Grief, Shame, and Chronic Pain
In the words of Francis Weller, a wise elder, psychotherapist and expert in the rites of grief:
You cannot grieve for what you have contempt for, or what you don't see as worthy.
This is why an immensity of grief often floods through when you start to know, claim, and embody your sense of inherent worthiness and self-dignity, perhaps for the first time.
There are many reasons to grieve when developmental trauma is at the root of your chronic pain symptoms:
The missing experience of feeling safe, cared for, and happy as a child. The loss of quality of life from months/years/decades of living with chronic symptoms. The loss of quality of life from living with chronic shame and low self esteem. The missed opportunities and possibilities from having struggled with your physical and mental health for so long.
Let's take a few steps back first.
Recent research on chronic pain shows that most people with chronic pain share these common characteristics & personality traits:
Perfectionism
People-pleasing
Self-consciousness
Self-pressurizing tendencies
Anxiety
Often what's at the root of these characteristics is chronic shame - a sense of feeling unworthy, wrong, or bad. Shame in and of itself is a normal, necessary, healthy emotion. It lets us know when we perhaps have done something wrong or harmful to another, and propels us to make amends when necessary.
Chronic shame, however, usually arises from repetitive scrutiny, ridicule, neglect, or abuse from people more powerful than you, such as a caregiver, teacher, or authority figure, usually in childhood.
This often results in toxic shame which exists as an unconscious belief about self, residing as a felt sense in the body as being inherently bad, wrong, and/or unworthy.
In the case of developmental trauma (which includes repetitive emotional neglect), this belief often remains outside of conscious awareness until one starts digging a little deeper.
This occurs because a child will always, every single time, override their own needs and authentic self expression to obtain a sense of acceptance and belonging to their caregivers in order to survive. Not belonging to the very people who are taking care of us is a literal threat to a child's sense of survival and safety.
Children don't have the capacity to understand that a caregivers chronic neglect, ridicule, or abuse is because of the adult's unprocessed pain, stress, or lack of capacity. Children internalize their caregivers' behavior as a belief that there must be something wrong with them, otherwise everyone wouldn't be ignoring, teasing, or abusing them.
The aim of this is not to vilify parents. Often, parents are doing their best, and sometimes societal stress and lack of resources can be the actual culprit, such as a working class parent who has to work over 60 hours a week to provide very basic needs for the family, and doesn't have the emotional bandwidth to provide the necessary attunement for a child to feel seen, safe, loved, and cared for.
Another common occurrence in families is an energetic mismatch between the parent and the child. If a parent cannot attune to the child's inherent constitution or personality, it can sometimes be enough to instill a sense of not feeling seen and safe enough.
Also, society can be an oppressive force or many young children including poverty or racism that impact the child and the family on many different levels.
Shame causes the brain to react as if you are in physical danger. It stimulates the sympathetic nervous system into a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. Shame is also associated with the desire to hide aspects of ourselves that we (often unconsciously) deem as unworthy.
This can provoke those personality traits like perfectionism and people-pleasing which are automatic, brilliant strategies that the nervous system does on its own to help us survive.
Another common characteristic for people with chronic pain is self-neglect, and this can be subtle and go very much under the radar.
If this is happening underneath your conscious awareness most of the time, just imagine how much havoc this wreaks on your nervous system, and therefore all systems of your body.
Remaining in a shame-spiraled trauma response of sympathetic nervous system activation or dissociation not only increases sensitization of the brain and central nervous system to pain, but it also affects every system of your body, including your immune system and digestive system.
Whoosh, this is a lot! And this certainly isn't everyone's story who suffers from chronic pain. But for those of us who struggle with multiple symptoms for many years, adverse childhood experiences are often the underlying culprit.
So what's the medicine here?
One anchor point that can be very helpful for the process of unwinding shame is to remember that you are inherently worthy. You don't have to and should never have had to earn basic care, love, and respect. You deserve to have your needs met, and you deserve the same basic dignity and respect from others, no more or less than any other human being.
Whether or not this has been your lived experience does not take away from this truth.
Starting to unwind these patterns of shame, perfectionism, people pleasing, etc, can be incredibly challenging when these are the very mechanisms and psychological structures from which we have learned how to function in the world.
When we start to process shame, and when the psyche is ready to begin to transform shame, what's often right behind that door is a massive amount of grief and anger, because we are starting to actually value ourselves. This opens the door to feeling the pain we have repressed for years or decades.
This is a beautiful and necessary process.
Grief puts us in touch with our authentic selves. It carves deeper canyons in our hearts, supporting us to dwell at the floor of the heart where truth resides.
Processing anger and grief in a healthy way, in which we are adequately supported and resourced, can regulate the nervous system and support all systems of the body to re-calibrate to homeostasis. It moves us out of the stuck trauma response and into the process of feeling the repressed emotions of grief and rage that keep the heart honest and open.
I support you to consider this, and to know that it's a process. It's often a toggle between grieving, then going back to those old shame-induced survival patterns, then grieving again, etc, until our center of gravity shifts to embodying our inherent worth and authenticity.
And, it's also very important to get adequate support for this process. Grief is NOT meant to be processed alone. It's meant to be held a larger container of community.
Lastly, if you know you have some deeply held repressed emotions, and you are having a hard time accessing them, please do not despair. There is nothing wrong with you. It is likely that your brain is working very well for you in an attempt to keep you safely away from those uncomfortable emotions that have been too overwhelming for you to safely feel during certain chapters of your life. It's a process that takes time, intention, and practice to move toward challenging emotions such as anger and grief, and begin to feel and process them.
This week's somatic practice:
I invite you to create a container for yourself, every day if you can, to set aside a few minutes of time and space to allow your emotions to have some space to flow.
You can use whatever tools best support you to do this. Some ways of evoking repressed emotions may be through stream of consciousness journaling, art, listening to music, dancing, movement, talking to a trusted friend or loved one, or meditating.
The point is that you are carving out some time and space with the intention of allowing for whatever emotions are ready to rise to the surface. Without force. Without any expectations. Just allowing. That's the practice.
If nothing comes, that's okay. You intentionally gave yourself the time and space to feel what's underneath the surface layers. With repetition, your brain and nervous system will learn that your daily practice is becoming a safe space to deepen.
