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The Mind/Body Technique I Use When Nothing Else Works for Pain Relief

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I’ve been dealing with chronic pain for over 43 years and I’ve become an expert, both personally and professionally, in chronic pain management. I recently experienced a pain flare that was the worst pain I’ve experienced in 40 years. I’m sharing my experience in overcoming that pain flare in the hopes it will help others who live with chronic pain.

Some Background

When I was 25, I hurt my back and was in terrible pain and agony for the next three and a half years. Doctors couldn’t tell me what was wrong and offered no effective treatment. I had to drop out of graduate school and barely functioned at all during that time. I eventually found alternative pain treatments that worked and got back to my life.

Over the years, I developed many other chronic pain problems. I had foot surgery for a bone spur and ended up with foot pain that made standing and walking excruciating for 14 years before I found a solution. Other chronic pain issues have developed over the years. Each time I eventually found relief through alternative medicine.

I became a licensed clinical social worker and certified biofeedback practitioner and in 1993 opened a practice focusing on chronic pain and illness. I researched and wrote a book published in 2015, “The Truth About Chronic Pain Treatments: The Best and Worst Strategies for Becoming Pain Free” and more recently started a website, the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory which has information and products and provider listings for safe, effective pain relief.

Not only do I have extensive knowledge about chronic pain treatment, I have an incredible variety of tools on hand in my home-based office for management of pain. I also have a network of providers who help me with pain. I’m far from rich, but I do have adequate financial resources to pay out of pocket for the services I need. I consider myself to be one of the most prepared people on the planet to deal with pain.

The Terrible, Awful, Miserable Pain Flare

On January 4, I was experiencing neck, right shoulder, arm and wrist pain. It had been creeping up on me for a while. I had been stressing a lot about work, particularly my website, and I was putting in way too many hours without a break on the computer and not getting enough sleep. I was doing a few things to address the pain, but work was more of a priority. Then we had a snowstorm. I live in a condo and we have a contractor who is supposed to do snow removal but he didn’t show up and I had clients coming. I started shoveling myself but I was angry. I was already feeling overwhelmed and this wasn’t supposed to be my job. My neck and shoulder were really hurting but I persisted with shoveling until a neighbor came by and informed me that our contractor was on the way.

After that, my pain increased exponentially over the next couple of days. I’m very politically aware and concerned. January 5 was the Georgia U.S. Senate run-off election which determined who controls the Senate and January 6 was the Capitol insurrection. Closely following those events and worrying about them exacerbated my stress and pain.

The pain was so bad that all I wanted to do was to crawl into bed, find the most comfortable position possible and not move. I did some of that, but I knew it was not a winning strategy. Inactivity makes pain worse in the long run.

I started making appointments for chiropractic, acupuncture, Rolfing and massage. I used my electric massager, low level laser therapy device and Healy frequency specific microcurrent device. I did some biofeedback. I applied my favorite topical pain cream and took CBD and homeopathics. I even broke down and took a few tablets of a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory for a couple of days. I took an herb meant to help chronic pain. All of these had helped me in the past, but this time, even after several weeks, nothing made much of a dent in my pain, though the herbal remedy seemed to help the most.

When Nothing Else Works for Pain I Do This
(Sometimes I Do This First)

What I have learned through years of both personal and professional experience is when nothing works on the physical level, there is usually an emotional cause. Often the emotional cause is out of our conscious awareness.

So I turned to a powerful mind/body technique I have used on many occasions personally and with clients called energy psychology.

Energy psychology includes a set of techniques that involve focusing on a distressing event, emotion, thought, sensation, memory or trauma while working with the body’s energy field. This usually results in a rapid and significant and enduring reduction in emotional intensity and can quickly resolve even seemingly treatment-resistant PTSD.

The specific approach I used is one I have developed based on other techniques I learned and involves holding certain points along acupuncture energy meridians while focusing on something distressing. In this case, I focused on my neck and shoulder pain. The technique is demonstrated in this video.

The technique starts with an anchoring statement related to the problem. I decided to focus on “I want to release the pain that I’m holding in my neck and shoulders.” This left open the possibility that the pain could have either mental or physical causes or both. Even when there is a physical injury, if the emotional distress associated with the experience is reduced, significant pain reduction can be achieved.

The Results of Applying the Energy Psychology Technique Were Astounding

As soon as I began applying the technique, I started sobbing. I had no idea why I was crying. As I continued the process, the pain began to decrease as I engaged in a spontaneous life review triggered by the technique that I can only describe as life-altering. I’ve kept repeating the technique over a period of several weeks as a lifetime of unresolved grief came up for healing. Here’s what I learned:

My only sibling, my brother, had died a few months before. I didn’t think it had too much impact on my life because we were never that close. I rarely saw him and he’d been sick for a very long time so his death was not unexpected. However, I realized that his death left me feeling more alone in the world. I’ve never married or had children, I live alone and all of my close relatives are gone.

Having to snow shovel when I was already overwhelmed recalled childhood experiences where adults in my life didn’t do their job and the responsibilities fell to me, leaving me feeling overwhelmed and resentful.

I then recalled and processed childhood experiences that had led me to develop beliefs, which had led me to stuff my feelings and avoid committed relationships, including:

When it comes to emotional support you are on your own

When I was about 5 years old, I had a terrible toothache. I was sobbing and pacing in our living room all night. I could hear my parents talking about what to do in their adjacent bedroom but no one came to comfort me.

When I was 5 years old, I had a boyfriend in kindergarten. We talked about getting married and built our dream farm out of blocks and wooden farm animals. One day I was told he got hit by a car and I never saw him again. Later my mother told me he moved away because his parents were getting divorced. It only occurred to me during this process that he might have died. My mother often lied to me about disturbing things. There was no acknowledgement of my loss.

When I was 9 years old, I was trying to call a friend from summer camp whom I stayed in touch with over the winter. I called and called and no one answered. Finally, a woman answered the phone and when I asked for my friend she asked to speak with my mother. When my mother hung up the phone, she was very distressed. When I asked her what was wrong she said my friend was very sick. I kept pressing her for information and she finally told me that my friend had died of leukemia. The only thing she said to me about that was, “Don’t worry, it’s very rare and will not happen to you.” She never acknowledged my grief.

My grandmother also died when I was 9 years old. She had lived with us until she went into a nursing home a short time before her death. I was not allowed to attend her funeral and when my parents came home it was never mentioned again.

By the time I was 12, the neighborhood where we lived in the Bronx had become dangerous. I was propositioned and followed home by strange men on the street. I had to climb over drunks passed out of the steps in our building to get to our second-floor apartment. My father wanted to move to a safer neighborhood, but my mother refused to acknowledge that things had changed in the 25 years she lived there and refused to move. My father established a business on Long Island and told her he wouldn’t come home until she found us a house there. He left me and my brother there with my unstable mother.

In response to my father’s threats, my mother did finally agree to move and we purchased a home on Long Island. On moving day, my father dropped my brother and me and our cat off at the house while my mother waited for the movers. My brother and I had one day of happiness. I remember us dancing around the house full of joy that we had this beautiful house with our own backyard in this safe, beautiful neighborhood. When my mother arrived she was angry and resentful at being forced to move and took it out on us.

My mother refused to do housework for years. My father was working 12-hour days six and a half days a week. My brother didn’t care. Household responsibilities fell to me. I was overwhelmed and angry.

My new school was a culture shock. I went from a very poor school district to a middle class one. My class had over 1,000 students. Everyone else had grown up together and was in cliques. I was very shy. There was no help at home for dealing with this. My mother was too busy with her own little drama.

One day, I couldn’t find my cat. My mother claimed she had run away. I kept hoping she would come back but she never did. My father admitted to me many years later that my mother had insisted that he get rid of the cat because she was scratching our new furniture. My father drove her to where he worked, but when he opened the car door the terrified cat ran away. Doing this energy psychology process was the first time I ever really considered my cat’s probable terrible fate and grieved for her.

Despite everything, I was a good student. I wanted to go away to college in Albany, NY. My mother had a fit. According to her, my job in life was to stay home and take care of her. She made my senior year absolutely miserable. My own needs and goals were immaterial to her. I received no support regarding my own feelings about going to an unfamiliar place and starting something new.

Things were so bad between us that after my first night away at college, my roommate, whom I had never met before, told me I had scared her in the middle of the night. I was yelling, “F**k you” and she thought I was yelling at her. I was actually dreaming about my mother.

Family holds you back

Besides my experience with leaving for college there was this:

After I left for college, I had very little to do with my family. My brother found a job and moved to Albany near me when he was 40 so he live where he could afford to buy a house. A few years later, my parents also decided to relocate to Albany because they were aging and wanted to be near us so we could help them out. Once they arrived, my mother insisted that I quit my work so I could take care of them full time. I had just left my job working for New York State and has started a psychotherapy practice. I refused to quit and my mother resented it.

I realized during the energy psychology processing that my chronic neck pain, which had waxed and waned over the years, started when my parents moved to Albany. I had previously attributed it to a repetitive strain injury. My mother was a real pain in the neck.

Because of my childhood experiences, I had many failed relationships over the years and stuffed much of my feelings about them. These also came up for grieving and healing, as did the loss of many pet cats. I thought I had worked through much of this in the past, and didn’t even realize how much I was still stifling my feelings.

I have often thought about my failed relationships, most of which I ended, and questioned whether I made the right decisions. In recent years I had avoided relationships altogether. I only realized during this processing that if I had been in a different emotional place with a different set of beliefs, I would have attracted different relationships. Now, the future feels more hopeful.

As I’ve gone through this process, my physical pain has eased more and more. I’m now back to my usual level of functioning.

Small ‘t’ and Big ‘T’ Trauma

The experiences I’ve had are what trauma experts refer to as small “t” trauma. Small “t” traumas are events that exceed our capacity to cope and cause a disruption in emotional functioning. These distressing events are not inherently life or bodily-integrity threatening, but they leave the person feeling helpless. These experiences may include non-life-threatening injuries, emotional abuse, death of a pet, bullying or harassment and loss of significant relationships.

This is different than what experts call big “T” trauma, which involves serious injury, sexual violence or life-threatening experiences such as fires, auto accidents, war, floods or earthquakes. Witnessing someone else going through these experiences can also result in big “T” trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As one trauma expert put it, “Although little ‘t’ traumas may not meet the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis, these events can be extremely upsetting and cause significant emotional damage, particularly if an individual experiences more than one event or if these traumas occur during important periods of brain development like early childhood and adolescence. Evidence now concludes that repeated exposure to little ‘t’ traumas can cause more emotional harm than exposure to a single big ‘T’ traumatic event. Empathy and acceptance for the impact of little ‘t’ traumas can be harder to garner because of the common misconception that these events are less significant than life-threatening emergencies. Minimizing the impact of these little ‘t’ incidents can create adverse coping behaviors such as bottling up emotions or attempting to manage symptoms without support. Failing to address the emotional suffering of any traumatic event may lead to cumulative damage over time.”

Unprocessed trauma can lead over time to chronic pain and chronic illness. With little “t” trauma, many people don’t even realize the profound effects these traumas can have. Is this your story too?

The Energy Psychology technique I used for healing my pain flare is demonstrated in this video.

Follow this journey on the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory 

Image via contributor’s YouTube video

Originally published: May 19, 2021
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