Putting on a face can cause pain

If you’re reading this you probably already accept that more often than not chronic/persistent pain is usually not due to a physical problem, but is actually a manifestation of unresolved emotional turmoil. It is an automatic and unconscious neurophysiological response where the pain is protecting us from unresolved inner turmoil.  This turmoil might be emotions which could threaten our equilibrium, our self-image or worse still we might publicly show our vulnerabilities, which can be perceived to be a huge threat.

There’s a lovely TED talk by Brené Brown in which she explains how we try to hide our vulnerabilities due to the fear of being laughed at or criticized etc.  Humans are basically tribal people and so connection/fitting in, is very important.  Anything we might perceive to cause us to risk being rejected can be perceived to be a ‘threat’ and therefore the primal ‘fight and flight’ or stress response will be activated, sometimes triggering or ‘fueling’ pain and other symptoms.

Our ‘fight and flight’ response is part of the most primal part of our brain  and in  order  for us to survive as a species it was important that it did  function well and did  respond for example not just to real threats to our  lives, but also to ‘false positive’ or  perceived threats.

For example, if caveman didn’t automatically react to the wind suddenly  causing a  rustle in the bushes behind him, one day he might believe it to  be just the wind,  whereas this time it was a lion ready to pounce.

If you imagine someone learning from a young age to fear spiders, then  this can become a very real fear, which although irrational (not many  spiders provide any threat to us at all) causes an automatic and very real physiological fear response in the body.  If you are frightened of spiders or know someone who is, you know that even a black thread on the floor can also trigger a similar bodily response until they realise it isn’t a real spider.

From this example you can see that how we respond to a very real threat to our life is the same as how we will respond to something we perceive to be a threat.  You can also see how physiological changes occur in the body purely as a result of an emotion, in this case symptoms such as; an increased heart rate, mouth going dry, hair standing on end etc.

Similarly physiological responses occur as a result of any emotion triggering the emotional brain, such as; blushing when embarrassed, bladder urgency when nervous, sexual arousal etc.

The physiological changes resulting in stress-induced symptoms follow a similar pattern and can be considered to be a ‘maladapted’ fight and flight response as our body reacts to what is perceived to be a threat.  As mentioned earlier, often these perceived ‘threats’ are fears related to the possibility of us being rejected if we reveal our vulnerabilities, therefore threatening our connection with those around us, including our peers, family and friends.

In this case, depending on the current circumstances, your past experiences (like the spider response which was a learned response), your beliefs and even your personality, very real pain or other symptoms can be triggered due to unresolved emotional turmoil which is perceived to be a threat. In fact a study quite recently demonstrated for the first time that the brain can trigger physical symptoms in response to repressed emotions.

Recognising that pain is actually not caused by any bodily abnormality or injury, but is part of a protective response, can really help reduce the fears related to their diagnosis and pain. Because fear itself also triggers the emotional brain, then overcoming this plays an important part in recovery from persistent pain.

Once any serious tissue-damaging condition has been ruled out, pain and other chronic symptoms are merely your mind and body communicating and providing a message that there is something that needs dealing with emotionally. The books on this subject and where necessary the more in-depth understanding offered by SIRPA’s online recovery programme helps people identify and then deal with these unresolved emotional issues, as well as looking at how we can become more stress-resilient as we learn to disrupt the pain cycle and reduce the self-induced stress caused by our past experiences, learned behaviours, beliefs and personality.