Fibromyalgia symptoms are neither PHYSICAL nor psychological, this is a false division…
Western healthcare systems and training separates the physical and the psychological.
It goes further, dividing up body systems and parts.
The reality is very different.
There is one experience.
Modern science agrees.
“…brain, body, and world as truly intimate partners in the construction of human experience.”
~ Prof Andy Clark
As a matter of experience, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and the world, all appear together in the present moment.
Everything appears to you in the same place. Your awareness.
Your mind is where everything appears, is another way to put it.
But your mind is in your head, you might say.
Are you saying it’s in my head?
My pain and symptoms…in my head?
No, I am not saying that.
Unless you have a headache, in which case your pain is in your head, yes.
Your pain and symptoms are real, they appear in your awareness in an embodied way.
Your pain is felt in your body wherever you feel it.
Doesn’t that make it physical?
Especially when there is something on a scan to show an injury or inflammation.
No.
Because to feel your pain and know where it is, it has to appear to you in your awareness.
A thought is both as physical as a pain as it is non-physical.
In other words, thinking of your lived experience as physical or psychological not only takes you away from reality (one experience), but also distracts you from what you can do to transform your experience.
An experiment:
Notice a thought.
Where is it?
And when it passes, where has it gone?
This can feel different to pain because you can point to where it hurts.
However, neither can be seen or actually located.
You can’t see pain, just as you can’t see hunger, thirst, love or any other feeling.
But they are all real.
Embodied.
You live all experiences through your body and the state of your body.
How you are in the moment influences the types of thoughts you have and the way you perceive the world.
An example I love is the one about the slope that looks steeper if you stand at the top wearing slippery shoes.
Stairs look steeper when you are tired.
Your body systems are generating all your experiences moment to moment as they try to make sense of the flowing sensory information, in light of what is known and expected.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
~ Anaïs Nin
It can be tempting to think that visible things are physical, and felt and thought things are psychological.
This is a belief system in action.
Again though, this is not the reality.
Each has their own reality — 8 billion realities! Different versions of events.
Visible things are being generated by your systems as much as thoughts and feelings. What you can see and touch are constructions of your body systems in the same way as thoughts and feelings. They just appear differently.
Focusing on an idea of physical symptoms is a major problem because it creates a false divide.
This view can persuade you into believing your anatomy is to blame.
The anatomy is not the direct cause of pain.
You feel it where you feel it, but the body tissues where you feel it do not generate your pain. They don’t have the ability to generate a conscious experience.
Your ensemble of body systems generate all your experiences — nervous, immune, endocrine, autonomic — including your body state.
There is a version of your body you experience, generated by those systems. You don’t feel it directly, which is a strange thought because it doesn’t feel that way.
If you feel pain, it is because your systems predict this as the best explanation for your current biology and circumstances, based on prior experiences.
To truly understand what is happening, you need to widen your view.
Pain is about you as a whole person — you feel pain, not your body parts.
Pain is a message and not well related to body tissue state at all. It reflects your needs and motivates you to look after yourself.
Discovering your needs and how to meet them is a big part of getting better.
You can feel better.
How you are now is not how you will be.
Change is happening each moment — impermanence. Life is only possible because of this.
You want to get better. You know what you want to do.
Commonly, people don’t know how.
They also don’t understand their pain and symptoms, which means being lost.
You may have tried many different things. Some may have helped, some not.
The key is to understand your symptoms, clarify your needs and aspirations, then create specific habits in alignment, at each stage with know-how.
This is why Pain Coaching is best placed to help, because it is multidisciplinary and guides you through your learning and practice in a highly individualised way towards your picture of success.
Pain Coaching is a whole person approach that sees you with strengths, capabilities and the ability to learn and grow. You will make your best choices moment to moment, and navigate the ups and downs as you transform your life.
This way becomes available to you when you drop ideas of separate mind and body and instead focus on curating and creating better and better experiences.
See you tomorrow.
r.s.