More and more research is supporting the idea that back pain has little to no correlation to physical abnormalities like disc problems or arthritis.  There are thousands of people walking around with arthritis and a slipped disc that have no pain.  Other conditions such as frozen shoulder, bursitis, tendonitis, and carpal tunnel syndrome are known to come with no apparent injury or reason.  And often two people with the same injury will heal at very different rates, and feel very different degrees of pain.  So the question is…why do some people have chronic pain and some don’t?  And if you do have chronic pain, what can you do about it?

No one can tell you if you have pain or not.  Pain is completely subjective.  Pain is information.  It’s a message from your body to your brain.  Pain is a lesson you need to learn.  Pain is like a foreigner asking for directions.  You try to help, but you don’t speak the language and you’re not even sure where he’s trying to go. 

            A client came in for a routine appointment and told me that she had gotten hit by a car the week before, and even though she flew through the air and hit the ground hard said she felt fine.   I was skeptical, but when I massaged her she seemed great, maybe even a little better than usual.  Three weeks later I got a frantic call from the same client.  “I can’t move my neck, I’m in a lot of pain, could you fit me in?”  When she came into my office a couple hours later she told me that her goggles slipped off her head as she got ready to ski, she went to catch them and her neck went out.  I couldn’t believe it.  She gets hit by a car, and she’s fine.  Her goggles slip, and she can’t move her head.  So I asked her what was going on in her life.  She said that she was very tired because of having company for two weeks after which a friend came to town and wanted to go skiing.  She confessed that she didn’t want to go skiing, but felt she had to for her friend’s sake.  Ahha!  Of course her neck went out.  She wasn’t listening to her body so her body made her listen.

            This is a common scenario.  We can get so wrapped up in our world and our responsibilities that we lose the ability to feel our true emotions.  And even if we do feel them we don’t respect them enough to change our behavior and put our own needs first.  Your body is like a two year old.  It tries to communicate with you, but the more you ignore it the more adimate it becomes until it’s in a full blown temper tantrum.

            One way to get chronic pain is to not listen to our bodies/emotions over time.  Another way is to have experienced trauma that we haven’t fully let go of.  By trauma I mean any profound shift in your emotional reality.  Anything from abuse to divorce to a car accident can create patterns in our bodies that result in pain.

            I was talking to a mom at a doctor’s office who was lamenting how long it was taking for her son’s broken arm to heal.  “When my niece broke her arm”, she said, “it healed up very quickly, but my son’s arm is taking forever to heal.”  I asked if it was very traumatic for her son when he broke his arm.  “yes, she replied, “he was really shaken up about the whole event”  I suggested perhaps that was why his arm was still hurting.  The physical trauma of an event is intricately linked to the emotional trauma of an event.  The physical won’t heal until the emotional heals.  We can learn to mask it, to cover it up and compensate for it, but eventually the body will bring it back to the foreground one way or another. 

            Chronic pain always has an emotional component.  Our bodies are made to heal from injuries, and most of the time we do.  When the pain lingers, or reoccurs regularly there is an emotional lesson we have not learned yet, and our bodies won’t let up until we do.  We may eventually heal from one thing (or get surgery to remedy a situation), but if the emotional lesson hasn’t been learned or the trauma has not been released, the body will send another injury to replace it.

I don’t mean to mislead you by suggesting that emotional trauma is separate from physical trauma.  They are always together, and in some ways the same.  If you have a physical trauma there will always be emotional trauma that goes with it.  If there isn’t, your physical injuries will be minor and heal very quickly.  The body always has emotional reaction to physical pain and trauma.  They are intricately linked.  Conversely, emotional trauma always has a physical component, even if no physical injury occurred.  Say you witness a horrific event, but are not actually injured.  Intense feelings of powerlessness and fear release a barrage of stress chemicals into your body, your breathing changes, your body tenses, the trauma may go into your diaphragm or belly, and most likely if you had any previous trauma your old injuries will start to hurt again.  I had many phone calls after the 9/11 attacks with clients saying injuries they hadn’t felt in years were acutely hurting again.  The body needs to put trauma somewhere.  It puts it in the weakest spot or the same place it used to put it.  Often people who have experienced trauma will repeat it in some way over and over until they deal with the initial event.

            Sometimes trauma lives specifically in the body.  If someone experiences physical abuse she can get all the best psychotherapy in the world, but until she deals with the specific muscles that took in that trauma, she will never truly release that emotion.  That’s why bodywork is so important.  We set up physical and emotional patterns that are intricately linked, and in order to change the patterns that are causing us pain we need to deal with both the physical and emotional aspects of our past.

            Lou Holtz said: “life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it”.  Our bodies mirror our emotional patterns.  In order to recover from chronic pain we must change both the emotional and physical patterns that are causing and keeping us in the cycle of pain.  Often it takes more than one therapist and more than one modality to bring about the changes that need to happen.  Massage, energy work, somatic therapy, and acupuncture, are only a few examples of bodywork modalities that can be helpful.  Most important is finding excellent practitioners who are able to facilitate your journey to an emotionally healthy and pain-free life.