Complacency vs. Empowered Indifference
The difference between complacency and empowered indifference is important to understand in the context of chronic pain or other chronic health conditions such as chronic fatigue, IBS, chronic migraines, tinnitus, vertigo, and the list goes on and on.
However, you could apply this understanding to anxiety, looping negative thought patterns, and various internal "parts" of ourselves such as those parts that are perfectionistic, people-pleasing, or critical, to name a few.
Indifference is an empowered, conscious choice to not react to your chronic symptoms.
Complacency is a disempowered, mildly avoidant way of just managing symptoms without much hope of improvement.
When you understand why you are experiencing chronic pain and take the active steps to work with your nervous system, you can make an empowered choice to not obsess or react to your symptoms, and instead allow them to be there in a way that allows for more spaciousness.
For those of you who are relatively new to my newsletter who haven't heard me talk about chronic pain, this may sound somewhat crazy.
However, there is a lot of research that supports the role of the brain, nervous system, and emotional health in chronic pain conditions. More to come on that.
For YEARS I toggled between obsessing about my symptoms, and then just feeling complacent in them. This was mostly because I didn't understand what was happening to my body, nothing seemed to be helping, and I was very scared and disempowered.
I thought it was Lyme disease, and then I thought it was an autoimmune disorder. But as I have committed to this mind/body approach, worked to contact deep layers of my nervous system, and processing repressed emotions, my symptoms have reduced significantly.
Attempting to practice indifference without getting to the root of your symptoms is just avoidance.
Coming to a place where you are ready to take an empowered stance to be indifferent towards your symptoms is often a process.
It's a process that requires cultivating a backdrop of safety to witness your symptoms without reacting to them with what Dr. Howard Shubiner calls the Six F's:
Fear of the symptoms
Focus on symptoms
Frustration with the symptoms
Fighting your symptoms
Trying to Figure out your symptoms
Trying to Fix your symptoms
To note, it is COMPLETELY COUNTERINTUITIVE to not do this when you are in pain!
You could think of it as a parallel to the process of healing anxiety.
With anxiety, our brain and nervous system want us to be vigilant all the time, even when we are safe. So if we allow the discomfort of the anxiety to scare us even when we are safe, then we end up in a negative feedback loop where the anxiety perpetuates itself.
Pain works the same way.
With anxiety, we don't want to react to it, yet we also don't want to be indifferent to it until we have gotten to the root of it. If we try to ignore it, but we haven't processed why it's here in the first place, it's just avoidance.
So in essence, it's a TALL ORDER to approach your symptoms this way!
It's simple but not easy.
And it takes an incredible amount of courage.
I know for myself, if I would have tried to cultivate indifference even just a few years ago, I would not have been ready for it because I did not have enough of an internal sense of safety and internal anchoring to rest into.
