Break The Seal On Pain
Tricky Situation
It can be tricky to even see a way past the experience of persistent pain. That hawk-like analysis of why it is impossible is natural. It represents our neurological wiring to look for danger to remain safe, and the pain keeps us safe.
When you notice the mechanism behind breaking the cycle of persistent pain, it can feel liberating.
For example, a patient who had established degenerative changes in his hip had several movements and positions that he described as painful and reproduced that pain. These were so predictable that he could explain precisely when and where this would happen.
I discussed the conditioned mechanism behind each pain and, although the physical elements were relevant. The emotional, situational, and contextual factors were more likely to influence his experiencing pain significantly.
The Feeling Before
Looking at how you feel as you consider an activity, even before doing it, can trigger the preparatory physiology to undertake that task. It occurs even with thinning about it, and this is just like feeling nervous when you’re standing at the start line for a race.
Feel The Anticipation
That anticipation is something we can all feel when we slow down enough to look for it. Understanding that the expectation is influencing pain means that there is an opportunity in the moment of anticipation to change your perception sufficient to alter how you feel in that moment.
That mechanism alone can transform how you experience pain for the rest of your life. The thing is, you have to slow down enough and reason to do that, and in the presence of pain, there are not many of us who find it easy to be rational.
Start With Safety
The way we approached it in this instance was by choosing the safest or most comfortable position before pain increased. Then, just short of where he would be almost able to guarantee that his pain would appear, we got him to notice how he felt.
He was able to pick up that sense of anxiety as a feeling, and simply breathing through that sensation allowed him to then move way beyond where he had previously expected to be able to.
Magic Moment
It was the moment of breaking the seal on his persistent pain. The following week, he came into the clinic and used the same approach to other positions and situations where he could have predicted he would feel pain, such as tying his shoes and getting into the van. He was delighted to report that he was no longer getting the same pain level.
Play The Game
It is almost like a game that you play with your body. Yout are rewiring the brain’s neural circuitry and how that appears in the body. The beauty is you don’t have to change the body for that to happen. You don’t need to change the degeneration, arthritis, scars, or any other physical element you may have believed the only cause of your pain.
You focus on the fears attached to them and the contexts in which those emotions appear. For example, changing the thoughts and feelings to ones that you choose and not the defaults that have been present for so long is the mechanism that breaks the seal.
Celebrate the changes in your body as representing a life lived, and losing the level of pain from those areas of your body means you can get on with living your life.
What’s next?
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