Chronic Pain... Part 2

Last week in my Chronic Pain blog, I began to tell you about the idea that research shows that chronic pain actually comes from the brain.

Interestingly, the area of our brain that is activated when we feel we are in emotional danger, for example, how we feel after a break up, with a loss, or with chronic stress, is the same area of the brain that is activated when we have actual physical damage to some of our tissues.

In other words, our brains cannot tell the difference between emotional pain and physical pain.  

This explains one reason why when we are living with chronic stress, our chronic pain or other body symptoms are typically exacerbated.

And unfortunately, many of the ways we tend to respond to chronic pain tend to not only solidify but also increase the sensitivity of our brain's danger detection system. This can cause our chronic pain to increase in intensity, duration, and often we find certain triggers can become stronger and stronger.

These typical responses include: fearing our pain, fighting our pain, focusing on our pain, trying to figure out what the cause of the pain is, trying to fix the pain, and of course to be frustrated by our pain.

You may have heard the term, neurons that fire together wire together.  When we feel our pain and then we have an emotional response to the pain, we are firing more neurons in our brain's danger detection system.

Now, of course, each of these response are totally understandable and normal, however, when we get stuck in one or a few of these and feel or respond this way over and over and over again, we unknowingly end up strengthening the neural circuits of the chronic pain.

If you know have been evaluated by a medical provider and you know that your chronic pain is not from a structural or hormonal issue (or your body has been healed from your initial injury) then likely your chronic pain is from an over sensitized brain detection danger system.  And likely the state of your ANS system also plays a factor.

So, what can you do?  

When you feel your chronic pain (or other chronic symptoms) bring kindness and compassion to your body.

 I cannot emphasize this enough. Our body's deserve (and need) kindness and compassion.

When you feel pain, remind yourself that your tissues are not damaged.

Remind yourself that your brain (and your ANS system) are not feeling safe.  

Tell yourself something like, "Oh, isn't that interesting. There is that sensation in my body again.  This is coming from my brain.  I know I am ok. I know this will pass."

This seems counter intuitive, but as you begin to change your response of your pain from a fearful one to a message that you are actually ok, you will begin to retrain your brain that indeed, you are ok, and in time this will calm your brain's danger detections system.

You can also look back at some of my other blogs on the importance of safety or diaphragmatic breathing to tips to help you increase your sense of safety and calm your ANS- which is an essential component to healing.

If you are living with chronic pelvic pain, you may want to keep your eyes open for when I next open my Wholistically Healing Pelvic Pain Online Program to new participants. If you are interested, please email me [email protected]

In Kindness,

Jennifer Chu, MS, PT, WCS, Mind-Body Coach