The Purpose of Pain

Think out of the box for a moment with me. What if the symptoms you have: headaches, neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, or whatever else you want to add to the list, exist to serve a purpose? What if the only reason your symptoms are there are for you to learn something from? Radical?

Track with me. Think of pain in emotional terms, like the symptom you have has a specific emotional state associated with it. It means something.

How does your headache make you feel? Does it make you feel sad? Abandoned? Does it make you feel like you cant think straight anymore? Like you cant bear that one thought anymore? Like you cant think about that one thing any longer? Does it make you feel weary?

Now, lets say you answered those questions and came up with a reasonable answer. You say: Well, yeas, I do believe my headaches began when I was in grade school when my mother scolded me for being late for school every day. And now, every day just before I leave for work I get a headache that begins on the left side of my head, and I can remember I used to hold my hand up to my ear so I didnt want to hear my mom yell at me. Its the same place on my head. So, Dr Lind, if I would get to work on time there might be a chance that my headaches would subside?

No, Im not saying that exactly. Im saying that if you begin to look at your symptoms emotionally, like your body is trying to say something to you, you might begin to unravel some of the problems you have today.

Whoa, thats looking at your pain and physical problems differently.

Great, lets go deeper.

Now, let me ask you: why did your mom have to yell at you every day? You were just going to school, right? No big deal. Whats the problem? Well, the yelling for being late for school never made sense to your brain. So your brain said to itself: Im going to store this right now as a headache because I dont understand this yelling thing. And someday I hope that you (you) deal with trying to understand it but until then Im going to give you headaches as a way for me to deal with it and for you as a reminder until you deal with it.

So you have headaches every day and never bothered to ask yourself why.

Right now, what do your headaches made you feel? Ill answer for you and Ill say, weary; they make you feel weary. And if you asked yourself when you were a kid when your mom first began yelling at you, you would have said weary then, also. I would have explained it like this:

You were late because you liked to sleep and you felt good sleeping and sleeping was more rewarding to you than being late and getting yelled at. You were still tired, weary, but being weary and sleeping was more rewarding to you than getting yelled at for being late.

Do your headaches make you weary (or what exactly is the emotion?).

Now, lets go deeper still. If you stop the purpose of the headache like medicating it, without dealing with its cause, wouldnt it be reasonable that your amazing brain would find another pain or symptom? Your brain wants you to deal with your emotions but yet it doesnt want to go through the emotional pain while working on it. It would like you to make some sort of sense out of an emotion that never made sense and do it in a way that is non-traumatic again.

So your brain gives you a pain syndrome.

Now, what if you would take the pain and deal with it like an active emotion? Talk to it and say: Hey head pain, you make me feel weary. Im going to stop feeling weary if you let my head pain alone. Dont do this pain anymore. And Ill do everything I can to stop feeling weary. Im going to arrive at all my appointments early, in fact Im going to be so punctual that Im going to become happy-early, a new character Im going to develop for myself. And while Im busy doing that, were both going to changeyou, the head pain, and me the late, weary person.

Try this for a month and see what happens. Im willing to bet it will change your life.

Dr Peter Lind is a practicing chiropractor utilizing newly developed procedures and protocols to remove the affects of stress on the body. He continues helping hundreds of people on his website http://www.stress-less-living.com

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