My adventures in healing neuroplastic pain

On By Elizabeth TaiIn Journal

For months, I suffered from relentless hip pain and lower back pain. My hip joints feel as if there was sand in it. I couldn’t turn without pain. I couldn’t walk without pain. Eventually, I couldn’t even sit or lie down without pain.

I started attending physical therapy sessions. Binged on physiotherapy videos and went all out to stretch my heart out. But nothing seemed to make a big difference.

The most infuriating thing about the pain is that it would come and go, sometimes doubling in intensity at night.

It also seemed to defy logic. The pain, although mainly focused on my left hip, would suddenly disappear and shift to the right side.

Some days, I’ll be totally pain free. So much so that my physiotherapist commented that he often saw patients who had pain during working days but be pain free during weekends!

I told myself that maybe I was pain-free during non-working days because I wasn’t sitting as much and was more mobile.

But each time I enjoyed a pain-free day, the pain would return with a vengeance the next day. I had no idea what set it off sometimes.

Things got so bad that I ended up not being able to sleep because I was in constant pain in my hips and lower back. I couldn’t walk, sit or stand. My sleep came in hourly snatches. It was an utterly miserable way to be.

Then, one night, I got so desperate and being a religious person, prayed/cried to God for help. I was led to a video by a lady called Chris Saenz who shared her experience healing from back pain after reading Dr. Sarno’s book, “Healing Back Pain”

This is when I remembered that I read that book years ago. I learned about Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) and how holding back all that emotional pain inside of me was backfiring in a big way.

Basically, Dr. Sarno believes that during times of stress, the brain or our unconscious minds limits oxygen to certain parts of the body to help us cope with the emotional distress. The brain believes that it is helping you survive by “distracting” you with pain, because facing the emotional pain was far more dangerous.

Or so goes the theory.

I realised with a start that my current bout with back and hip pain came at the heels of a few major stresses in my life. One of which I explicitly told myself: “I won’t even write this down in a journal. I won’t talk about this to anyone. Because doing this would mean it is real.”

In this video, I talk about the surprising results I got by following some of the principles in this book.

My pain fell by 70% just by acknowledging (with much tears) one stressful issue that I had refused to think about for months.

It felt almost magical. And pretty much incomprehensible.

But I was not completely healed.

The next few days, disappointingly, and almost as if to spite my optimism in the video, my pain flared up to such an extent that I couldn’t sleep for days. On some nights I was reduced to tears of frustration.

I found the videos from the TMS community overwhelming. Many seem obsessed about the methods to heal. Should you journal every single emotional insult that you’ve felt in your life? Some say yes. Should you meditate? Should you not use “crutches” like physiotherapy, stretches and medication? Lots of controversy in that department!

I’m the sort of person that can get too deep into the rabbit hole and get obsessed to the point where I will consume information about health problems 24/7. Instinctively I knew this was a route I must avoid. Thinking about pain and how to solve it all the time was making me a basket case.

Resources

The resources that finally got me centred were the following:

The approach employed by these folks were more grounded and logical. Their theory about chronic pain? The brain is the one that makes you feel pain, and sometimes it misinterprets the sensations/signals that your body is sending out and sends out pain signals to “warn you”. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is you end afraid of the pain, and the brain, alarmed by the fear that you’re sending out, raises the pain threshold further and prolongs it.

I am especially relieved that Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv believe that if your pain is at an excruciating level, you can use “crutches” or “avoidance methods” such as medication and stretching. This is because they believe that trying to grit your teeth through the pain will only ring more alarm bells in your already hyper-alarmed brain.

The key to healing from chronic pain, according to them, is to train the brain to understand that the signals that your body is sending out is nothing to be afraid of.

Do you have neuroplastic pain or not?

Of course, the first question I asked is whether I have it or not. But as I read Dr. Sarno, Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv’s work I realise how my accurately symptoms matched the characteristics of neuroplastic pain. My pain:

  • Appears only at certain times of the day or hours
  • Can disappear completely only to reappear with a vengeance later
  • Appeared during times of emotional stress
  • Shifts around my body
  • I have a history of unexplained chronic pain or ailments
  • I have a tendency to develop allergies, asthma etc.

Heck, my “pain spots” even appear at the areas where Dr. Sarno says neuroplastic pain manifests!

Bizzare results

So, I tried some of the techniques recommended.

One of the most crucial steps is to face and feel the emotional pain that you’ve been avoiding. I’m a chronic avoider of emotional distress. I refuse to journal sad things primarily because I don’t want to rehash or even think about difficult and painful moments in my life.

To compound things further, I don’t even talk about them to people because I don’t want to burden or scare people away with the intensity of my feelings.

These are some of the results:

Feeling the emotion

I literally let myself cry. Praying to God was a form of “letting out” the emotion. The first time I did it, I was alone, with God as my listener. My pain dropped 70%. I was utterly shocked by how quickly it happened. The second time I did it, I talked about a difficult situation with a friend. My pain, again, dropped by half. Astounding.

Listening to a podcast

The most puzzling thing about Dr. Sarno’s treatment was that he believed that people will be healed from “information”. There have been anecdotal accounts of people getting healed just by listening to his lectures or reading his book. This sounds like a lot of woo except that I’ve personally experienced it in the past. (Watch my Youtube video above where I tell you what happened.)

I experienced this again when, during another chronic bout of pain, I put on a Tell me about your pain podcast. In that podcast, they explained how the brain sends out pain and how it can interpret benign signals as danger. For some reason, my mind just latched on that, went “aha!” and released the pain. I was pain free for a few hours after that.

Pain attachment

The most puzzling and confounding symptom of mine is that I tend to have pain when I sleep on my mattress. You’re probably thinking, well, there’s something wrong with your mattress.

Here’s the kicker: I only get this pain at night. The moment I see the sun rise, the pain disappears and my body goes, “Oh wow, this mattress is so comfortable.”

It is absolutely bizzare.

But Alon Ziv and Alan Gordon explains that this is a very common occurrence for people who experience neuroplastic pain.

I have a bad habit of thinking about scary things at night in that bed: horrible lonely, scary thoughts about horrible futures.

I think there’s no surprise why my brain associates mattress + night = danger, so I have to stop catastrophizing about my life in my bed at night.

And think happy, calming thoughts.

Conclusion

Putting up a strong, smiling front was literally driving the stress to my bones and organs.

The lesson is that our brains are amazing and mysterious things, and we need to give it the respect it deserves. Also, I need a mindful, healthy way to cope with life’s turmoils and stresses.

Never again will I think that it’s virtuous to “not talk about my problems” or deny that they even exist.

I still have some recovery to do. It’s been about four days since I experienced that first 70% drop in pain but I’m now able to sit for long periods of time on all kinds of chairs (something impossible before). Last night I was able to sleep better in my mattress, though my hips and back did twinge a few times, and I was filled with anxiety about the pain returning. It wasn’t a perfect sleep, but it was definitely a big improvement from my one-hour spurts of sleep of the last two weeks.

I’ll update this page in the future to show you my progress. I hope that in the meantime, this page will be a good resource for those struggling with chronic pain. I hope you can find the respite that you need.

Mastodon logs

May 09, 2023

My current topic obsession is back pain – as I was enduring it for the last few months. Came across Dr. John E. Sarno’s unconventional methods of treating back pain and watched the documentary All the Rage.

His theory that back pain is caused by the mind shouldn’t be considered unconventional. If we accept that headaches & bowel problems can be caused by emotional distress, why not back pain?

May 12, 2023

The last two weeks have been a wringer for me, which is why my posting on Mastodon has dropped significantly. Chronic pain. Lovely stuff. This led me to explore Dr. John Sarno’s work, and the world of neuroplastic pain.

I tried some of the methods and I was quite shocked at how well it worked. First time, I reduced my pain by 70% by just allowing myself to be upset over an issue I was keeping buried.

Yesterday, I just listened to a podcast episode from https://www.curablehealth.com/podcast/your-pain & I was pain free for a couple of hours.

Some people have testified that this happened to them by just reading Dr Sarno’s book, Healing Back Pain. I know it sounds very woo but there’s something to this mind-body connection thing!

When I read Dr. John Sarno’s book and the book, The Way Out, I saw myself in it. The typical neuroplastic patient profile fits me to a tee. Also, this explains some of my weird chronic pain episodes throughout my life.

When I was a kid, I suddenly had really severe toothache. Went to the dentist & expected to loose a tooth only to have the puzzled Dentist say he couldn’t find anything wrong.

I was going through exam stress then.

Then there was that time when I was going through a very rough patch and my stomach just stopped digesting food. I couldn’t even take a bowl of soup without my stomach hurting.

The brain is very creative.