Explaining Chronic Pain - the mind and body connection
Pain can arise in the body as a ‘somatization’ of something that is purely psychological just as much as it can represent physical injury or inflammation. Somatisation simply means experiencing psychological distress in the form of physical symptoms.
Somatic therapy requires an awareness of what is going on inside the body, meaning the physiological cues in response to a trigger or the physiological reactions we have throughout the day, such as headaches or stomach aches, or muscle tension.
When we have a traumatic experience, it gets stored on a cellular level. Some might be aware of a bestselling book by post-traumatic stress pioneer Bessel van der Kolk “the body keeps the score.”
In a healthy nervous system, the fear response keeps us safe from danger by triggering the flight or flight reflex in our reptilian brain, the Amygdala. When that reflex is triggered our body is flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, hormones produced by the adrenal glands, which helps us fight off, or quickly flee from the danger. At the same time, the areas of our brain that control emotions and higher thought shut down because they are not useful in that moment.
When the danger is over, and you are safe again, everything in the body returns to calm, adrenaline and cortisol are switched off and the nervous system resets itself back to homeostasis.
Except when it doesn’t. If the danger does not go away, if you cannot flight or flee or get help from another, if there is no end to the threat, then the body continues to pump those hormones into your system and, now no longer helpful, this continual drip of the hormones becomes very toxic to your system and causes inflammation. It makes you sick.
‘Trauma’ is what happens in your body after the scary event if the body does not get the message “it’s over and I’m safe”. The unconscious mind creates a program that continually alerts you to what it thinks is danger. Fear becomes your default state of awareness, at a subconscious level. Your thinking brain knows that you are not back there in the scary event, but your subconscious mind thinks otherwise. And the subconscious mind is the one in control, making your life miserable.
Pain serves 2 purposes in the body: adaption and self-preservation. It warns us that something is wrong and messages us to stop what we're doing. Following trauma, chronic pain may become a negative feedback loop. Inflammation causes tissue damage leading to more inflammation, and overtime persistent pain can affect the mind as well. Our motivation, our sleep, and our mood will get negatively affected and then we become more sensitised to pain. When treating chronic pain, we must therefore consider the mind and the body for best results.
If you are experiencing persistent pain or medically unexplained pain symptoms, then my approach may be able to help you. I used a multifactorial approach to recovery from chronic pain using evidenced based approaches that are trauma informed. I help you develop healthier neural pathways to enable a pain free life through pain education and trauma therapy.
Not all physiotherapists who treat chronic pain use a trauma informed approach. This is the approach (using a number of evidence-based trauma techniques) I have been using for the past seven years because I understand the relationship between trauma and the way it can show up in the body in the form of chronic pain.
My approach has enabled me to help clients resolve and recover from both chronic pain end trauma. Of course, not all chronic pain has its roots in unresolved trauma, and not all unresolved trauma will cause chronic pain in the body, but the research about the relationship between the two is very strong and from my own experience, the mind body approach is crucial for results.
Book an appointment with Carole
