Are You Constantly Pre-empting Pain Even When It’s Not There? How To Break Pre-emption Loops To Heal Chronic Pain
Are you micromanaging your life to avoid the onset of pain?
A typical complaint of many of my clients is that they find themselves pre-empting pain, even when it’s not around. Spending your day either in pain, or pre-empting the onset of pain, can create endless loops of fear, worry, frustration and hopelessness.
I call the constant pre-emption of pain ‘pre-emption’ loops, the mental merry go rounds of fear trying to predict the onset of pain. Pre-emption loops can happen at any time during the day, at work, before bed, on the weekend etc
By overly focusing on these loops your body's stress response kicks in, which puts the autonomic nervous system on high alert. With the autonomic nervous system on high alert, otherwise known as fight or flight, you inadvertently prolong your pain.
Breaking pre-emption loops will go a long way to healing your chronic pain, as you no longer put the autonomic nervous system on high alert.
So how do you break pre-emption loops?
There are two simple steps to breaking pre-emption loops:
Believe that your pain is emotionally induced not a physical problem
This first step is very important, if you’re new to this community I urge you to read John Sarno’s books and to understand the very real existence of TMS. TMS stands for Tension Myositis Syndrome, a discovery Dr Sarno made when seeing no correlation between his back pain patients and their structural issues.
The correlation that Dr Sarno did see was that all of his back pain patients had very similar personality traits, had been living a stressful life or had never resolved stress from the past. As soon as he was able to identify a patient's personality traits and help them to resolve stress, their back pain would go away. For a full understanding of TMS, visit this link.
And TMS didn’t stop at back pain, digestive issues, bodily pain, migraines, allergies, fibromyalgia and many more conditions were also healed with this work. For a full list of TMS conditions, visit this link.
Since Dr Sarno pain science has come a long way, now there are many books, podcasts, practitioners and courses helping people recognise TMS. It’s an empowering process which has helped 1000s of patients to heal their pain, simply by understanding that they’re not making their pain up but it’s more of an emotional rather than a physical issue.
Once you begin to realise that you have TMS, the next step is how to acknowledge and express the arising emotions
2. Cultivate tools to acknowledge and allow a healthy expression of emotions
Through an understanding of TMS, you begin to realise that pain arises to distract you from emotions that at some point you decided were unacceptable to feel. Whether it’s resentment, shame, anger, guilt, sadness or fear, all adults have decided that some emotions are acceptable to feel and some are unacceptable.
If you’ve suffered with pain for a while, chances are you aren’t sure which emotions are arising and what to do with them if you do recognise them. Fortunately there are many tools to enable you to acknowledge and express emotions. In my experience, the best tools are:
Mindfulness Meditation: specifically focused on labelling emotions as they arise
Journaling
Men or women’s circles or support groups
One on one mentorship
Creative outlets or hobbies with like minded people
When we start this process, the first most apparent emotion is our feelings towards the pain. Ask yourself right now:
How do you feel towards your pain?
Are you fearful? Angry? Sad?
And how do you feel about your fear, anger or sadness?
Are you happy to feel these emotions, or are they too uncomfortable to feel?
You may not immediately have the answers to all of these questions, but through this process you begin to recognise more and more emotions, and what those emotions need from you.
Breaking pre-emption loops is not a linear process, it’s something which takes time, practice, support and dedication.
Over time you end up realising that your pain is emotionally induced, and you cultivate tools to recognise and express those emotions. Both of which are incredibly powerful ways to live your life, as you no longer rely on dr google or endless doctors appointments when you have pain.
Most importantly you get your life back, free from pain.
If you’d like to know more about which areas of your life you need care, take my FREE Mindbody Quiz,
or
I offer a complimentary consultation with me to discuss the steps you would need to take to heal your pain.