it when you know you’re on the right track, even when there are doubts as I had, even when it’s not going perfectly because it won’t go perfectly, but when you feel it’s gotta be this, then you just keep going. That’s the biggest thing people have in common who have success with this approach is determination and they just keep going even when it doesn’t look like it’s working.

So If you’re interested in knowing more about this approach or expanding your knowledge I have a resource page on my free Substack here, with books by John Sarno and resources with Howard Schubiner, Alan Gordon, Steve Ozanich, all this stuff that can show you how this works. That’s it for today and maybe I’ll see you again next week.