Your Pain is Real
Whether you’re experiencing physical pain or emotional pain, your pain is real. You are not broken. You are an imperfect animal who has lived through particular situations that have shaped who you are and how you respond to the environment around you. It's okay if you feel like a mess. It's okay you have pain, trauma, and fear. It’s okay if you feel lost, angry, sad, guilty, shameful, or stuck. There is strength in looking within, seeing the darkness that counterbalances the light. The trick is to find the present moment, return to breath, observe the heart beating—or whatever may work better for you to return to the now. And then, channel love.
Love can come from many forms—for yourself, from your family, friends, colleagues, or a significant other. Love can come from or be directed toward a pet, a place, or an experience. This practice of recognition and embracing love can be grounding and return you to the truth that nothing is real except this moment right here. And if you can find love in this moment, there is gratitude.
When it comes to chronic pain, most people’s struggles are not due to structural problems. It’s caused by patterns in the brain perceiving normal situations as threats, and this is due to programming that has occurred over one’s life experience, as well as some behaviors genetically ingrained from our ancestors’ evolution. The brain tries to keep us safe, and it does a great job at performing this functional service. What was revolutionary for me to learn was that emotional trauma in the brain is processed using the same neurocircuits as physical trauma. Essentially, the same neurons that fire when you break your ankle are the same that fire when you feel fear when an abusive partner returns home from work or a boss verbally discredits your value in the company.
So sometimes when we have an emotional trauma inflicted on us (whether this is big trauma, like a car accident, sexual assault, or displacement from a natural disaster or war, or a less threatening event that causes physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological harm), regardless of the size or perceived damage, these experiences can be interpreted by the brain and stored in the body. When the brain perceives a threat, whether it is real or not, the brain reacts to protect, and this habitual recurrence can then become learned and endlessly repeated during situations that may or may not be directly associated with the initial painful experience. Think of the brain keeping score, and the body is the scorecard.
As one example, we can explore the concept of some phobias. When my mom was little, her dad played a practical joke on her that turned out to be not so funny in the long run. Locking her outside their home in Colombia, she was surrounded by large frogs that she remembers jumping all around her as she pleaded to go back inside. In Colombia, there are various poisonous frogs and toads so whether conscious or not and whether the species was dangerous or not, the fear became intolerable. Decades later, I remember as a child myself, she would tightly grip my arm and shriek with her eyes closed as we walked in the dark—terrified of the thought of even seeing a frog. Her child mind perceived a life-threatening situation where later in life, when not even in an environment where there were frogs, the very idea of seeing one gave her an anxiety attack. The anxiety was triggered as a protective mechanism, because the brain decided that having a physiological response of guarding would be less threatening than thinking about the emotional wound that created the trigger in the first place: feeling locked outside and without protection from the one place and the person that was supposed to keep her safe.
If doctors have done scans and tests that come back in normal ranges and are not sure why your pain exists, if you’re tired of taking medications to manage pain, depression, or anxiety, then please reach out. The key to stopping this cycle is first making an accurate diagnosis: is there a structural problem or is this a neurocircuit problem? And if you have a perceived structural problem, like I do with spondylolisthesis or with something more serious like an autoimmune disorder and want a better outlook to function daily, let me help you learn how to calm the brain with stress reduction and eliminate fear. Reducing the fear of pain or reacting to emotional situations will be instrumental in reducing neural circuit induced or exasperated pain and distress.
We can’t control situations of pain, people, or our environment. We can only learn how to respond rather than react to them. Just like your brain learned these patterns, we can train it to unlearn the same patterns and introduce new behaviors and modes of perceiving our experiences. As Dr. Howard Schubiner, an internist and Director of the Mind Body Medicine Center in Michigan, likes to say, train your brain like you would train a puppy: with persistence, patience, and kindness.
