Beyond Chronic Pain: living your best life.

If you’ve ever suffered for some time with pain in your body, you’ll probably have explored many avenues to find relief: you may have visited your GP and possibly been referred to a specialist to obtain a diagnosis. This may have felt like a relief as now you know the pain is real and will be taken seriously. You may have tried chemicals to control the pain, and found something that helps, and then have become aware of the side effects of this as time goes on, and that the chemical is not as effective as it used to be. So you’ll have gone back for more. You will have tried adapting your lifestyle, your diet, and your exercise regime, each new approach will have given you some hope that you found something that helps or even takes a pain away permanently. And then you will have lost faith again.

You may have tried complementary therapies and explored different ways of understanding your pain. This will undoubtedly have helped, and yet you still have it. You will have begun to recognise that you are now talking about little else, and that the pain is becoming the main preoccupation in life, and that your sleep is affected, and you are starting to become less mentally sharp.

By this time, you’ll be worrying that you’re going to be stuck with pain for life, and it will only get worse. You may never get back to work. You may no longer be able to drive, to care for people, or eventually care for yourself. Then you notice that you’re developing symptoms of depression and begin to fear that your partner will give up on you so it’s back to the GP for more chemicals and on the story goes.

Of course, not everyone will recognise every part of this pattern, but if you have chronic pain or live with someone who does, then you can probably relate to at least part of it.

It may be useful when exploring the idea of TWM as a route out of this downward spiral to see health and ill health as being like a set of scales: when we’re healthy, our scales are in perfect balance, and return to this state after every challenge. We get flu, this pulls one pan down, but then we recover, and the equilibrium is restored; we experience a shock or trauma, which makes us reel, but over time we bounce back; or, we have a physical injury, which slowly repairs.

But sometimes we get a challenge, or series of challenges, that are so overwhelming that our inner healing mechanism cannot right itself, and we get stuck out of balance which means our symptoms persist. These symptoms may be emotional, such as post traumatic stress disorder, or physical, such as persisting headache after flu, or chronic back pain after an injury.

When our inner healing mechanism has been overwhelmed, we may need some outside help to restore ourselves to balance. Talking to a counsellor may help us work through our emotions and make sense of what has happened to us, seeing a chiropractor may repair our backs and paracetamol may relieve the headache. But what do we do when the problem keeps recurring, or is not helped by dealing with the symptoms, which is the case in the majority of people who are in chronic pain?

Pain is rarely felt as a simple, discreet, physical sensation: our minds and our bodies do not work that way. Take back pain, for example, just follow this story and your imagination. Your mind perceives a pain in the lower back, let us say it was caused by a torn muscle. Other muscles in the area immediately contract to protect and support the damaged area, and in the ensuing hours and days there may be an inflammatory response, where the surrounding tissues become swollen hot and tender.

You know, from experiencing this before, that as soon as you move it’s going to hurt, and so you start holding yourself very still and being extremely cautious about jolting the area. You feel fearful of making a wrong move, and your muscles start to ache with the effort of protecting you from further pain. You also start to worry about how long it’s going on for and how you’re going to sleep, manage work or drive the car. You remember that you’ve run out of sick leave and anticipate getting sacked, being unemployed, not paying the rent, and finally being on the streets. You feel that urge of shame as you picture yourself huddled in the subway with your three kids crying with hunger, and then you feel a surge of hatred towards your HR manager who you believe would be delighted to let you go.

You have a flashback to when you hurt your back the first time and relive the trauma of that event. You remember that it was your sister’s fault and that she still hasn’t apologised. You feel angry and have a momentary urge to seek revenge then you remember how worn down and desperate you got from coping with the pain that time and you’re not sure you can bear it again.

Notice all the emotions that this simple back injury has the potential to evoke, each one adds to the distress of the pain. And you don’t go through the scenarios just once, you repeat them endlessly, like a stuck record, and in so doing so, you perpetuate an intensify your suffering.

Now imagine that you found a simple exercise that helps you to see your pain from an objective perspective, that trains your mind to be accepting and relaxed, one that, with continued use, allows you to let go of habitual thought patterns and emotional responses, so they are no longer triggered when you feel a sensation in your body.

TWM does just this. It helps you to separate what your mind does with the idea of pain from the reality of what you are really experiencing right here in this moment. This leaves you freer to live your life, even if that is with some pain. The exercises, in this course, are designed to train your mind to be less and less involved with your pain. It can mean that the pain simply leaves you entirely, and at the very least you will suffer less and feel freer to live your life with your pain rather than dominated by it.

You may want to work with each exercise for a few days before reading on and taking the next step in your journey towards a freer life.