Intro to Pain Ponderings
Welcome to Pain Ponderings!
My hope is for this blog to provide an opportunity to share thoughts, ideas, skills and tools to help people navigate their journey with persistent pain.
I believe deeply that all of our life experiences affect the whole of ourselves; mind, body and spirit. Because of my early-life experiences, I attended physical therapy school with plans of learning holistic ways to help people. Ten years into my career I started to realize that my passion and calling was to work with people who experience persistent/chronic pain. This is partly because most physical injuries respond well to traditional physical therapy. The physical issues that remain after quality medical care often require a little more reflection to determine why pain is being perpetuated in a system that seeks balance and harmony -- and this is where things get interesting. Although I am fortunate that I do not have persistent pain, my personal experiences with depression, fatigue and anxiety have kept me persistent on my personal path to freedom, which has given me insights into ways to help my clients along the way.
I have spent my adult life learning about our wholeness, specifically how our physical experiences with pain are affected and influenced by the whole of our thoughts, beliefs, past experiences, and future expectations. The truth is, I LOVE learning about this stuff! After spending 20 years trying to fit my holistic beliefs into a traditional medical business model for physical therapy, I finally surrendered, let all of my employees go, and began my solo practice. Without the distractions of a business to run, I can follow my deep desire to guide people to expand their understanding as to why their struggle with persistent pain keeps them from enjoying a fulfilling life.
Over the past couple of months I have taken a deep dive, re-reading and skimming several of the pain books I have acquired over the years. This has re-inspired me to want to help my patients tap into potential deeper influences on their pain experience, particularly emotions. However, I am not a trained counselor, and I am aware of only two pain-counselor specialists in my area. What I have realized, is that there is no lack of written resources for people with persistent pain to learn to change, decrease and even eliminate their pain. Yet the task to figure out the best way for someone already overwhelmed by their pain experience can be daunting. May these writings be a guide and resource for those on the path.
Whether it’s mindfulness, journaling, visualizations, movement and exercise, etc., I believe the personal journey for pain relief requires (at least); Compassion, Courage, Commitment and Curiosity.
COMPASSION: If you’ve been on the pain-journey for awhile, you may have experienced a lack of compassion and understanding from medical providers, family and friends. Let’s face it – persistent pain is confusing and frustrating! There are few simple explanations for your unique experience. In order to take responsibility for your individual condition, I believe it is important that you first and foremost learn to have a deep well of self-compassion and self-love for yourself and all you are going through. This may not be an easy skill to learn yet I believe it is fundamental for your journey to freedom.
COURAGE: It’s hard to have courage to face your inner challenges, your past and present difficulties, and all of the people who have no idea what you’re going through. I recommend that first you find a safe inner-place of compassion for the emotions that will come up. As you learn to courageously face anger, frustration, feelings of overwhelm, guilt, shame, depression, anxiety, etc, toward others and sometimes yourself, you will want to have developed a loving place of safety that you can ultimately trust when the other experiences exhaust and even scare you. Only then can you courageously face the deep and profound emotions that need space to be expressed, seen, heard and cared for to unravel your brain/pain entanglement.
COMMITMENT: If you have persistent pain, you have probably already tried a number of interventions in hopes of finding permanent relief. It is likely at this point in your journey that there are few, if any, outside “fixes” that will give you the relief you are looking for. Temporary relief from PT, injections, acupuncture, chiropractic adjustments, laser, massage, medications, etc will not change the brain’s neuroplasticity that is likely a key part of your brain/pain experience. That’s not to say that temporary relief is not warranted. Indeed, any relief you can get is helpful, and can hopefully be used so that you can do the deeper work of changing your brain.
Most of my clients can make time for endless appointments and some are fairly good at doing their home exercises or taking walks. Unfortunately, making time for the inner journey is a struggle for many. There are also so many different paths to go “inside” to unravel the brain/pain entanglement that it can be hard to know where to start. You may have even tried something such as mindfulness/meditation and it may have not been the right technique for you, you may not have had the right coach to guide you, or you may have been frustrated with the level or lack of pain relief you experienced. Without a deep desire and commitment to discovering yourself and how your inner world of emotions and experiences is influencing your brain/pain system, relief may be out of reach.
CURIOUSITY: Other than childhood, my earliest exposure to learning to be curious, rather than just learning to “know” (and get the grade), was in my Feldenkrais® training. Moshe Feldenkrais developed an intriguing body/mind movement system that encourages one to be curious about all of the connections in how we move, sense, think, and feel throughout our body/mind during novel movement sequences. At no time in our training were we ever told the “right” way to move, position ourselves, think or feel. Everything was available for exploration. By developing curiosity I was able to truly learn without my fight/flight/freeze response being triggered or my needing to perform the “right” way interfering with discovering my authentic self. I have realized that learning to be curious about my inner thoughts, emotions and judgments (as well as my movements and postures) has allowed me much more freedom from the deeply ingrained habits that I have developed throughout my life. Although I still find myself habitually reacting to circumstances, I also have the capacity to pause, reflect, assess and learn from my behaviors – with compassion, of course. :) I believe open-curiosity is the key to deep learning.
It is my hope that my writings about the brain, body, mind and spirit, and how these influence our personal experiences with pain (as well as depression, anxiety, etc) may help you or someone you know along your journey towards less pain and a greater sense of freedom to enjoy your life!
If you have any insights you would like to share on this topic, or questions, please go to Healing Bridge Physical Therapy on facebook.
Blessings,
Allison Suran, PT, GCFP, TPS
Therapeutic Pain Specialist
Healing Bridge Physical Therapy