So, I determined I would find out more about chronic pain
and fatigue and see if I could unlock whatever it was with alternative methods.
I tried acupuncture (which was helpful), homeopathy (which was not – for me
anyway). Then I tried massage and chiropractic and finally some Chinese herbs
which were incredibly effective as they detoxified my body and enabled it to
begin to heal. I started to see that health and wellbeing was more than curing
myself of disease. It was about bringing my body back into balance.
Fast forward 15 years and I am now a fully qualified
therapist specialising in Chronic pain, specifically TMS or Tension Myositis
Syndrome (which is closely related to Chronic Fatigue syndrome although they
may manifest differently). It is a stress-related illness – by which I don’t
mean necessarily due to an obvious stressor but it can be accumulated, low-level
stress like being in the wrong job, relationship for you, or by burying your
emotions of loss, grief or anger. Men and women are different in this respect
as their emotional landscapes are different which may explain the huge preponderance
of women with CFS/ME as compared to men. Men on the other hand may get
unexplained back pain, or auto-immune diseases. Modern medicine calls these
conditions different illnesses, and attempts to treat them symptomatically.
This doesn’t work as the central cause isn’t in the affected part but in the
brain.
Now, here’s where this gets tricky as people in pain do not
like being told ‘it’s all in the mind’. That isn’t what I’m saying at all. The
pain is very real and there is real physical disturbance in the tissue causing
that pain. However, the ultimate causation is in the imbalance in the nervous
system which comes from undischarged emotion. It is a simple biological fact
that we are hardwired for emotion – the two most primitive are fear and
defensive anger (rage). In the animal kingdom (of which we are part from an
evolutionary perspective) animals will display these emotions as a survival
tactic. If we didn’t have fear we would be incautious and perhaps get eaten, if
we didn’t have rage we couldn’t stand up to our attackers with the same result.
The part of the nervous system that controls this is the autonomic nervous
system and it is composed of two parts; the sympathetic and the
para-sympathetic. They are like the accelerator and brakes respectively that
modulate the body’s responses to outside stimulus. But they also response to
internal stimuli – our feelings and emotions.
So, if we are afraid, our heart rate increases, our
breathing is rapid, we are geared to the so-called ‘fight or flight’ response which involves the brain
and endocrine (hormone) system. If we have a situation where neither of these
is possible we can exhibit a freeze response where our body is in perpetual
slow motion – lacking energy and vitality. This is probably the basis for
Chronic Fatigue syndromes – much more common in women whose nervous systems
tend to freeze more than they fight. [i]That
our mind can create this may seem nonsensical until you begin to understand our
evolutionary heritage. As animals, our mind is incredibly complex and designed
to deal with threat- it cannot differentiate between real threat and perceived
threat – perception is everything! So, for instance we can get anxiety because
our mind is interpreting a situation as threatening even when it is relatively
innocuous. This is because the brain is a pattern recognition machine and it
links certain events together by their associated senses or emotions. So, for
instance a certain smell will evoke a memory as will feeling fearful – but the
associations may be unconscious, so for instance your boss may remind you of
someone you once feared so they trigger that response in you causing
unconscious stress.
TMS is the physical response of the body to that cumulative,
low-grade stress. It inhibits blood flow to the tissues casuing local ischaemia (or oxygen deprivation). The
tissues become hypoxic, lactic acid builds up and pain and fatigue is the
result – especially in muscles and tendons. There only needs to be a small amount
of reduction too to have serious effects. If the nerves are affected then the
pain may be accompanied/replaced by tingling or odd feeling sensations. But
because the root cause – stress – is never addressed all physical approaches be
they massage, physio, pain killers and surgery will never work. It has been
noticed of instance that in people with Fibromyalgia most pain killers are
ineffective.
There has been a lot of research into TMS but the main
author who first coined the term was Dr john Sarno[ii].
He was in rehabilitation medicine for 30+ years and began to notice patterns of
trauma in his patients that, if he encourage them to highlight and address
their unprocessed emotions, they were able to reduce or remove their pain
altogether. He hypothesised that the mind was creating pain as a diversion to
these uncomfortable emotions – in the mind’s view physical pain is less
damaging! He also noticed that the pain
could shift and move around when these feelings were addressed. Combined with his
research into normal pathology of the spine and tissues with ageing, he came to
the conclusion that the root cause was not physical but emotional.his work has
since been furthered by clinicians such as Dr James Alexander[iii]
who being a psychologist, was able to hypothersise how this mechanism might be
mediated.
I have written extensively on this in other blogs and won’t
repeat here, but mindbody medicine which acknowledges that we are both mind AND body is
really the only logical way forward to solve the epidemic of mindbody disorders
that we are currently seeing. These include in no particular order; CFS/ME, auto-immune disease, IBS, anxiety/panic disorders, headaches/migraines, insomnia, etc. In my practice I work with people on a mindbody level - we investigate the whole person not just the physical symptoms. I use massage and Reiki to stimulate the body and rebalance the energy system, and then various psycho-somatic techniques such as EFT (tapping ) and EMDR within a hypnotherapeutic framework (which emphasises safety and self-empowerment).
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