Chronic Pain – your knight in shining armour?

Believe it or not, chronic pain is part of your body’s primal protective response as a result of a real or perceived threat. It’s not there to make your life a misery or because you have done anything wrong. In fact the more frustrated and angry you become about your pain, the more you ‘ramp it up’ because of the effect these emotions have on the emotional part of the brain and as a result of this, the pain cycle.

So, what is the pain protecting you from?

It is basically the body’s reaction to perceived threats to your self-image and self-worth. In the western world we believe it is weak to cry or show our vulnerabilities and we tend to feel we should be seen to be coping, whatever is going on in our lives. Therefore a perceived threat might be something that could potentially cause you to ‘fall apart’ emotionally, swear at your boss or show any other sign of vulnerability.

It is all part of our unconscious and primal fight or flight/stress response, although these days any threats we face are generally psychological and not life-threatening. Unfortunately though, this means we don’t usually need to take physical action by fighting or running away, so the emotional energy/turmoil triggered by the threat isn’t utilised, remaining bottled up and unresolved within us.

The process is similar to the responses we have to any emotion, whether that’s fear, anxiety, embarrassment or sexual arousal. The emotions trigger the emotional brain to cause specific physiological changes in the body, many of which cause very obvious physical changes, such as blushing or an erection. In this case though, the physiological changes caused by this triggering of our stress response might result in muscle spasm, pain, numbness, weakness or various other symptoms.

Although the triggering emotional response is often unconscious as are the resulting neurochemical changes, unfortunately because the symptoms triggered are usually physical, they are often misdiagnosed as a medical problem. This unfortunately creates even more of a distraction from the underlying cause, which remains unresolved, so the symptoms/pain persists.

The exciting thing about recognising your pain is actually stress-induced and not due to whatever physical ‘abnormality’ found, is that it is reversible. Watch out for the next blog to find out a bit more about how pain is a protective response.

In the meantime though, you can check out the SIRPA approach which focuses on helping people deal with their unresolved emotions, while also educating people to recognise how to reduce the self-induced stress caused for example by our personality traits (e.g. by being self-critical, ruminating, over analysing etc) and our learned behaviours (e.g. our response when our ‘buttons are pressed’.) Along with these the aim is to enable you to become more stress-resilient and not only resolve any current symptoms, but prevent future health problems by learning to live life with less resistance.

Do you have a real life example of how your pain was acting as your ‘knight in shining armour’?