A Poorly Tummy

Written By Drew Coverdale

Danger Signal

Pain is a danger signal.

It's a message for you to attend to yourself and investigate why you have a painful experience. First, you must determine if you need to change those circumstances or continue with the perceived risk. The unconscious system senses and manifests that process to your conscious reality as pain.

Pain needs interpretation to understand why it has appeared and analyse the risk of continuing with the situation influencing pain or withdrawing from it. It can come before or after damage, but it is not always proof of damage. It is a protective mechanism to prevent damage to the organism.

Actual Damage?

That determination of whether the pain is related to actual damage or not takes rational thought. The paradox is that when we experience pain, our brains proportionately function more from an unconscious perspective than a conscious viewpoint.

It is a much faster way to access our protective mechanisms in the presence of a threat.

That is why we often have unconsciously reacted to pain before becoming consciously aware of what creates that pain.

Pulling your hand away from something sharp, being startled with a large bang, being very still when fearful or fainting are examples of the fight, flight, freeze or fawn mechanisms that have served all animals alive today so well.

Faster Wiring

From a wiring perspective, the neural fibres operative unconsciously and very quickly. When you compare the speed of unconscious action to conscious, there's a significant difference. 

There is a beauty in our speedy unconscious mechanisms that we should cherish. Still, occasionally that beauty becomes the beast when the unconscious reactions to pain happen even faster and despite conscious reasoning to suggest there is no actual danger at that moment.

How could such a beautiful system go wrong?

It starts with a misinterpretation of that danger signal of pain. 

If you consider another situation, you may see how easy it is to misinterpret and sensation of pain and then subsequently make an incorrect decision.

A Poorly Tummy

Think of a young child who presents to an adult saying they have a poorly tummy. The child is not necessarily aware of all the potential reasons for that discomfort and doesn't know how to act themselves to resolve it.

The adult must consider what is relevant to that child’s pain to choose the most appropriate and correct action to resolve it.

If we took three simple explanations for that uncomfortable, poorly tummy sensation, it could be influenced by circumstances relating to the past, present or future.

A poorly tummy from not having any breakfast earlier would relate to a sensation felt now because of behaviour that happened earlier.

The same discomfort from a tummy bug would mean there is an active problem now.

If the poorly tummy sensation were an uneasy feeling of going to school and feeling scared or vulnerable, that would be a sensation based on a prediction of what was to come.

Three Questions

Asking the child questions about their poorly tummy helps the adult work out the true meaning of the sensation. 

Have you had any breakfast? 

Have you been to the toilet, or have you got the runs?

Is there something upsetting you?

These explorations teach the child experiencing this poorly tummy that there are variations on the reasons for their experience.

That also means that there are different solutions for it.

There could be many different reasons in addition to the ones above, but they give an example of how we investigate pain in a young child.

Resolution Depends On It

It is essential to do this as the symptoms' resolution depends on the next step.

If we were to assume that the poorly tummy sensation was hunger, and acted on that belief, it would only be effective in one of the three scenarios. A sandwich would quickly alleviate it, but it would be different if the other two causes were true.

Eating a sandwich when the tummy is already poorly meant it will likely come back up or worsen that situation. 

The other alternate is even more disastrous and potentially damaging. Having a sandwich to alleviate what is a sense of anxiety in the child will give some relief because it gives the body a task to do, and it will partially or temporarily block the sensation. However, if the anxiety-driven poorly tummy persists, all that is happening is a development of an association with that feeling and eating food through a temporary blocking of that sensation.

You don't have to look far in society to find someone who has an unhealthy relationship with food and uses it to soothe themselves during times of stress in a similar way.

So if we feel pain and get that initial reaction wrong and base it on the interpretation that pain is only related to actual danger or damage now, the selected behaviour to fully resolve that pain will either not work at all, only temporarily block it or potentially make it worse.

Classic Errors

These are the classic errors driving the chronic pain pandemic. 

We have to understand that the presence of pain is not only due to the potential for actual damage at that moment but that it can represent behaviour from the past. It can also mean the prediction of danger that is anticipated before that event appears in reality.

It appears as pain in such an alarming way often due to the priming of that individual from previous experiences, beliefs and an amplified sense of protection required for future events consisting of cues representing those earlier events.

The sense of danger and speed of firing comes from the emotional charge attached to those neural pathways either through one-trial learning with extremely traumatic situations or a sustained and cumulative repetition and build-up of those patterns over time.

This is the process of automation that our brains and bodies use to deal with situations that appear predictable to us efficiently.

Short Circuit

The trouble comes with this short-circuiting of earlier and gentler emotional feelings and rational thoughts that could appear, now being replaced and dominated by the fast-firing, sharp shooting and drum beating protective message of pain.

Often in circumstances where the person is looking for actual danger in the current moment to explain that, and without it, they default to the misinterpretation that their experience could only be due to existing damage within them that they have proof of or feel yet to be discovered.

Can you see how it's so hard for that individual to understand their experience in the same way it is for the child with their poorly tummy to understand theirs?

Fortunately, most of us find that parent or carer to work out the true meaning for our pain.

It’s Tricky

The tricky part comes in adulthood when neither ourselves nor the people we show our pain to reach the same logical conclusion, and the path to chronic pain begins.

Understanding the different pathways to trigger the pain which becomes such an unpleasant part of your experience means that you can look at other avenues to reverse it.

For example, rather than only following the physical aspect based on an incorrect belief, you can now start to explore thoughts, feelings, and other circumstances that are likely to influence your experience more than you could have ever believed initially.

You can look at what you've just come from and perhaps where you anticipate going.

Seeing the effect on those np=on present moments in the present start to bring real meaning to pain.

Then you can change your responses to those circumstances, reward yourself for those changes, and benefit from a difference in your perception and soon after a change in your pain.

What’s next?
Take Your First Step to Recovery.

Drew Coverdale
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