How Pain as a Neural-Circuit disorder can help you heal your Body by healing your Brain?
September 04, 2021
What is neural-circuit disorder and can you heal your body by healing your brain?
Today, we’re going to be looking at pain. Before we dive in, I’d like you to reflect a minute on what “pain” looks like to you, what it looks like for others, and perhaps expand your mind a bit to see and explore pain in a whole new light as we move through today’s content.
Back pain. Knee pain.
Migraine. Joint Pain.
Toothache. Headache.
Tummy ache. Nose bleed.
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“I broke my arm”
“I stubbed my toe”
“I feel so broken-hearted”
“I can’t believe she said that to me!”
“How dare you talk to him like that!”
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A car wreck. A paper cut.
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Someone cut you in line in kindergarten
Someone cut you off in traffic as an adult.
You don’t feel heard.
You don’t feel seen.
You don’t feel understood or that anyone else cares.
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PAIN can look like many many different things for many different people.
Let’s dive in with a kind heart and open mind.
PAIN
P – Pay
A – Attention
I – Intently
N – NOW!
Pain is information.
Pain tells us we need to change. Pain provides us with insight that something inside us is in need of help and we have to change something in order to fix it.
We walk around with thorns not only in our feet and rocks in our shoes, but actually many of us walk around with needles poking and prodding every micrometer of our body every day. It will come at no surprise to you that when we feel chronic pain, we feel so ill, so down and distraught when we’re dealing with pain.
Chronic pain affects millions of people in this country and around the world, holding them back from living their most freeing abundant lives possible. And many innovative thinkers in the world of chronic pain, addiction medicine, mental health, depression, and anxiety have found a few additional pathways for healing beyond just your standard industrialized infrastructure for sending scripts for opioids and other pain medication, sugar-seeking pleasure and relief behaviors, or others.
In fact, they have found that a large source of pain for the body may actually start in the brain.
Additionally, they’ve linked early life experiences like trauma or ACEs (adverse childhood events) to chronic pain as well. Also, Feelings or oppression, microaggressions at your workplace or home life, killing us by 10,000 tiny papercuts all over our body. Microaggressions can kill the human spirit much sooner than they can kill the human body, but if you take enough infliction for your heart and emotions, the soul and spirit inside of you, it’s likely your human body and brain will begin to suffer just as well.
When emotional therapists look at someone with chronic back pain – they often actually don’t have a true physical manifestation of a collapsed disc or pinched nerve, etc., but what they do often have are years and years of unresolved emotions, lack of coping skills, lack of self-love and compassion. They may talk about how they’ve been treated by their parents, their partner, or their coworkers for years with great pain and dismay in their voice and the honest stories they share. These emotional wounds have both psychological implications and physical manifestations of pain and overtime can display as chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia like symptoms and more.
Essentially a neuro-circuit disorder is exactly as it sound, a misunderstand for the maleficent wiring between our brain and our body. If we think we will get sick from taking an experimental (placebo) pill, we end up feeling sick. If we feel oppressed, worn down, overlooked, ignored, and uncared for by others in our life, our tanks will go to empty and we’re throttling the engine without anything to keep us going. Thus, we can become injured, both emotionally and physically.
Has anyone ever told you, this pain is all in your head? You just have to snap out of it or that they don’t believe you at all?
We can have major life events that send us into a deep dark hole of pain and despair, while some people tell us “There’s nothing I can do.” But when we’ve looked at emotions in pain and health in the path we explored how the power of hope can actually help us overcome, right?
Exactly. Likewise, the innate power of healing can also come from our emotions and our brain as well. When we forget we are sick, when we are so excited or enjoying ourselves with friends or loved ones or the wonderous book we love reading, we actually forget about our pain. Because in those moments we are actively healing the wounds of our past, the wounds of our emotions and so our brain functions for health, instead of pain.
Meeting with a Mind-Body counselor for a 2-weeks, 4-weeks, or more can actually have a profound affect to help someone release stored negative emotions inside their body and provide great insights on how to live life on the other side of pain and emotional damage by actually healing those wounds.
Sometimes physical “pain” doesn’t show up on an X-ray, a CT scan, or MRI. It doesn’t show up as a broken bone, bike wreck injury, or falling off the monkey bars. Sometimes pain begins to grow inside of us after many years of staying silent with our emotions, with our feelings of being walked over or stomped on. When we suppress our thoughts and emotions we end up neglecting our needs, inflicting more pain on ourselves in the long-term, and continue to show up for others while we’re slowly growing our pain inside of us.
It’s like someone hands us a moldy, slimy, seed of pain and instead of throwing it away, we decide to coddle it, hide it under our pillow at night, keep it tightly packed inside our pocket throughout the day. We take it with us and hold on to it for many many years. It starts to grow, becoming part of us and we a part of it. Our pan becomes part of who we as it wraps its arms around us like a vine wraps around a tree.
But the good news is is that it doesn’t have to be like this. We can recognize the tree as distinctly different than the vine. We can take a machete to the vine and slash that thing away from the tree itself and set the tree free.
Don’t you think it’s time to set yourself free from the choking vines of chronic pain induced by emotional wounds we’ve just never felt strong or safe enough to share with others?
Now if you or a loved one deals with chronic pain – I’m not saying its all in your head, trust me. I’m not saying it’s all stored in your bones either. I’m saying that PAIN itself is information, telling us to Pay Attention, Intently Now. We cannot ignore it.
We need to open ourselves to the possibility that our pain could be improved through both psychological and emotional healing.
If you think your boss is a real pain in the neck, this doesn’t give you the excuse to blame them necessarily, but it might possibly help you recognize how you may feel more anxious, irritable, or your pain increases as you think about your emails or the way your boss speaks to you. Recognizing our pain, and the truest roots of where it comes from (many places) can help us in our personal healing journey.
We all deserve that chance, don’t you think?
To hold on to hope and never let go? To never let ourselves believe the lie that we have no hope for a better future? That this world is a damned and awful place? Even though we are berated every day with fear-based messaging on television, advertisements, the societal and cultural messages we grow up in, doesn’t mean we need to suck them down like bottle-fed rat latched onto a sugar drip.
Fear provokes our emotions. Fear prompts vasoconstriction and sends us into fight or flight. Fear promotes inflammation. Fear promotes pain, and I don’t believe you deserve to be essentially told and scolded into feeling the pains of the world by having the problems of the world placed on your shoulders.
Look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? Do you see a human, or do you feel emotions? Do you feel happy or sad, tired or excited, inspired and creative, or down and depressed, neglected or appreciated.
Your level of human experience is not defined by others – it is however highly susceptible to be influenced by others, but you know what, we call get the chance to change the station of the radio when we step into the driver’s seat of our lives and decide to take a conquering mindset, driving ourselves to higher hope and prosperity mindsets to help us heal from the inside out.
If pain is a road sign, perhaps its time we need to go in a different direction. Perhaps its time we consider the rapidly evolving role of PAIN itself and believe in pyscho-social-emotional healing in a whole new way.
If you want more information on Mind-Body Medicine, neural-circuit disorders and how emotional healing can promote physical pain reduction:
Podcast: Body of Wonder - Arizona Integrative Medicine
Article Overview of EAET - Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy for Chronic Pain – Current Rheumatology Reports in Chronic Pain
Video – Talks with Google – Getting to the roots of chronic pain
Article: The Neurocircuitry of Fear, Stress, Anxiety – Nature
Article: Internet-Administered Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy for Somatic Symptom Disorder With Centralized Symptoms – Frontiers of Psychiatry (Feb 2021)
I’ll end with this…
Radical improvement requires a radical shift in not only how we act, but also how we think and how we feel.
I remember that bright yellow and orange poser taped to the walls of every elementary school I went to as a kid. Maybe you’ve seen something similar.
My thoughts lead to feelings.
My feelings lead to actions.
Think Well. Feel Well. Be Well.
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Or something like that.
Finally, here’s a picture of some puppies to help :)
Have a beautiful day, and a beautiful week and a beautiful life. Tell me what you think about this topic of pain as you reflect on your pain and the pain of others perhaps in a whole new way… and don’t forget to
Smile
Spend time in Nature
Go out and see the Sunshine
Take time for Movement that you love
Love Yourself
Spend Time with People that You Love