chronic pain attitude and more

What is our relationship with pain?

The immediate answer would be resisting it or opposing it . it seems like the natural response like an innate reflex. but, believe it or not there are other ways to interact with pain. what would happen if you would choose to embrace it, listen to it, talk to it and treat it like a frightened little kid in tantrum? We went to people who had a long term relationship with their body pain and found a way to befriend it and let it go. we asked them how do they relate to pain before and after their healing journey and what insights they have gained. Here is what they shared:

Bonnie Sharf's insights about pain:


I did experience excruciating back pain at the very beginning.  The pain from all of the blood draws and IV insertions was something I had to learn how to withstand and I did so by putting my mind on something else and practicially "living in that moment" in my mind rather than the experience in my 3D reality.




Ann Miller's insights about pain:


Regarding pain,  the inner self talk back then was fear or frustration: "Oh, no. How long is this gonna last? I got to run to some specialist somewhere. I gotta run to a pill bottle somewhere. See a new chiropractor or PT"  a lot of self pity  poor me"  That was my self-talk. My self-talk now is  " what are my emotions? What was I thinking about right before this?"  it could be just  right before this pain, but it could be over the last 24 hours. 

Nobody likes pain, me neither!

I ask myself what are my emotions around that? What could be some layers of emotions under there? So maybe I'm resentful on something. Well, what's under resentment? Well, under resentment is anger and under that is envy and under that is anger at yourself that you're angry or envious etc.  you see? so you're going for those layers and layers and layers, and that's my relationship with pain now

I have learned so much about myself through my pains


Be sure I still get frustrated. nobody likes pain, pain is painful always but today I do look upon it as a messenger and am  grateful for it in the end. I'm not grateful for it when I'm in it but  I have learned so much about myself or my, or my relationships with others or how I need to show up better for myself via these pains so  I'm always grateful for it in the long run. I see the pain as an opportunity to get curious about the hidden more repressed emotions!




Mathew Embrey's insights about pain:


I made a documentary about opioids and the side effects are horrible as we all know. My current approach to address pains is via  mental control and mindful practices  things like meditations, affirmations, brain programming, reprogramming concepts and beliefs, sounds and frequencies etc. mindful practices are a big part of my life now and they work not only for pain but they create vitality and happiness. Let me tell you: 
 

It is much harder work on mindfulnes than on diet


It is much harder work on mindfulnes than on dietand excercises and it requires some isolation. My life experience showed me these modalities work. I used to see pain as inevitable place. Now i see pains  as a place to enter to some extent,  but never stay there too long. You do have resources to go after your pains as they start and kick them away. Your resources are not only in the physical realm but in other more etheric realms like dreams.




Victoria K. Carman's insights about pain:


It’s painful J, but I know it’s not forever, it will go away, I can lessen it, I can talk to pain – it’s a friendly, but misinformed messenger, faithful part of my protective mechanism. Not reason to be angry or desperate, but to contact, connect, negotiate, listen!




Sara Halevi's insights about pain:


I have always had a high pain threshold. I would say that now I don’t allow my thoughts to dwell on pain. If something hurts, I don’t allow it to go into a place of fear and resistance, I just say, oh, ok, it’s like this now. It will shift.




Laura Haraka's insights about pain:


Pain is my barometer - I did not want the pain and I wish that I never had it.  Having said that, my lifestyle is so much better now than before I went on this journey.  I am grateful for my understanding of pain and the message it brings me.  Knowing that it was here to protect me and brought positive changes to my life. I was angry at my pain in the past.  It wasn't until I knew what my brain was doing was I able to form a new relationship with my pain




Dr. Jeff Axelbank's insights about pain:


Jeff's take on pain: It's interesting that the parts of the brain that light up with chronic pain. If you're looking at a functional MRI scan are the same parts of the brain that light up for emotional pain, so if you have a loss or something like that, if you're grieving or it's the same part of the brain that lights up as when you have chronic pain, so there's a close connection between emotional pain and chronic pain, so we don't know what is the cause and what is the effect. They are intertwined the emotional pain and the chronic pain.
 




Samantha Klassen's insights about pain:


I feel like the chronic pain came on to stop me from feeling about the baby and about my mother. It makes a lot of sense. I could not grasp that I lost my mom and my baby, and I think the pain came on at the perfect time to distract me. It protects me right more or less. I think that's what its intentions were, and it worked for sure. 

I am talking to my pain


The biggest thing that I took away from everything is learning how to not be afraid of it and really believing that this is TMS, so I would basically yell instead of my head sometimes, like, you will not beat me. I am bigger than you. Pain. You cannot control my life.

Not afraid of pain any more


I don't get afraid anymore. I'm not afraid. I sit there with it and breathe it in. Breathe it out. I allow it to be there. Nothing faces me anymore. It was the biggest growth I've ever had in my life, and I know everybody can outbeat living with pain, like, for real. I did.




Jeanni Kulwin's insights about pain:


My practical advice is when you have pain: don't run away to the mind to distraction. Just be present with the body and its aches.  stay open to it. 

When pain takes all attention


Well, it depends what level we're talking about. Somatic tracking is a technique that is not recommended  if your  pain level is ten because you don't want to be in your body, but if you're experiencing on scale  zero to ten, a degree of  five or six, we can just sit with it and sit with our breath
 




Zacarry Cupples's insights about pain:


When you have pain,  I get it. It's a frustrating thing because there's so much in life that you want to do and accomplish, but it's just like anything. Learning any skill or anything like that. It takes time. Right. You could think of having freedom from chronic pain as learning a skill, and the skill is getting your body to move and do the things that you want to do without hurting so much




Valerie Hickman's insights about pain:


The thing that has changed is in my relationship to pain is that before this journey I was terrified of pain. I was so scared to death of the pain. Now, I'm not scared anymore and I treat it just as a sensation. I'm not entering any more to the what if scenarios and the worst case scenarios. When something is starting to ache, I go to my feelings. I ask myself, what are the my current stressors and I write them down.




Ray Lelievre's insights about pain:


Pain and fears are strongly connected. I am not afraid of pain any more. I lost my fear, and with it went most of the pain. For example,  I suffered of chronic cluster headaches 5 to 8 times a day for about 9 months. It was hell!! I was hospitalized, given several medications but noting worked. It was not until I completed the 4th and 5th steps of AA's 12 steps that they disappeared. I know now more than then how emotions and fears are the root of many problems in cluding chronic pain. When now i experience some pains here and there, i dismiss it by telling my brain: "it's just TMS"!  my inner self talk is : never let fear control your life. Be the captain of your own ship.




Tracy Tatcher's insights about pain:


I’ve learned to listen to my body, to feel when pain might present and listen to what it’s telling me. Pain is our body communicating with us, telling us we aren’t in alignment, we are dis-eased, not balanced in some way. To have complete health you have to be balanced, this all made sense to me and it means I am in charge of my choices. I take full responsibility to what is happening to me now that I know my answers and have gotten better. As you start to see improvements you start to trust your inner voice, you start to feel safe in your own skin and in your choices, you connect with yourself on a much deeper level and your life changes for the better.




Experts are talking on Pain issues:

Pain experts explain the mechanism of pain, whay does it linger in some folks? what can you do about it?

Dr. David Clark explains pain:

We all know pain. For example, when we hit our thumb with a hammer, the pain is generated by the damage to your thumb, but there's another kind of pain which can be generated in the brain, and the most classic example of that is Phantom limb pain, where a person feels pain at the site of a limb that has been amputated, and that pain clearly is not coming from the limb because it's no longer there.

Pain is being generated inside the brain

And it turns out the brain can do that quite commonly and can create symptoms, pain or otherwise anywhere in the body, so the reason that it does that is that there are changes in the neuroanatomy. There are real physiologic underpinnings to this. The circuits in the brain that process these signals are different, and the reason they're different is because of one or more types of stress that the person is suffering from. It can be childhood stress. It can be stress in your life. At the moment. It can be a mental health condition like depression, anxiety, or post trauma, and if we can identify what that source of stress is, and there may be more than one that a person is suffering from, then we can treat it.

Adverse childhood leads to chronic pain

If the person, for example, has been abused as a child, we can address the long term impact of that in a way that benefits the person not only in their daily functioning and in their view of themselves, but it also alleviates the stress that's creating the symptoms

Dr. Howard Schubiner MD explains pain:

There's certainly tremendous amount of suffering  AND PAIN in the world: Tremendous amount of abuse, tremendous amount of poverty, tremendous amount of injustice, tremendous amount of racism, discrimination against people and more. I would argue that there's also always some degree of choicee that people have. Victor Frankel wrote about that and lived that in his life. No matter what your external circumstances are And admittedly, many external circumstances are extremely difficult. There's always some choice, how you think, if you're going to live, how are you going to live? Given your circumstances, many circumstances are not changeable, but we can choose to change our attitude. We can choose to change our mood. We can choose to change how we think about our circumstances, and we can choose to find meaning and purpose in our lives. We can choose to find social connections and we can choose compassion WHICH AS I SEE IT- THESE ARE THE INGREDIENTS NEEDED FOR HEALING.

Why does pain linger?

Pain lingers because people think they're injured. Pain lingers because they think there's ongoing damage. Pain lingers because there's fear of the injury because the medical profession tells them you have CRPS or you have RSI or you have  fibromyalgia, et cetera. You look them up and you read they're incurable.  So pain lingers because of fear of pain and the conceptualization of it as being incurable and that you have ongoing damage.

The big cause of persistent pain

On top of that, pain lingers because of focus on the pain, because of frustration with the pain, because of trying to heal it and using all these different techniques, including injections and diets and surgery and massage and acupuncture and physical therapy. When none of it works, you get more and more frustrated. All that fuels the danger and alarm signal in the brain. The third reason why pain tends to persist and linger is because of emotional trauma : childhood trauma and stress in people's lives.  if they have an ongoing situation with their work or their child or their spouse or their neighbor or the political situation in the country or the virus situation in the world, all those things can fuel this danger alarm mechanism and make pain linger. Those are the main reasons why pain will persist in some folks.

Research about chronic pain

The vast majority of people with chronic pain do not have a structural problem. We did a recent study where we evaluated very carefully over 200 people with chronic neck and back pain, and we found that 85% of them do not have a structural problem. They may have had injuries. Many people have had injuries as human beings are designed to be injured and to heal all injuries.  If you have a severe structural problem, you may end up with a curvature of the spine. You may end up with the leg length discrepancy.

Scars do not hurt

 There's a lot of structural disorders that can be severe and can lead to deformities, but our body adapts to those deformities. Our brain adapts to those deformities. If pain is occurring after an injury after the injury is healed, it's because the brain has taken over that pain. The brain has learned that pain because the injury has healed and scars do not hurt.

Sometimes we heal with scarring.  Scars are not painful. There's this idea that someone has a car accident or a mild injury, and then they have pain because of that injury. No, that's not the case.

 

I was just talking to a friend of mine who spent some time in West Africa working in a rural area, and he's met people with tremendous injuries, head injuries that we would call concussions and traumatic brain injuries, people with all variety of cuts and scrapes and broken bones.  he did not see chronic pain in that population. There was no chronic pain, there was no chronic head injury, there was no concussion lasting  injury. There was no whiplash injuries that lasted for months or years.

Osteoarthritis does not necessarily have to be painful

Everyone gets wear and tear of their bodies over time. Everyone gets some degree of osteoarthritis over time, and if you look at X rays of people's joints as they age, they get more and more osteoarthritis, but not all of that is going to be painful.

We are over diagnosing

If you look at the correlation between people's pain and people's X rays, there's no good correlation, very poor correlation between X ray evidence of osteoarthritis and pain. Now, clearly, some people have severe levels of osteoarthritis  and some of them will need a joint replacement. That's fine. That is true, but it is over. In our modern medical world, we're over diagnosing.