Healing Chronic Pain by Facing Repressed Emotions
“There’s nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.”
– Snoopy (Charles M. Schultz, the creator of Peanuts)
On a cloudy Southern California day in March 2021, I woke up with chest pain. Holy sh*t, I thought. I’m having a heart attack. I also felt pain in my left arm, neck, and the back of my head but what sent me to Cedars-Sinai Hospital that morning was the extreme fear I was having a heart attack.
Hospitals are scary. Add the bleak ambiance of Covid times and you have a recipe for panic. After my test results came back normal, the ER doctor assured me there was nothing to worry about. Only there was something to worry about. I would spend the next fourteen months in chronic pain.
In addition to chest pain and disconcerting head sensations deemed migraine with aura, I would experience left side weakness, leg muscle pain and atrophy, tingling/numbness in feet and hands, unintended weight loss, dry mouth, skin lesions, IBS, GERD, working memory loss, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, depersonalization, insomnia, frequent urination, fatigue, eye pressure, and fibromyalgia-like pain. To name a few.
It was shocking how fast I went from healthy and active to paralyzed by my symptoms. Many days I was bedridden with my migraine and the myriad symptoms of ever changing severity. I’d undergo exhausting rounds of testing: blood tests, X-rays, CTs, and an MRI all showing no major abnormalities.
I felt trapped in my body and obsessed with trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I spent hours on Google researching various diagnoses determined to get well and back to living fully. I would visit emergency departments ten times in as many months, always leaving with no answers and the added insult of being pegged a ‘frequent flyer.’
Could it be thoracic outlet syndrome, sarcoidosis, or vitamin B deficiency? What about some obscure genetic disorder that vaguely lined up with my symptoms? Doctors often obliged my hunches with more tests and specialists that would invariably lead nowhere.
I presented to so many practitioners with so may symptoms that didn’t seem connected that I’d invariably come across one particularly egocentric doctor who would overtly condescend to me. He implied that it was all in my head.
The Pain is Real
Of course the pain was in my head but it was real. And his medical terminology was off. It was specifically in my brain. The reality of my chronic pain and its cause simply hadn’t gotten through to the medical establishment yet.
At the time of that first ER visit, I was dealing with numerous personal and work stressors. Three kids, each with their own remote learning challenge, created a unique parenting pressure. A toxic work environment that piled on the workload after my boss was let go and not replaced. And personality traits that set me up for burnout.
Oftentimes people who struggle with chronic pain fall under a certain personality type: perfectionistic, high achieving (but not type A), do-gooder. They don’t want to let people down. They are often the peace keepers.
Over the course of those many months, I had it explained to me that my anxiety wasn’t helping things. That it might be amplifying my symptoms but only in the context of prescribing anti-anxiety medication. The truth is, my unconscious brain was trying to distract me from my buried emotions with anxiety-inducing yet harmless pain. I had no need to be anxious about this pain. It was a con job and the jig was up.
What I came to learn was that I was suffering from mind-body or neuroplastic pain, a condition originally termed Tension myositis syndrome (TMS).
According to Wikipedia:
Tension myositis syndrome (TMS), also known as tension myoneural syndrome or mindbody syndrome, is a name given by John E. Sarno to a condition of psychogenic musculoskeletal and nerve symptoms, most notably back pain.[1][2][3].
Dr. Sarno would eventually expand his definition of the syndrome beyond back pain to include other symptoms including migraine, gastrointestinal disorders, repetitive stress injury, and a host of other pain disorders. As the pioneer of mind-body pain treatment dating back to the 1980s, Dr. Sarno faced malignment from the medical community even as his thousands of patients found life changing relief from his care at NYU Medical Center. Prevailing medical wisdom holds that in order to heal we need drugs. Why?
In 2012 during a hearing on chronic pain, Senator Tom Harkin asked, “I read a book by Dr. Sarno. I began to follow his regime. I haven’t had a back pain since. Why isn’t this being looked at?”
It’s not as if the clinical trials that prove the effectiveness of mind-body healing modalities are not out there. A recent peer reviewed study on the effects of a mind-body treatment called Pain Reprocessing Therapy on back pain concluded that, “Psychological treatment centered on changing patients’ beliefs about the causes and threat value of pain may provide substantial and durable pain relief for people with CBP [chronic back pain].”
How to Diagnose and Treat Mind-Body Pain
Treatment for mind-body pain takes place in the brain. It is the test lab and the tonic. It starts with feeding your brain knowledge. Reading books and listening to educational podcasts on the subject of neuroplasticity, TMS, and practicing techniques like Pain Reprocessing Therapy that rewire neural pathways.
As it happens, I came to my treatment by way of an Instagram ad for Curable, an app with numerous tools to help heal chronic pain. I was skeptical at first but I had tried almost everything, so why not. After listening to the curable educational podcasts and doing meditation and brain training exercises like somatic tracking and emotional reframing, I could feel my body relax and the discomfort recede. One day, as I sat in my car in a Trader Joe’s parking lot listening to one recovery story in particular that sounded similar to my own, I put my head back and breathed a sigh of relief. I was going to get better.
It took a couple of months but I eventually experienced relief from all my symptoms — thanks to getting into it with my emotions. I journaled, cried, yelled, and truly tapped into my own emotions, especially rage. I let myself wade into my own waters and it felt holy, miraculous even.
I had gained a sense of agency around my healing and less reliance on a medical community slow to embrace the reality of this diagnosis. Because I’d had every test done under the sun to rule out structural or chemical causes, I was free to explore the idea that my symptoms were directly influenced by my emotions, or more specifically, my lack of addressing my emotions.
But why did I have to come to it myself? Why did I have to rely on an online advertising algorithm to bring me this knowledge? According to the CDC, more than 50 million US adults currently suffer from chronic pain. Will they be served the same algorithm? Modern medicine saves lives. It has its place. But there is a need for doctors to address chronic pain from a more holistic perspective, one that considers neuroscience and psychosocial dynamics instead of relying solely on drug manufacturers to fix what in many cases only the mind can cure. This paradigm shift is beginning but paradigm shifts take time. In the meantime, those in pain wait.
My UCSF neurologist once said to me, “there is so much we don’t know about the brain.” Now I would respond, there is so much our brains and emotions can tell us.
References:
Mindbody Prescription, Healing the Body, Healing the Pain by John E. Sarno
Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Curable
Prevalence of Chronic Pain and High-Impact Chronic Pain Among Adults — United States, 2016
