An Overview of Chronic Pain: How it Originates and What You Can Do to Heal

Chronic pain can affect everyone and can come in many forms. Usually, pain is described as chronic when it has lasted over three months without any apparent reason. 

In my practice, I often receive clients dealing with different forms of chronic pain. Sometimes, pain started from a very concrete cause, such as an injury (a car accident, falling down the stairs, or twisting your ankle). Most often, however, the pain seems not to be linkable to any physical traumas. Perhaps the pain simply starts during a highly challenging and stressful time. Or it begins right after a crisis in marriage, being fired at work, or feeling overwhelmed with duties and responsibilities. Interestingly, some people notice that the pain persists even after recovering from an injury. This is often a cause of stress and concerns, which might make you wonder if you actually healed or perhaps something will stay “broken” forever. You need to know chronic pain often lacks explanations from standard medical tests and exams. On paper, everything looks good. However, you might experience a wide variety of symptoms that affect not only your body but all your life areas.

What is chronic pain, and how does it develop

For starters, chronic pain is not always very simple to explain. While acute pain (that can come from a physical injury, infection, burn, etc.) is generally concentrated on one area and is easy to point out, chronic pain might be broader, affecting multiple areas and symptoms, leaving you feeling low, exhausted or overwhelmed. In this case, medications might not help, nor other treatments that work for most acute pain cases. You might start questioning yourself, “Why am I still feeling all this?!” And doctors might tell you that there is no structural reason for you to still be in pain. Yet, you know the pain you're experiencing is very real.

If we had to point out when a certain predisposition to chronic pain begins, we should go back to our childhood. Yes, your childhood! In fact, when we’re young, the brain can literally learn how to set the stage for dealing with complex emotions, and if done incorrectly, it can very well impair how we cope with stress and adverse events as adults. 

If you went back to childhood with your mind for a minute, could you point out a physical or emotional experience that made you feel unsafe? What happened? Can you stay there, virtually, for a minute, and give that earlier version of yourself some compassion?

Traumatic experiences and coping mechanisms

Usually, when we’re faced with challenging moments as kids, we seek coping mechanisms that seem like the best route in that instance. We might try to withdraw, we might seek comfort in food or biting our nails, or we might seek the attention of parental figures. Some kids, for example, learn they “should always be perfect” to avoid being scolded. Of course, this might not have been the intention of their parents; however, this quickly becomes the kid’s new reality. This is a classic example of a coping mechanism, often resulting in perfectionism and people-pleasing tendencies. While some of these mechanisms are very closely related to behavioural changes, others might affect posture and the way we use our bodies. Growing up, we might not realise we have fallen into specific behavioural patterns until they become increasingly meddling in our lives and relationships.

At an unconscious level, these coping mechanisms are associated with a large sum of stress. The nervous system never forgets those childhood experiences, associating even the smallest of the signs with a potential life-threatening danger. In other words, growing up, it still feels like you’re living with a constant subtle tension and a certain level of vigilance that never allows you to rest and fully recover.

To add up, adult traumatic events and health experiences can further change the way we feel within our bodies and in relation to external circumstances. Going through an incident in a car might develop the extreme belief that “driving is not safe.” Thus, you might then begin to experience heart palpitations and catastrophic thoughts whenever you have to drive or simply get in a car. For very sensitive and empathetic individuals, even hearing other people’s stories might count as going through a stressful event. Let’s say your best friend is robbed while withdrawing money at a bank. While she tells you all about it, you imagine the scene as if that were you and experience deep emotions of fear and worry as if you were going through the same event. A few days later, your body might react negatively when you approach your bank to withdraw some cash. You might feel tense and worried and might find yourself overthinking about your safety and whether you should avoid withdrawing after all.

Although these were just simple examples, keep in mind that everything has the power to affect your brain and perception of reality. Of course, the more emotionally impactful the event is, the stronger the effect on your mind and body will be. Changes affecting your relationship status, the loss of a loved one, being fired at work, or being involved in abusive relationships can all influence the way you cope with stress and emotions as well as how you see yourself.

Chronic symptoms and the role of the brain

Day after day, when traumatic events add up, your nervous system ends up overworking. Perhaps a long period of stress at work led you to be constantly alert. Secondary functions of your body have been delayed for weeks and months. Your body has been functioning in fight-or-flight without a single day of a break.

After reaching this tipping point, chronic symptoms might start to arise. Some might surge in relation to past injuries or traumas. But others might come out of the blue, completely unexpected. Commonly, symptoms that are related to chronic stress involve headaches and migraines, back, neck, shoulder and joint pain, fibromyalgia, neuralgia, IBS and gut issues, chronic anxiety, and more. 

“Wait, are you saying all these symptoms are just due to stress?” In a big part, yes.

Chronic symptoms like these often arise from a combination of compounded stress, inflammation, and neural pathways that have developed to reinforce the pain cycle. Pain is like a habit. Once the brain builds a neural pattern, your thoughts, actions, and feelings can further strengthen it, turning it into a vicious cycle. In other words, the more you focus on your pain and worry about it, and the more stress you add to the mixture, the stronger that neural pathway becomes. This is what we could call the chronic pain downward spiral.

Often, as you try to avoid pain, you consciously or unconsciously begin to alter your lifestyle. You start avoiding specific movements or stop physical activity altogether. You say no to going out with friends and, without realising it, nourish your stress levels even more because you’re feeling restricted in social activities. With every adaptation you make, you keep spiralling down without even noticing. 

From knowledge to self-discovery

Here’s where you have a choice. You either keep going down the rabbit hole or dedicate some time and patience to understanding how your mind works and how you can best support its healing. For most people, it takes a while even to find the right sources of information, as few health professionals work with holistic practitioners to offer alternatives to medicines and conventional therapies.

If you’re here, chances are your healing journey has already started.

You now know how neural pathways are created. The good news is you can reverse that downward spiral by working directly with your brain and your nervous system. Knowledge is power, and so it is for your health. We can consider your prefrontal cortex to be the rational part of your brain. While stress and traumas become ingrained into the deeper layers of your mind, your logical mind can, with time, affect the unconscious. Often, the first step with clients affected by chronic pain is simply to show them how their brains work and what might be going on in their minds. Realise that pain might be simply due to old feedback loops, and you have the power to alter your neural patterns by reframing your pain experience.

In my practice, I use a mix of techniques to help patients go through these stages. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (including Emotional Awaremess and Expression Therapy), along with Feldenkrais sessions, is often the perfect mix of therapies that can help clients with chronic pain to:

1. understand how their brains work and what role they might be playing in the chronic pain experience;

2. understand the role of repressed and hidden emotions, whether from recent challenging experiences or coming all the way back from childhood;

3. release habitual stress and tension patterns (coping mechanisms you have built for self-preservation) that are feeding the pain cycle;

4. reset the nervous system, and nourish feelings of safety through the experience of connecting and being comfortable in one’s own body.

MindfulBody in Luxembourg

Our goal at MindfulBody is to help you unlearn your pain, reconnect with your body, and discover – or rediscover – the freedom of pain-free movement. To help your nervous system feel safe again, it is essential first to understand what made it feel unsafe. Both physically and mentally. This is what self-discovery is all about: not simply rummaging through your past without a goal but looking for those vital moments that can help you piece together how your brain learned to cope in an effort to keep you safe from perceived threats to untangle it and break the cycle. 

With experimentation, patience, and consistency, you can change your neural pathways and heal from chronic pain. The main goal is not only to build new ones that can support feelings of safety and self-confidence but also to help you understand how you can tweak your experience of reality in the future and stay pain-free. In other words, the more you practice self-awareness and introspection, along with movement practice, the easier it will be in the future to spot unhealthy neural patterns as they start to develop.

If you wish to have a chat, discuss any specific health concerns with me, or delve into the ways in which I could support you on your healing journey, feel free to drop me a message at iryna@mindfulbody.lu.