Your Symptoms Leave with an Irish Goodbye
If you want to want cultivate more ease and feel less dominated by your chronic pain symptoms, you have to keep a couple of points in mind:
Your symptoms are secondary.
They are the last to leave.
And perhaps this calls for a third point, which is that your symptoms are also shy to leave. Meaning that if you continue to focus on them, they will likely stick around.
Think of your symptoms as like the person at the party who does the Irish goodbye. I'm not sure about you, but it's my favorite way to leave a big gathering.
Perhaps it's an introvert thing, but if I announce that I'm leaving, I'll end up sticking around for another hour or two just saying goodbye to everyone and letting conversations linger for way longer than I wanted (and feeling exhausted).
What does this have to do with chronic pain?
Regarding point #1, your symptoms are secondary to something deeper. The symptom is an external expression of some way that the nervous system and brain have perceived that some stimulus is a threat, and is trying to get your attention through a wide variety of potential symptoms that can be activated by the autonomic nervous system.
Repressed emotions are perceived as a threat to the brain, and we'll get into more of that in a future newsletter.
And regarding point #2, you have to get to the root of the perceived threat and work with that instead of focusing on the symptom itself. This is usually a process of regulating your nervous system. The ultimate goal is for your default mode to be that of a regulated, easeful nervous system.
Side note: Accessing, feeling, and processing your repressed emotions regulates the nervous system.
Our brains are constantly trying to figure out what is important to pay attention to. We have thousands of internal and external stimuli hitting our senses every second, and our brains make split second decisions based on a process known as "predictive processing" meaning that what we perceive is predicted from past experiences.
Our brains are actively helping us to navigate the world by trying to predict what will happen next so that we are prepared for it. If the brain expects us to feel pain, it will create those sensations without needing the actual stimulus anymore.
When the brain is in an ongoing state of worry or anxiety (hello adverse childhood experiences and chronic stress), it will continue to produce fatigue with activity, pain with walking, and all kinds of other sensations to try to enforce rest or inactivity with the intention to protect us from what it perceives as dangerous.
Have you ever laid on a massage table, and knowing that you are about to get a massage before the therapist has even begun touching you is already is bringing relief to your symptoms? Or you are driving home from work and you have to pee, and the closer you get to the house the more urgent it becomes? Or you put your phone in your pocket and you swear it was vibrating, but when you check, alas, there was no missed call?
This is your brain working for you, and this is part of how the process of chronic pain works. Hence, your symptoms are REAL whether they are coming from an actual stimulus or a perceived stimulus.
Another interesting thing to note here is that your brain will turn pain signals on or off depending on how important they are or are not. For example, if you break your ankle while playing soccer, you will probably be in extreme pain to prevent you from continuing to run on that ankle and injure it more. However, if you are running from lion or an axe murderer, your brain would probably turn those pain signals off in your ankle because running for your life is more important in that moment.
So, you can use some mental gymnastics here with your symptoms by changing the tightly wound up way that you tend to experience, perceive, and relate with your symptoms that have likely become patterned over time.
This is important because the way we react to our symptoms (and usually our response is a patterned reaction by the time the pain is chronic) heavily influences whether or not these neural pathways of perceived threat paired with a pain response become more deeply embedded, and therefore harder to change.
When we react with fear and try to manage the way we feel, we are reinforcing the pain cycle. Because fear is the fuel for this danger/alarm mechanism in your brain.
To note, some people tend more towards self-neglect than hyper-management of symptoms. Some people just feel their symptoms and completely try to ignore them and stay distracted. This also does NOT work, and tends to make things worse. Again, symptoms are pointing as something deeper that needs some tending.
I'll tell you some of my personal story of how I managed to do some mental gymnastics for myself that had a significant impact on my recovery process:
I have been a massage therapist for a long time now, and I have had to shift careers because this activity has become such a deeply embedded association of pain in my brain. Before I would even start the massage, my body would start hurting which is probably the opposite experience that my clients were having on the table.
When I was really in the place of not having yet switched careers, and having to do a significant amount of massages on a daily basis to make enough income, I was in a pretty rough daily pattern around trying to manage my pain after work. (Note: feeling trapped is a key factor that perpetuates chronic pain.)
I would come home, usually exhausted and hungry, and stand at the kitchen counter and eat food, and then would go lie down to meditate and stretch and do breathwork. All good self care practices. Except that I got so stuck in this pattern of "self care", that the pattern of self care itself became the issue.
One day I found myself doing this same routine, and realized I wasn't even feeling that symptomatic, and that I was using the food/meditate/stretch/breathwork as a crutch. When I tried to not do the usual routine, I experienced intense anxiety. This then became the new challenge to face: being with my anxiety when I tried to do something different.
So I started thinking of what things/activities/places/people actually have supported a sense of safety, comfort, and freedom in the past for me. As silly and mundane as it sounds, what came to my mind was the freedom of turning on music, hanging out with friends, and having a beer in the evenings. Luckily drinking has never been an addiction for me, or this may be a bit more complex. But I just recall the ease and freedom of evening time, friends, a beverage, music, and dancing.
So then when I would come home and try to break the old "self care" routine that was, in essence, no longer worth a damn for self care anymore, I would just lie down on the floor, and think to myself, "It's evening time now, I'm free." And it flipped a switch in mind.
I still needed some of that routine just to feel somewhat in control, but the little change to maybe try turning on music, and grabbing a beverage (or maybe just a cold seltzer) helped me to reorient and shift my patterning from a tightly controlled ritual to sensing that perhaps I am actually a little more free than I believe I am right now.
This would then shift me toward maybe joining my partner in the kitchen and dancing, which would help me feel relaxed and at ease, and I think the key word here is FREE.
Did this immediately stop my symptoms? No. It took time, and a willingness to do something counterintuitive to my usual ways of managing my symptoms. And sometimes I still needed some of the routine just to soothe my nervous system a tiny bit, while simultaneously adding in a small dose of something different.
With a little practice, I started feeling this sense of freedom in my body even while the symptoms were there, and I chose to pay more attention to this deeper sense of safety and freedom, and be just a little more indifferent to the symptoms and anxiety.
And it started with this one silly little thing I could bring to my mind that generated a shift in my perception of what I thought was possible for me in those moments of feeling symptomatic, anxious, and dysregulated.
This brings me back to my point #3 again: that your symptoms are shy to leave, and they will leave with and Irish goodbye. Meaning that when you start paying attention to what helps you feel safe, inspired, what makes you feel alive, what gives you a sense of purpose....over time, your symptoms will get quieter. But if you are all over them, watching and managing them all the time, they won't have an opportunity to slip out on their own.
This can feel like a tall order when you are intense pain. So if your symptoms are intense, then I encourage you to bring your attention to something that reminds you of feeling free and safe, and then see if you can allow in just a tiny bit of indifference to your symptoms, even if it's just a fraction.
Start small, and meet yourself where you are.
