Complex Trauma and Chronic Pain
Living with a chronic pain condition is a complex, nuanced, deeply personal experience.
The new research on chronic pain reduces this deeply complex human experience into a simple framework for healing. These basic concepts of pain science education, though helpful, can leave out the vast array complexity and nuance that varies from one person's experience to another.
That is something I am constantly chewing on in my personal experience of living with chronic pain, and with my clients' experiences.
Healing is anything but simple and linear!
I see the complexity in three tiers when it comes to creating the ripe conditions to developing a chronic pain condition.
Stress in adulthood such as stressful/traumatic events or ongoing stress such as a high-stress job or raising a family that can sensitize the brain and nervous system.
Stressful events in childhood, adolescence, and/or young adulthood that led to a trauma response that the body held onto with a previous reference point of safety before the traumatic or stressful event(s).
Pre-verbal and attachment trauma in which the brain and nervous system learned how to orient/function/exist in a trauma state without a previous reference point of safety.
The first tier is likely the easiest to heal. Getting injured while in a stressful relationship, job, or other situation could be enough to put the brain on high alert and use the neural pathway of pain as an outlet for the unprocessed stress.
Tier two requires deeper digging. You will likely have to go beyond simply cultivating a sense of safety around the experience of your symptoms alone, and start digging into some repressed emotional territory that is leaving the nervous system in a state of high alert.
Tier three is the most challenging because it requires you to start to see the water you are swimming in. Healing developmental trauma is not for the faint of heart. And while in many cases you don't have to necessarily heal your trauma to get out pain, when it comes to preverbal and attachment trauma, your survival mechanisms are often the only way you know how to function.
Unlearning these survival patterns can be incredibly challenging and confusing because there was no "before" experience of safety prior to the trauma.
This is why I combine Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Hakomi Somatic Therapy together into a coaching session.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy is excellent for desensitizing your brain to your pain symptoms and retraining your brain to perceive the sensations as safe.
Hakomi Somatic Therapy is excellent for entering the deeper waters of your emotional territory, unconscious barriers, and deeply embedded survival patterns.
Hakomi is excellent when you don't know the what, why, or how of your suffering. You just know you are riddled with anxiety, depression, or dysfunctional habits. Slowly, session by session, we can start to build a map to see and understand how the unconscious has organized itself to function in the world without getting certain essential developmental needs met.
The stress of chronic pain itself adds to the problem by making the stress-producing neural circuits of pain stronger.
Decreased income, decreased activity, and stress on relationships due to living with chronic pain all have a huge impact. This is why living with chronic pain is an active trauma for a lot of people.
Feeling trapped is often a trigger for pain, and therefore oppression has a huge impact on people who are under-resourced, and don't have access to opportunities and possibilities for healing.
This is why healing chronic pain is not just an individual, self-reliant healing ordeal. Chronic pain is a collective, societal issue. We need each other, and shared resources to process, grieve, and heal.
The brain continues to produce pain because it is the only way it knows how to deal with these stressors. Pain is always a protective response.
Adverse childhood experiences leave an imprint on the brain, making it more likely that a chronic pain cycle will develop.
Unresolved, repetitive stress will do the same.