FAQ - Has Pain Become My Stressor?

Written By Drew Coverdale

A Patient’s Question:

‘Hi - one thing I’ve been struggling with is fear of the pain because it’s there. So I’ve been getting frustrated because I know it’s mind-body, not physical, and I don’t feel stressed anymore, but I want it gone, and I’m frustrated/fearful!

But I have just had a bit of an aha moment I wanted to ask about!

If the pain started at a very stressful time in my life and my brain sent the pain to protect me from that stress to make me attend to myself, am I right in thinking that the pain isn’t going because I’m now more worried about/focused on the pain than the actual stressful events? I’m other words, my brain still thinks I am stressed even though that stress has now gone? So I’ve just swapped one reason for the pain for another’.

My Answer

Think of that very stressful time in your life (projects and high-pressure deadlines at work/house move/new puppy etc.) – anything that pushes your coping capabilities. That can include uncertainty that we ask for and like, e.g., work, sport, challenges we enjoy achieving and overcoming; and then there’s uncertainty we didn’t ask for, e.g. more work and more deadlines than we’d prefer, losing out on six new houses and the puppy doing a poo on the kitchen floor every morning!!!!)

In these stressful situations, we use the skills to deal with fighting these fires that have proved successful to use in the past. So pushing through, sorting it all ourselves, telling others we’re fine whilst we do (even though we may not feel ‘fine’, and having a great game face that we show to family, friends, work colleagues and clients).

Childhood Influences

These behaviours encoded in childhood become the best way to feel better in overload situations. If repeated, these can become the traits that we carry into adulthood and get rewarded for in work, sport, etc. We can get approval, praise, and a sense of self-worth, and if it always gives us those feelings quickly, then it can invisibly and slowly become hard to achieve those feelings without those behaviours.

These behaviours are potentially dangerous if we don’t have other behaviours that bring us down from those moments and balance our system. Care, kindness, compassion, safe boundaries, love – either from other people, places, times, or activities we place ourselves in to get these feelings or just from knowing how to feel like that from within.

Unconscious Wiring

Those wired permanently to push hard sometimes don’t realise how close to the sun they are flying and don’t always recognise when they need to slow down from the intensity of their experience. Some don’t even know they are stressed and deny it if asked or suggested.

 We have this regulatory system in the background. It’s not a ghost in the machine. Still, it's an unconscious series of homeostatic reactions that monitor bodily functions and create a conscious awareness of overload when a sense of that appears. It includes heart rate, digestion, blood flow, brain function, breathing rate, muscle tension, and millions of similar adjustments to keep us healthy, alive, and balanced.

But if you make seemingly conscious decisions to keep pushing when one or more of these systems starts to shout, when you're instinctually using an automated and unconscious stress-inducing behaviour to deal with that stress, the level of alarm the body and brain use begin to crank up. If a conscious awareness of pain or discomfort means the person chooses to slow down or stop, that’s great because they feel that alarm and respond appropriately, and the danger fades.

Crank It Up

However, suppose the person cranks it up even more because that’s their first unconscious response to discomfort or resistance, which is to ignore and push through to overcome it. In that case, they misinterpret that sensation as a temporary warning from short term overload when it is due to much longer-term, highly intense and more dangerous stress-inducing behaviours.

 Yes, pushing through discomfort and pain can get us certificates, awards, project completion and sporting achievements. However, when distress and pain are due to forcing those systems too hard without realising the early warning system was offering and asking us to protect ourselves, then that misguided drive to carry on regardless becomes our nemesis.

 That driven and determined nature to overcome a sense of overload changes from the thing that used to please us to the something which eventually creates our pain and becomes the perpetual driver of it.

Just A Suggestion

The pain is the unconscious brain suggesting to the individual that it is not a good idea to keep using the default behaviour that the person is currently using to take them towards a place of safety because it now presents danger through its overuse.

 The earlier warnings on that available spectrum have usually been ignored or overridden so many times as they’ve appeared that the organism now short circuits these warnings to use pain as the first line of defence.

It can appear now with the slightest suggestion from any internal or external cue presenting potential overload. It is triggered with such a shock to the individual's conscious awareness that the only way they can explain it is by believing that pain is due to physical damage.

That’s when the person should stop to attend to themselves, and we all know now that ideally, it should have been with one of the earlier and more gentle warnings. But some don’t even stop at this point. It is not their fault, and there is no blame, as they're only using unconscious mechanisms to survive that have served them very well in the past. 

The Illusion Of Damage

They misbelieve the illusion that the pain represents damage that neither they nor anyone else can do anything. Their weight, height, age, genes, the weather, wear and tear, structural changes etc., are believed to be at fault, yet all these things were present long before and whilst they had no pain.

So seeing pain for what it truly is, as a kind, regulatory, survival-based warning system and not a punishment or proof of some form of physical pathological process is the first and most significant step anyone can take.

Then they may see the behaviours they used during the stressful time in their life when this pain appeared and recognise they are still unconsciously using those behaviours in a futile attempt to recover.

Three Months Grace

If there was any physical damage to initiate pain, then after three months, it has healed to the best of your body's ability and need not warn you anymore about that. Just like all the hundreds of injuries you have recovered from without conscious thought beyond the initial first aid.

If the events in your life have changed to be less stressful, then now that you can see how you may have unconsciously automated your brain and body's survival mechanism into perpetual overdrive, you can start to reverse that mechanism. Not with the same driven behaviours that took you there in the first place.

 It is counterintuitive to approach this painful sensation without defaulting to the behaviours you’ve used in the past, which have brought success. There is a natural resistance to using new behaviours that will make you feel better when in a stressed state, as your brain already has perfectly trained itself to use the ones that have proved successful for it in the past. It had usually encoded these in childhood when you had no conscious choice about installing them.

The Choice Is Yours

Thankfully you now have a choice.

If there are ongoing stressful situations of uncertainty that you are unable to control externally, then give them what time you have to give them and do your very best. But at the end of that day, filled with doing for others if you have to, start to set aside time in your day to attend to yourself with none of the emotions that overload your system.

You've already used them to excess.

Even feeling fearful or frustrated about ongoing situations or the pain itself creates the momentum to have that situation and the pain as an unfriendly foe.

Pain Is A Guide 

But seeing it as your guide, as a reminder to care for yourself whilst dealing with those situations and especially when they are over, means you must commit when you are ready to learn or relearn how to attend to yourself with kindness, caring and compassionate things that you would naturally offer another human in distress.

You are only human. No more and no less.

Your skin will melt at the same temperature as everyone else, and your brain and body will fail under a certain stress threshold when we neither change the situation nor change the way we feel about that situation.

Is It All Over? 

If it’s all over, all you now must do is create small pockets in your day to attend to yourself with a variety of kind words, thoughts, breathing patterns, movements, and forms of emotional expression that authentically make you feel safe. It must also come with boundaries set from kind, caring, loving and compassionate intent for it to give you the results you deserve.

If that doesn’t currently come naturally to you, it is now the moment to learn how. And remember that you're wiring these new behaviours into the fabric of your unconscious brain, like changing gear in the car, like learning a musical instrument or language.

Yes, these take repetition, but none of this wiring occurs if you are screamed at by a teacher who fills you with fear or shows you their frustration every time you turn up for a lesson.

Focus, But Softly

You must engage in each activity with focus, but one that sets you at the centre of your universe, with a small moment of happiness that you give to and receive from yourself. Then you reward that currently unusual behaviour with a dopamine shot of self-praise to the organism for delivering such a gift to itself.

The paradox here is that you are both the student and the teacher.

So how do you react to yourself as you learn these new skills? Kindly or with fear and frustration that you will never be good at this process? I know you have become good at many things.

Your job now is to get good at showing all your unique human intuitive capabilities to yourself and ingraining them until they’re practically invisible to you.

Allow them to shine out from you as demonstrating your success and an example for others how they can best find a sense of peace and pain-free balance in their life too.

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

Drew Coverdale
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