How to Get Unstuck in Mind-Body Healing
Feeling stuck in healing from pain and other chronic symptoms? Dr. Stracks shares insights about why you might be feeling stuck and what you can do to move forward with healing.
How to Get Unstuck in Mind-Body Healing
People often tell me that they feel stuck when using mind-body approaches to heal pain and other chronic symptoms. While there can be many reasons why people are stuck in their healing, I’m going to focus on the three most common ones.
Understanding Why You Have Pain
The biggest reason that people get stuck is that they are still not clear how pain works and why they’re working on it. Why do you, as an individual, have pain or symptoms? Once you understand that, you’re more likely to get better.
We humans get pain for many reasons. Our handout 10 Reasons for Pain and Other Symptoms lists the general reasons that people develop symptoms.
You’re not general, though–you’re you. And so your symptoms developed for a very specific reason.
Pain and symptoms do not show up by accident. They show up because your brain is trying to protect you from something. That something may be a thought or a feeling; a stressor or a trauma; a person, place, or thing; a fear; a challenge; or anything else. Your job is to sort through what it is for you that’s bringing up the need for protection and then to do whatever you need to do to deal with that situation so that you don’t need the protection anymore.
In addition, you need to have a good understanding of the biology and physiology of pain and symptoms so that you can conceptualize why once you’ve taken care of that issue, the pain and the symptoms can improve. If you don’t have a clear picture of this in your head, go back to the science (you can see our pain science class here) until you have a clear picture in your mind of how this all works.
Traumatic Experiences
The second biggest reason I see is that people who are stuck have a history of traumatic experiences in their lives.
Traumatic experiences are, by definition, difficult. In fact, traumatic memories are coded in our brains differently than other memories are, as they tend to be placed more in the amygdala and less in the hippocampus. That’s by design, as it’s important to us as human beings to attach negative emotions to traumatic events to have the best chance of avoiding them in the future. This also means, unfortunately, that the memories can be incredibly intrusive, and the effects of those events can show up when we’re least interested in having them show up.
There are many ways to heal trauma, and many good books that have been written about how to do that, including:
• Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth, by Jim Rendon
• The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk
• The Last Best Cure and Childhood Disrupted by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Despite all the information that’s available, healing from traumatic experiences can be extraordinarily slow and difficult. Sometimes working with a professional can help get people unstuck in ways that aren’t possible otherwise. Somatically based therapies like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy help people safely heal trauma without revisiting the story and thus decrease the possibility of being retraumatized in the therapy. If you have access to a practitioner who practices a somatically based therapy, it can be a tremendously helpful way to move forward.
Trying Too Hard
While this may sound strange, the third major reason that I see people getting stuck is when they try too hard to get better. Interestingly, this is the paradox of healing in general, not just from pain and other chronic symptoms.
Getting better involves learning that pain and other symptoms are not dangerous; they’re simply the way that our bodies will speak to us about what’s going on in our lives. Thus, pain or symptoms are not something that needs fixing, they’re something that needs interpreting.
I’ll say that again. Pain or symptoms are not something that needs fixing, they’re something that needs interpreting.
Think about trying to read your favorite book in a language you don’t know. It would be frustrating and impossible, right? But the answer would not be to eliminate the book so that it wasn’t so frustrating for you anymore. The answer would be to figure out a way to translate the words into your native language so that you have a better idea of what’s being said. Pain and symptoms are like this; once translated, they offer meaning that’s useful for us and propels us forward; getting rid of them right away is not always the answer.
When we try and try and try and try to get rid of the pain or the other symptoms, we send ourselves the message that the symptoms are bad and need to be banished. The symptoms, having a message to send to us, fight harder to stick around, hoping that we’ll get the message and act on it.
Jill, a patient whose interview can be found here, found that she could help calm her headaches with a visualization. She had learned that her amygdala (an emotional center of her brain) contributed to her headaches, so in her mind she anthropomorphized the amygdala into a small, blue, muppet-like creature. When she felt the beginning of a migraine, she would settle herself down, close her eyes, and imagine that the muppet was throwing a tantrum. She would then imagine reaching out, giving it a hug, and saying, “Thank you for alerting me about this current stressor. I know that you’re worried about this work deadline coming up, but actually, I’m an adult and I have this covered. It’s sweet that you worry about us so much and work so hard to alert me to the potential danger. In fact, I appreciate that you’ve been working diligently for over 40 years on this, knowing that one day, I would finally understand what you’re saying and react appropriately. Really, though, at this point I can take care of this and you can go back to bed.” And then she’d imagine the muppet snorting and spinning around and huffing, but finally going back into its cave and back to sleep. By the time she had done all this, the first inklings of the migraine had retreated and she was generally fine.
In doing all that, she did a few different things:
1. She didn’t run away from the symptoms, she leaned into them.
2. She didn’t banish the symptoms, she learned from them.
3. She appreciated that the symptoms were trying to work for her and, importantly, had always been working for her, over decades and decades.
4. She interrupted the fear cycle. By understanding the symptoms, she was able to loosen their hold on her. And by creating the nonthreatening, cute muppet in her mind, the migraine just didn’t seem so scary anymore.
Jill is one of the few people I know who says that for her, the healing was fun. I know many people who find the work of healing excruciating as it can bring up old, painful memories, ask of us to do things we’re not good at doing, and make us confront situations we’d really prefer to run away from. Jill’s story is a nice example that it doesn’t have to be that way. For a variety of reasons, the process for her was intriguing and smooth, and she appreciated the information she learned, the progress that she made, and the people she came across during her healing. The muppet example is one in which she used her creativity and playfulness to move the process along more quickly than she might have otherwise.
I say all that to say this: the harder we push the symptoms to go away, the more credibility we give them as a threat to our survival. The more we recognize them not as a threat but as a companion, teacher, and mentor, the easier it is to allow the symptoms to leave on their own accord.
If you are feeling stuck in your healing from pain and other chronic symptoms, ask yourself whether looking at one of these main reasons in more depth is the key to helping you get unstuck.
If you’re ready to find a different model of healing, click here for more information or to schedule an appointment.