a common question with a complex answer…yet there is huge hope because…
Through the very complexity of life and being human, there are many possibilities and opportunities to ease and overcome chronic pain.
Understanding your pain will open your eyes.
What does cause pain?
If it is not the tissues or a particular area of the body (e.g./ back pain) or a particular action (e.g./ bending)…what is the cause?
Pain comes about, or emerges, because of a set of conditions. There is no simple cause and effect, even though it may seem that way.
I hit my finger with hammer, it hurts, therefore the hammer caused my pain.
Feels that way, right?
Or, I bent over and my back hurt, therefore bending caused my back pain.
Feels that way, right?
How things appear to us is not always the way it actually is.
Cause and effect is far to simple an explanation for any experience.
Partly because we don’t experience the world or ourselves directly.
What?!
It doesn’t feel that way does it? It feels like here I am and here is the world, right here.
All experiences (we have many many), including pain, are generated by an ensemble of body systems including the nervous system, immune system and endocrine system (hormones). In fact, you could say that all systems are involved somehow, because there is no part of you left behind or separate from any experience.
This is why we think of and describe pain as a whole person person experience in your lived world.
There is no firm division between your body, brain, mind and the world. They all come together. Trying to separate them moves away from reality and hence your ability to take helpful action.
Helpful action to get better is only going to be helpful if you are grounded in reality. In this moment, which is sandwiched between the past and the future, neither of which exist except in thought.
If bending your back was a painful experience, i.e. cause and effect, it would mean that anytime anyone bent over it would hurt. Clearly this is not the case.
There have to be certain circumstances that involves the whole of you in a certain context for pain to be generated by your body systems as they seek to explain what is happening in any given moment.
Your body systems are making best guesses, often using past experience as evidence for what could be happening now — watch here.
So, if you have bent over and it hurts, which is common at the start of an episode of back pain, and this happens a few times, you start to expect it. As do you body systems. You move differently to protect and to avoid the pain. Sensible and useful for a while.
Those past experiences, especially recent, provide reliable evidence to best explain the sensory data your systems are receiving and inferring the meaning of. In this case pain.
So it is not the bending that causes pain. It is the interpretation of the sensory signals from all parts of your body, framed by past experiences, beliefs, expectations, fears, worries, living circumstances, emotional state, general health and more, that you experience as pain in this case.
Or any other experience. The mechanisms are the same.
The body tissues themselves do not have the ability to generate a pain experience or any conscious experience. You feel pain in your body and it is real, but it is not generated where you feel it.
Knowing this opens the door to the many ways you can change and ease your pain.
With persistent pain (or chronic pain), the lived experience continues. It becomes a habit of the body systems, protecting you and giving you information that there is work to be done. There are needs to be met.
Within each person’s story, those needs become apparent, and the work is to consistently meet them and create the conditions to heal, to get better, to reconnect with what matters, to let go of fears and worries, to forgive or whatever is relevant to you.
Chronic pain is not a system gone wrong. It is not faulty ‘wiring’ to be re-wired.
It is information for you, just as all states tell you about how you are and how well you are doing. Like hunger and thirst, pain is a need state.
When you understand that pain and tissues are not well related, and pain is about you as a whole person, this begins to make sense.
Understanding your pain is the key first step to following your path of easing your suffering. There is a path and you can ease your own suffering.
You know what you want and why it matters, i.e. to live a happy and healthy life, but do not know how.
That is the stuckness of chronic pain. That is the stuckness we jostle and free you from so you can move forward in the direction you choose.
Thank you very much.
r.s.