To Fix Or To Feel

We live in a culture that leads us to believe that all problems should be able to be fixed. Especially medical problems! We are taught that pills, surgeries, injections and even physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture and others should be able to heal our ailments. But what happens when we’ve tried these things and we are still left in pain? Depending on a person’s health insurance and dispensable income, they can continue the long and expensive search for relief. Any number of practitioners will offer the promise of healing with their various remedies. This is just as true for our emotional pain as it is for our physical ailments.

 Unfortunately, various levels of pain, physical and emotional, are a fact of life. The constant focus of eliminating pain can also increase a person’s fear and anxiety about it. The medical community, interested in addressing chronic/persistent pain, has gathered significant new evidence over the past 10-15+ years since the development of fMRI. (Functional MRI’s are currently used primarily for research, are not readily available, and can be very costly). These scans are confirming what mindbody practitioners have always known; that a person’s emotions are inseparable from their pain experience. We now know, without a doubt, that the area of a person’s brain that is responsible for processing pain is the same region that is processing emotions: past, present and future. Unfortunately, the medical establishment is not designed to be able to take the necessary time or offer appropriate financial reimbursement to practitioners for considering a person’s whole life and how it is influencing their health.

 So while a person is doing everything to fix and get rid of their physical pain, their brain may be becoming more and more stressed if the pain is not relieved. Because the pain is being processed through the emotional brain centers, the pain may also be triggering memories of past physical and/or emotional challenges including trauma. Since one of the brain’s primary roles is your safety and survival, it may very well misinterpret your physical pain as more of a threat than your healthcare practitioners are trained or have time to acknowledge. As the pain continues, your brain may find ways to produce even more pain through a complex cascade of chemicals and neuronal messages, in a mis-guided effort to keep you safe. 

 Of course, no one wants to feel their pain. However, there is an increasing body of evidence that shows that by guiding people to recognize and acknowledge their emotional response to on-going pain symptoms, they can be taught to work with these emotions and thus help bring their pain levels down, and even resolve them. On-going pain can trigger fear, frustration, anger, anxiety, helplessness, and countless other emotions. It may also trigger conscious and unconscious memories of past stressful/traumatic life events. Then, in what seems to be a never-ending cycle, the emotions can exacerbate the pain – which increases the emotional distress, etc… 

There are a variety of emerging approaches, mostly used by counselors in the field of somatic therapy. Soma = body, and somatic therapy is a way of connecting one’s thoughts and emotions with how they are felt in the body. I have also discovered that many people can’t just think their stressful thoughts away. Although there are numerous techniques that can be helpful such as learning positive thinking and affirmations, or mindfulness to learn to observe stressful thoughts, when a person is truly stuck in their pain experience, learning to fully listen to how the emotional energy is showing up as a sensation in the body can be a useful step to more emotional and physical relief.

"To every emotional state corresponds a personal conditioned pattern of muscular contraction without which it has no existence." --Moshe Feldenkrais

One technique to learn to feel and listen to these sensations in the body is called Focusing.  Although focusing is often done with a guide or a partner, it is possible to learn to feel and listen to yourself. The challenge is similar to the difficulty one is having with physical pain – when fear, anxiety and other difficult emotions are showing up, we often just want to avoid and get rid of them. Many people get busy or distracted with life in order to avoid these feelings. Often they will increase in their intensity until one can’t ignore them further. Unfortunately, the medical community is all too quick to prescribe medications to dull the brain, rather than helping people uncover the underlying issues. To be fair, most people are so busy in their lives that if they can get, what on the surface, seems like a quick-fix, that also seems simpler than taking the time to learn how to listen and hopefully, truly heal.

A wonderful focusing resource is Ann Weiser-Cornell:  https://focusingresources.com/

Not only does she have excellent resources on her website, but she also has a YouTube video that explains the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwzdkKARWrw

Another resource I’ve discovered is: https://www.livingfocusing.co.uk/

The basic steps include:

1.      Learning to feel “something in me” as a part of you, rather than encompassing all of you. This is probably the most important first step in learning to feel and recognize the sensations of emotions. It may take days or weeks to learn to notice when you are experiencing an emotion, positive or negative, and to remember to pause and notice. Once you’ve remembered to pause, then you simply ask yourself, “Where or how am I feeling this emotion in my body?” Initially, it may be easier to feel positive emotional experiences than the ones that are deemed “negative”.

When a person feels like their whole being is consumed by an emotion, it can be overwhelming and people instinctually want to just get away from it. Since most people have not been taught how to actually “feel” their emotions, they may be experiencing something unpleasant without even knowing it, let alone that there is a corresponding physical feeling or sensation related to it. They unconsciously want to get rid of their discomfort which may be labeled as anxiety, depression, etc.  As they learn to listen to the “part” that is experiencing this emotion, they are also learning that the rest of their whole-self is available to listen and take care of the “part.” This can take some time to separate the part that is “feeling” and the rest of you that can listen to and provide compassion for whatever is showing up. This feeling is different from where a person is experiencing pain. This is about listening to where the energy of emotions live in the body. Usually, but not always, the sensation will be somewhere in the trunk: the throat, chest, stomach or abdomen.

As you learn to separate the part of you that is feeling and experiencing the emotional energy in your body, you are also developing the larger part of yourself that is learning to offer self-compassion to the emotional “part”. This is one of the keys in helping emotions not feel so overwhelming.

The rest is a brief summary of the other steps in the Focusing process. I encourage you to read and listen to the information I provided above, and then make a personal commitment to learn to listen and shift how your emotional energy is impacting your life and your physical pain.

2.      Learning to say “hello” to that part: A person’s emotional life is not used to being listened to and cared for. When you initially start to feel and listen, those parts may actually be shy and not feel safe being seen or heard. This can take time and patience.

3.      Placing a gentle hand on it: This is not always required, but can be a caring way to feel and listen to those parts of you.

4.      “I am sensing”: Learning to describe what you are sensing. Sensations can be felt and described with size, shape, density, color, movement, and so on. It requires a willingness to let go of your objective-thinking mind and allow your creative mind to just trust what you are feeling and describe it. If you are practicing alone, writing it down can be helpful.

5.      Asking what “it” would like you to know from “it’s” point of view. This can get a bit challenging. The thinking mind often wants to get involved to fix it and make it all better. But the juice is in just letting yourself feel, listen and care for these emotions without needing them to be fixed and banished. 

6.      “No Wonder”. Once you start listening to what this emotional part of you has to say, you will realize that from “its” point of view, the emotional experience makes sense. Then you can truly care for that part of you that is hurting. 

Of course, there’s so much more in learning to reconnect your mindbody for healing. But any start you can make through reading, finding a counselor who does more than just talk-therapy and knows how to guide you into uncovering and experiencing your emotions, AND understands how they may be influencing your body-pain, may start to bring renewed relief where none or little was found in the traditional mechanical approaches. This doesn’t mean to give up on trying the “fixes” that are out there, however, when you understand the undeniable inter-connectivity of your wholeness, it will allow you to recognize that there are parts of you that may be getting neglected on your healing journey.

Wishing you wholeness!

Allison Suran, PT, GCFP, TPS

Therapeutic Pain Specialist

Healing Bridge Physical Therapy

PS: Another excellent process used by trained professionals is called Somatic Experiencing. There are, of course, others, but these are the two that I am familiar with.