Many clients with pain symptoms come to my office with this complaint; they don’t feel heard by their primary care or chronic pain physician. Instead, they get things like:
“The tests are negative, so there must be something mentally wrong.”
“There is no physical reason for you to have migraine headaches. What are you stressed about?”
“Depression and pain go together, so you probably are just depressed.”
“There is nothing physically wrong that we can find—it’s probably all in your head.”
Feeling understandably very discouraged and frustrated, my clients have gone to practitioners only to continue to feel misunderstood and dismissed. If you’ve experienced this too, you’re not alone!
Fibromyalgia can be a part of the picture
It takes a substantial amount of time and effort to receive an accurate pain-related diagnosis, mostly because fibromyalgia is still such a poorly understood condition. There are a host of concerns that can contribute to pain related to fibromyalgia, including genetics, sleep, headache, nutrition, and impaired movement. It’s also common for fibromyalgia to have frustrating overlapping issues, like low back pain, migraine headache, and irritable bowel syndrome. In fact, most people who deal with long-term pain have more than one diagnosis.
This means that a focus on helping people to heal from FM pain must center on the care of the entire person, not just one specific diagnosis. Everything in the body is connected with everything else! One important aspect of treatment is a core focus on developing a body and brain that are resistant to pain.
Trauma is often part of the fibromyalgia picture
I find that people who have unresolved mental-emotional trauma have issues with pain more frequently and with more severity. Helping people to understand traumatic events and how these life events may still have a negative impact on our life is absolutely instrumental in moving the healing process forward. It’s important to understand that trauma is based on the perception of a person and the traumatic experiences can range from a significant traffic accident, to experiencing financial hardship, to having a detrimental health problem.
Why does trauma have such an impact on our perception of pain?
Our body and brain have a primary goal of protection before anything else comes into the picture. Someone who has dealt with unresolved trauma tends to have a brain and body that remain in a “fight, freeze, or flight” response. It’s unreasonable to think that this can be a sustainable way to manage trauma, so the patient tends to “stuff” the emotion and try to bury it deep in the back recesses of the brain in an effort at avoiding the pain and protecting self. Of course, this doesn’t work, and that unhealed trauma can wreak havoc on the body and its health.
Research confirms that people who are suffering from fibromyalgia are particularly prone to these types of avoidance, also known as “disassociation.”
Direct avoidance of pain is an important evolutionary survival mechanism. As pain is a sign of threat to the body, we are primed to learn what causes it and to withdraw as quickly as we can! When we’re younger this works well with acute pain (avoidance of a hot stove or iron) but sadly fails miserably when pain is chronic (continuing after the initial acute pain). A situation of avoidance can set in. It may seem safer for a person to avoid something that might be painful and dangerous than to test it out, making us always on constant protective alert. This alert signal never (or rarely) gets turned off, keeping us in a constant state of alarm and chronic, longstanding pain.
Now what?
Any human suffering from chronic pain should be working with a comprehensive team of healthcare providers in an effort to take their lives back from suffering. This team of providers absolutely has to acknowledge the role that each person must play in healing themselves from pain. At least one provider on that team should be equipped to explore how stressors of the past are playing into the symptoms of today!
All care for chronic pain must see the body as a whole; physically, emotionally, spiritually and in all other ways. Instead of avoiding situations that might be painful, the idea of progressive relaxation and allowing one to feel the negative emotion in a safe environment allows the body to better communication. This can be a very useful tool in eventually overcoming pain.
If you are dealing with fibromyalgia or another chronic pain condition and have experienced trauma, know that you’re not alone! You can find relief and move forward from this – asking for help is the first step.
