Stress, Hidden Stress, and Chronic Physical and Emotional Pain

Moments of psychological breakthrough can be accompanied by euphoric feelings and a sense of everything coming together to take life to a higher level. They can be the result of a deliberate campaign of improvement or can come suddenly and unexpectedly. Just as they can be euphoric in nature, so they just as well may be accompanied by more mixed feelings – maybe the feeling of relief at having discovered the root of a niggling discomfort, mixed with the realisation of the difficulty of what has been revealed – more of an ‘Oh,’ feeling.

It was at such a moment of mixed feelings, working with a therapist and successfully reducing the anxiety levels I was experiencing at that time to a manageable level, that I had a sudden and swift flare up of chronic physical pain, which, in turn, dragged my anxiety level back up with it. The therapist was deflated as the success of her anxiety therapy had just gone into reverse. She suggested I go into therapy for chronic pain with a chronic pain specialist instead. It was an ‘Oh,’ moment for me, and, not wanting to ping-pong between anxiety and pain therapy with neither problem being resolved and both problems reinforcing each other, I began researching connections between anxiety and chronic pain, convinced that there must be therapies available somewhere which addressed both physical and emotional pain and treated both as caused by a common root.

Of course, once you scratch the surface nowadays, and type into a search engine, you soon start to find a whole world of whatever it is you are looking for (or sometimes a disconcerting void, seeming to block your path). In fact, it can be quite bewildering and confusing to find how many variants of what you are looking for there are, all trying to grab your attention with similar, if contrasting, solutions.

I needed a focus, something to bring together the diverse elements of this wide world of diverse opportunities which appeared after a few attempts of typing different wordings into the search engine in order to turn the initial void I found into a world full of opportunities. A few searches in I came across the app, ‘Curable’, which turned out to be, on using its free try-out, then, as a result, buying into it, a really great resource for trying out a whole range of different therapies which address this connection between physical and emotional pain, and, as I dipped in enthusiastically, practicing from its menu of healing options, I started to find, then look for, parallels with my own healing practices of hypnotherapy and mindfulness; parallels which might also help me realign my own practices so they could also address diverse kinds of pain in this particular joined up way.

Which brings me onto stress. The mind and body’s reactions to stress are not always straightforward. Parts of the mind which are supposed to work together in harmony can, under stress, come into conflict and produce unexpected and uncomfortable results in mind and body. Then, sometimes the stress hangs around, especially if there’s no way of expressing, understanding and resolving it. It can become a forgotten presence in the background, causing havoc in the mind and body. You can even not only forget it’s there but also forget how it got there. The mind and body do their best to draw our attention to these stresses – they present us with pain, anxiety, panic, fatigue and disrupted digestion and sleep – but we often misinterpret these messages as meaning something completely different – not stress, but something structurally amiss with the body or mind. Many is the time I’ve been to the doctors, they’ve found nothing structurally wrong but sent me away with anti-inflammatories or another course of strengthening physiotherapy. On go the support bandages and I start another new exercise regime.

More recently, with practice and training, I liked to sooth myself with self-hypnosis, mindfulness meditation and exercises using breath and body awareness. The app, Curable, inspired me to start finding ways to refocus these techniques into healing the underlying causes of chronic pain, emotional and physical, and I started to put together my own healing response to what I was learning about stress-induced emotional and physical pain. I’ll share more about this as I add more blogs to this page on my website – relaxandflowhypnotherapy.co.uk – and in my emails, printed materials and sound recordings. I started to see professional trainings I had received in a new light, with new enthusiasm for possibilities in them I had not previously realised and I re-orientated my own training towards this new field.

Thinking of time – it is astonishing how different response times can be to treatment. Some people need only uncover a hidden stress in just one therapy session and find long term relief from their symptoms. For others, it can take years. Yet this does not have to be disheartening. For the most important thing is to be on the healing path, secure in the knowledge that you are moving in a positive direction and with all the healing tools you need in place. Maybe your stress is deeper, more hidden and takes more work to express, accept and release. Think how much strength, flexibility, resourcefulness and resilience such a journey has given you.

If we can get meaning and fulfilment from the journey, not only from the destination, think how much more fulfilment in life is possible.

Being in Control of Your Healing Journey

It can be really empowering to be in control of your own healing, to have the special techniques in place to help you to uncover and resolve hidden stresses in order to relieve pain, so that you can live your social and work lives with much greater comfort and ease. This can be done under your own steam using resources like the Curable app and/or with individual therapist support. It is important, I think, for whichever therapist you choose to have an understanding of how both physical and emotional pain can have a common root in visible and hidden stresses and to have a focus on uncovering and resolving the stresses as a key component of resolving and healing the physical and emotional pain. In this way, current difficulties and blocks to living the life you want can be gently dissolved.

Being in control of your own healing can be an important component of self-care. Very often stress is experienced because of a lack of care and kindness in parts of our lives. Maybe we have an unsympathetic boss who piles on too much work or a family member or friend who demands more of our time and energy than we truly have available. In these and many other cases, finding and practising compassion for yourself, while putting boundaries in place for your own wellbeing, can begin to empower you and give you the kindness, compassion and soothing you need for yourself to help you begin to heal.

Self-Therapy for Chronic Emotional and Physical Pain or Support from a Therapist

If a therapist offers you a free session before you choose whether to begin your therapy with them, this can be a perfect opportunity to talk through your difficulties with chronic physical and/or emotional pain and what you are hoping to achieve on your healing journey. It can be an opportunity to find out what different techniques and exercises might be a good fit for what you want to achieve. And if there is a good fit between what the therapist offers and what you want, it could be a good opportunity to take this therapeutic relationship further and invest in some therapy and training with them. There is also an argument for using one-to-one therapy as a way of working with the difficult to uncover and express emotions which can start to be uncovered using self-therapy, whether following exercises in a book or on the Curable app. It can be hard to work with these powerful emotions on your own and a therapist can provide a safe space for you to express these strong feelings in a more manageable way than can sometimes be achieved alone. Very often in this healing work, there are whole areas of life which we have put on hold or which we avoid because they have become too painful either physically or emotionally. It can be hard to re-integrate these areas back into our lives because in our pain we have become so fearful of them that when we try to do activities in these areas our minds and bodies can react with sudden pain, panic or extreme anxiety. This is our mind and body’s way of trying to protect us from what they feel is dangerous. Although doing the work of soothing our nervous systems while slowly reintegrating feared activities into our lives can be done on our own, sometimes it is useful to have a therapist to support us on this journey, especially when the anxiety and pain we feel when we try to reintegrate a particular activity is intense and frightening.

It can be really frustrating living with these chronic pain difficulties. There can be so much in life that you feel you are missing out on and you can feel stuck in situations which feel very limiting because of the boundaries of pain which seem to wall you in. You can feel shut off from the resources of life, feeling unable to access them through the limitations your symptoms give you. All pain is real. All pain is generated in the mind whether it is a response to structural damage in the body or to stresses in your life, sometimes hidden from view. Whereas pain caused by structural damage can usually be resolved as the body heals, it can be harder to resolve physical and emotional pain caused by stresses, as often you can be unaware of the stresses or of their origins. It can take years of seeing different specialists, following physiotherapy and diet regimes, finding some relief but not enough to really impact on your life, before you start to discover that there is a deeper cause for your pain and begin to uncover and resolve it. How ever long this has taken, you can take your first steps on the healing pathway and know how much strength and resilience the difficulty of your life journey up to now has given you and how useful this will be in giving you the courage and motivation to stay on the healing pathway and really appreciate and benefit from every step of the journey.

I hope you have found this piece of writing useful. If it resonates with you and you want to ask any questions, please get in contact through my website.