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The Emotional Element of Pain |
Man has become one of the most successful organisms on the planet by adjusting to the environment. When we are presented with a situation that threatens to alter our existence, our way of life, and if we are unable to change it, we adapt to it.
Similarly, we as individuals are very good at adaptation and compensation. When we suffer an injury or insult to the physical body, rather than sit and wait for it to get better, we adapt the way we move, we compensate for it. Thus we can continue our lives while healing takes place. It is a survival mechanism, and if there is one thing we do very well it is surviving.
These compensations and their consequences are what we deal with here at Physiologic. The changes in your body brought about, not only as a direct effect of physical injury but also as an indirect effect of our reaction to that injury. By working backwards through the compensatory mechanisms we have employed in order to carry on living our lives, we can alleviate pain and return you to a state of physical equilibrium.
Now consider the body’s reaction to emotional trauma, sometimes a much more profound and long lasting problem than a skiing injury or a slipped disc. Emotional trauma cannot be measured in terms of a straight forward scale of magnitude. What may be passed off as a simple joke one day might have deep and irrevocable significance the next. Similarly an incident that we may have laughed at when younger, such as a near miss whilst driving, might now be truly troubling later in life.
How do we deal with such events? Do we sit and try to work through them until they are resolved, thus returning ourselves to a state of mental equilibrium? Or do we do what we do with any other problem? Save it for later, store it away to deal with when we are not busy living?
Mental or emotional trauma may come about as a direct result of the same thing that caused a physical trauma. For instance; being hit from behind whilst stationary at a set of traffic lights, The sudden acceleration and deceleration of the head on the neck will almost certainly cause a whiplash injury. You may also experience some direct physical trauma from hitting the steering wheel. These types of physical trauma are an excellent case in point, as quite often people who have suffered such injuries will describe how they felt no pain at the time of the accident but 2 days later started to experience shoulder or neck pain, chest or head pain. A course of treatment will heal the inured tissue and the physical effects of whiplash. However, on occasion, simply dealing with the physical injury is not enough and pain persists despite there being no apparent physical cause.
Consider, now, as someone crashes into the back of your car and you are thrown forwards into the steering wheel, the thought processes that have started. Firstly there is a huge, and unexpected, physical movement. This will trigger your self-preservation mode, your fight or flight mechanism as it has become known. This is a physical reaction to an emotionally unstable situation. Your body does not know what is happening, just in case you are being attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger (because that is how old this reaction is) it fires your adrenal glands and you receive a huge dump of adrenalin into your system, in case you have to run away. This triggers all manner of responses from the muscles, the organs and the brain. Secondly there may be a realisation of how dangerous your situation was during the impact. This then is an emotional response; what if I had been killed? What if I couldn’t provide for my family anymore? What if, and add your own ending. This will certainly keep your adrenalin pumping which will stop you responding too much to any physical injury.
To continue to live in this heighten emotional state is obviously not a good idea; we would burn out very quickly if we did. Some examples of these situations include ME, fibromyalgia, and autoimmune diseases such as Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus and Scleroderma. In order to continue with our lives we store the information, the physical impact and the emotional impact but not as memory as you might expect. Instead we go through a process called somatisation where mental or emotional stress is stored in the body tissue. Typically we store it in the most easily accessible place available. At the time of a physical injury the most accessible, or most vulnerable, place available is always the site of the injury. However recurrent pains that we experience such as in the hip or knee can return following a period of distress or grief. Have you noticed this or perhaps you experience a cold or other illness when feeling run down?
Treatment aimed solely at releasing the physical trauma is not addressing all the possible contributory factors involved. This is where we at Physiologic differ from most practitioners. We have the skills to help you to deal with all aspects of your trauma, physical and emotional. Through use of such techniques as Somato-Emotional Release, Meta Medicine, Emotional Freedom Technique, Matrix Reimprinting, Theta Healing, Acupuncture and Kinesiology we can help you restore balance.
By releasing the emotional element the body is free to behave, move, perceive and experience life differently.
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Deepak Chopra:
"The unconscious mind regulates our energy."
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Our unconscious minds are used 95% of the time to make decisions and formulate beliefs.
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