Pain to Power
Pain speaks a language most try to silence. I learned to listen. To study. To understand. Now I teach others how to translate their pain into power.
SURVIVING CHRONIC PAIN
Chronic neuropathic pain is an insidious adversary; one that slowly eats at your very essence from the inside. It burrows deep and far beyond our reach. This pain screams the loudest yet is the furthest away from us. It deceives us into prioritizing its relief, but dominates our lives from a far away place. In my quest to understand arachnoiditis, I have learned about:
- Building resilience
- The nature of chronic pain
- The complexity of its interactions with our physiology
- Its effects on the victim's psychology
- The necessary support systems for patients
THE NATURE OF PAIN
Chronic pain is pain that persists for 3 months or longer, beyond the usual healing time for an injury or illness. Unlike acute pain which serves as a warning signal, chronic pain can become a condition in itself. It can affect any part of the body and may be constant or come and go.
Symptoms:
People with chronic pain often experience symptoms beyond just physical discomfort - it can affect sleep, mood, energy levels, and daily activities. The pain can be caused by ongoing conditions like arthritis, nerve damage, fibromyalgia, or back problems, though sometimes the original cause isn't clear.
My own experiences:
- The weight of the pain is suffocating, like carrying an invisible boulder that crushes your strength and will.
- Some days, it's a dull, relentless ache; other days, it feels like lightning bolts tearing through my body.
- It's not just pain—it's a thief that steals your mobility, your sleep, and all too often, your hope.
- Living with arachnoiditis is like being trapped in a body that has turned against you, every nerve screaming betrayal.
Effects:
The effects of chronic pain cannot be overstated: anxiety, depression, complete despair, hopelessness from agonizing, unrelenting pain, inability to maintain stable relationships, severely restricted or loss of ability to work, loss of memory function, loss of purpose, complete isolation in one's experience.
SOLUTIONS
We must reconceptualize this pain. It's chronic pain that feels acute. Acute pain demands immediate withdrawal from the source of discomfort; this approach does not work with chronic pain. We must take the opposite stance with chronic pain; confront the pain. We must understand it, study it. Your pain is unique to you alone. It's a part of your experience, unpleasant as it might be. Only you can truly understand the depths of your pain.
"My motivation was to understand the source of my anguish. If this spiteful disease is to take so much from me, I demand to know what it is to me, and to understand it; I'm stuck with it after all."
Understanding Boundaries
- I've developed a range of powerful breathing, mental and physical therapies to specifically address chronic neuropathic pain, using the body's healing modalities.
- There is no cure for Arachnoiditis, so we must go to extraordinary places to find extraordinary solutions to extraordinary challenges.
- The chronic neural inflammation caused by Arachnoiditis and related conditions is the source of our agony.
- We must create and maintain private, protected spaces to allow the body to rest. Peace is critical.
- These breathing, mindfulness, and other more advanced methods like somatic release rely on you to support the process by allowing time and space, nutrition, exercise, stress management, and maintaining strict boundaries.
- Maintaining boundaries is not just a mental exercise; we will explore gentle breathing exercises that enhance your sense of space and awareness.
Understanding Tension and Trauma
- Chronic pain is more complex than it appears.
- The extreme pain leads to compensation patterns, which cascade as more compensation patterns develop as a consequence of previous ones.
- We end up engulfed in a mangled web of tension patterns, each pulling in different directions, interwoven and extremely difficult to unpack.
- These tension patterns burrow deep into your muscle tissue and internal organs.
- Our battle is to dissolve the adhesions which hold the tensions patterns in place, but to do so without causing inflammation to the nervous system.
- The nature of these patterns is that you cannot feel them until they release, so the process is a constant journey of self-discovery; discovering what was, now that it's let go.
The Unwinding
- As discussed earlier, this pain is rooted very deep, yet its screams deceive us into believing it's just beneath the surface; so we're constantly chasing relief, but relief is far from us.
- We must instead focus on unwinding the tensions over time; not just in the painful region, but everywhere.
- We must face ALL of our demons first; the process of clearing these tension patterns releases vast amounts of energy the body is holding on to, and thus creates space for us to move and breathe; a space to maneuver when fangs of pain clench tightly.
- This is the resilience we seek, and we need to gather our strength before venturing into Hades itself. I am not there yet, but I can guide you to gain some relief.
- I have attempted many ideas in pursuit of relief from the unrelenting pain, and collated an intersection of the safest, most accessible and effective methods.
- I understand those of us seeking relief from such intense pain are extremely vulnerable, so these are structured with this in mind. Even those of us who are paralyzed/immobile on top of debilitating pain may gain some relief...you only have to breathe.
The Road Ahead
- These methods increase body awareness; your sense of your own bodily functions and sensations, thereby making you more sensitive to your surroundings and more in tune with what's happening inside you.
- This empowers you to notice and reject negative influences, become more sensitive to your body's needs, and provide for those needs.
- Our needs are different from those without chronic pain; we must adapt to those needs. We must learn to listen to the body, for it to tell us what those needs are. Providing for those needs builds resilience; the strength to keep going despite the pain.
- These have made an immeasurable difference in my quality of life.