Healing The Emotional Component Of Chronic Pain

In 1989, an auto accident left me crippled with chronic pain. During the years it took me to recover, I learned that chronic pain always has an emotional component. For full recovery, both the physical and emotional aspects must be healed.

This concept isn't always so easy for Westerners to accept. When I was first injured, I would have thought the idea ludicrous. The source of my pain was obvious-I'd been in a serious auto accident. Case closed.

But when traditional medicine failed to help me heal, I began exploring alternative medicine. The more I read, the more I learned about the number of ways that our beliefs and ideas impact our body. I began to understand that the rage I held inside–rage against the man that recklessly caused the accident, rage against the doctors that carelessly misdiagnosed me, rage against the insurance company that closed and left me stranded–all that boiling rage was standing in the way of my recovery.

It wasn't easy to let go of that rage. After all, it was completely justified. All those people had caused me to suffer, yet they had moved on with their lives without so much as a slap on the hand. I wanted justice, and knowing there would be none left me filled with fury.

But book after book, scientific study after scientific study, told me the same story. Our brains react instantly to our thoughts and emotions, releasing millions of combinations of chemicals in instant response to everything that passes through our mind.

I knew I had to find a way to release my rage, and with much work and over time, I did. Since then, I've continued to study brain function, hypnosis and what some call emotional or energy medicine. And a couple of years ago I came across a field of energy medicine called EFT, emotional freedom technique.

EFT is a way of tapping into and resolving painful emotions by tapping on your body. It's one of the first techniques I turn to when I need physical or emotional help. I consider it my first aid kit. But a few weeks ago, even though I needed help badly, I seemed helpless to help myself.

I was getting ready to go to a 4-day seminar on internet marketing when I slipped and twisted my knee. Nothing seemed broken or torn, so I wasn't overly concerned. And I knew, from years of physical therapy, how to care for it.

But after the first day of the seminar, I was a wreck. To walk, I was shifting all my weight to the right, to protect my left knee. Doing that put my spine out of whack, and I now had a nagging backache as well as a throbbing knee. I knew I'd better start using a cane to keep me standing straight while my knee healed. So that night, on the way home from the seminar, I stopped at a drug store and bought a spiffy blue cane with a comfortable handle.

I instantly felt more comfortable walking, but as I left the drug store, something came trailing behind me. It was a swarm of negative emotions and fears that followed me home, settling on me like little black flies, biting and pinching me. I tried to brush them away, but as I fell asleep, they invaded my dreams. I got little rest that night.

The next day, I walked into the seminar with my cane and was again overwhelmed with painful emotions. Everything I'd been though in the past came alive again. I vividly remembered using first a walker, and later a cane. I remembered people making unkind remarks and ridiculous assumptions when I was slow crossing a street or moving through the grocery store. And the more I remembered, the more my knee throbbed and the worse I felt.

I didn't make it through the last day of the seminar. And all the next week I was so worn out from pain I could barely get my work done. Mail and housework piled up, making me feel more stressed, more afraid, more angry at myself for not taking control of the situation and doing—- well, doing what? My knee needed time to heal. Wasn't I using a knee brace, a cane, exercise and infrared heat? 

Wasn't I doing everything I could? I was not. And I knew it. I purposely wasn't using EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique, to resolve the leftover feelings that damn cane had awakened. Worse, I didn't know why I wasn't using EFT. Some part of me seemed stubbornly resolved to stay in turmoil.

I've seen this in other people, this digging in and accepting pain without doing everything we can to resolve it. I don't know where it comes from or why we do it. I just know it's common.

I knew I had to motivate myself to move forward. But it took me a few days to come up with enough motivation just to motivate myself! To do that, I used a technique I learned in NLP (nuerolinguistic programming). I made a list of things I badly wanted to do, things I would not be able to do if I didn't get out of the unresouceful state of mind I was in.

When the pain of potentially missing out on those events became greater than the pain of making myself take action….I took action. I started using EFT to tap into my emotions and resolve them.

I'd clearly been shown there was a lot of leftover fear and anger from that auto accident that needed to be put to rest. There were lots of new fears, too, fears about the economy, about growing older and declining, as well as lingering grief from the death of my dearest friend last November.

I'm still working my way through some of those issues. My knee is getting better. And I have a better understanding of how deeply our emotions stay buried, not just in our minds but in our bones and muscles and nerves.

There are many ways of resolving emotional pain. I have used EFT effectively, as well as hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming. There are also techniques like Reiki or Rolfing or massage therapy that release emotional pain though physical work. And when the right person is available, therapy with a psychologist or mental health counselor can be a blessing.

The challenge is not to find a method of healing emotions-there are many– but simply to motivate yourself to take a step emotional healing. Don't be afraid to try a technique, or as I did, many techniques. Unlike surgery or drugs, no harm can come from these gentle forms of therapy. When one is right for you, you will feel it. And feel, too, how much physical pain is lifted when emotional pain is released.

### Bonnie Boots publishes Pain Health News to provide news, information and motivation to people living with pain.  You can stay in touch with her by adding your email address to the subscribe form located in the upper right corner. For an eye-opening look at EFT, read this very interesting article  at  Emofree about demonstrating EFT to a group of doctors, and how it was used on stage for pain from a broken wrist. or this one–Did Karen’s physical scars disappear as she did EFT on her emotional scars?

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