Pain Talk

Humans relate.  We relate to the world and each other, mostly through speech.  Chronic pain recovery is a result of changing our relation to pain.  Often our speech is a main way we learn to relate to pain differently.  How we talk to our pain can have a big impact on its intensity and duration. 

Pain also talks. Through much of this work I have learned that neuroplastic pain is the brain’s way of speaking.  The primitive brain – the seat of emotions and the subconscious – uses pain to signal to our conscious mind.  Pain is an opening, an opportunity to change patterns of relation that keep the brain stuck in fear. In this sense pain is a direct path to healing.  And one way to do this is by noticing the words we use in response to our pain, and where necessary, changing those words.   

All too often I hear people uttering harsh words toward their pain, like a drill sergeant would command an unruly subordinate.  Sometimes people are downright mean to their pain, saying any number of hair curling things.  At other times people respond to pain as if pain is the drill sergeant commanding them into submission.  Sometimes there is a response of fatigue, a pleading for the pain to just go away, for it to quit being so mean and relentless. 

Somewhere between these two extremes – of subordinating the pain or being its subordinate – a healthier relationship to pain can blossom.  And it begins with a small dose of self-assertion: that the pain is a part of oneself, and your response to that part can either increase an overall sense of safety or not. 

I often remind myself that when pain occurs, I have an opportunity to speak to that part of myself.  That suffering part.  That part that hopes to be heard even if it is screaming.  I can treat the pain not as a subordinate, and I need not treat myself as subordinate to it.  In truth, we are with our pain.  And when we are with our pain as a trusted friend, or a comforter, or an attentive parent, or an assertive though kind companion, we lay new neural pathways that train a sense of safety rather than fear.  And that kind of pain-talk can make a world of difference.