Pain is a mechanism that our nervous system uses to provide us with information. That information is usually about damage being caused to the body. The pain is there to tell us to take actions which allow our bodies to heal, which in turn causes the pain to stop. If you put your hand in a fire, it is very painful, so you take your hand out. The fire damages your hand, and the pain is created to help you avoid that. Leprosy is now thankfully rare, because it can be treated quite easily with antibacterial drugs. One of the effects of leprosy is nerve damage, which then means that many sufferers can lose digits because they do not get pain signals when their hands are being injured. Being in pain is a very common reason for people to seek medical assistance for a whole range of illnesses and conditions. So one way to look at pain is that it is there for a reason.
Pain often gets sub-divided into acute and chronic. Acute is the ‘hand-in-fire’ type pain, and usually once the cause is removed and healing has progressed far enough the pain disappears. Chronic pain is defined by reference to its duration. This does vary, but usually it’s pain that persists for about 6 to 12 months. Conditions such as arthritis, cancer, and neuropathy (nerve damage) are known to include chronic pain. It is also possible to have chronic pain for which there is no immediate medical reason.
Practicing NLP, Time Line Therapy™, and Hypnosis means that you are interfacing with the mind, both conscious and unconscious, rather than with the body directly. But there are places where the boundary between what is your mind and what is your body, are still as yet unclear. As a non-medical person, I stay in my lane and work mainly with self-improvement and not with overtly medical issues. I follow the credo of, one can only ever investigate the psychological cause of a physiological problem, once the physiological causes have been fully investigated by a medical professional.
I recently read an article in the New Scientist headlined, “Chronic pain could be eased by learning to regulate negative emotions”. This was a study run by the University of New South Wales, which included 89 people, who were randomised into a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group were given an eight-week online programme based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). In which there was an emphasis on mindfulness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance. On completion of the therapy, the treatment group experienced significantly less pain than those in the control group. According to the study’s authors, how the therapy reduced pain was unclear.
This study reminded me of the work of John Sarno, a Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine. Based on his treatment of 10,000 patients, he proposed a condition of Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), which is not accepted by mainstream medicine. According to Sarno, TMS is a psychosomatic illness causing chronic back, neck, and limb pain, and possibly some stomach and skin conditions too. Sarno’s theory is that the pain is being caused by repressed unconscious emotional issues. The idea being that the patient has created a degree of dissociation between the conscious and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind refuses to contemplate or ‘deal with’ an emotional issue. The only mechanism then open to the unconscious is to create pain, by holding tension in certain muscle groups, to force the conscious mind to pay attention to, and then process and release the emotional issue. But usually what happens is the conscious mind gets caught up in the experience of the pain, doesn’t make the connection to emotional issues, and the pain cycle continues.
As I said Sarno’s work is not supported in mainstream medicine, but this recent University of New South Wales study points to his work. Whatever is really going on, I think it highlights the benefits of experiencing your emotions, learning from them, and maybe changing beliefs and definitions that cause them. Facing our beliefs and emotions can be painful, but not doing so can hurt us even more.
“The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.” Arthur Schopenhauer
