New research shows that emotional and physical pain draw responses from the same regions of the brain.
Read To the brain, getting burned, getting dumped feel the same, on CNN.com.
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How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists
I can speak to this article from a few different angles. As someone who’s done intensive meditation practice, I discovered firsthand how trauma is held in the tissues. As I got days into intensive practice, I’d feel burning in certain parts of my body. My teacher encouraged me to just be with the sensations instead of getting up and moving. I actually accessed some beatings and neglect I experienced and released them physically out of my body. When the anger from the beatings left, it felt like an electrical bolt going out my body. I did have to scream and yell a little, and cry a lot. I was amazed to see the very physical manifestations of trauma.
As a massage therapist who has worked with FM and had a FM training, I know that it is definitely stress-related and often triggered by stressful events. They call it a “syndrome” rather than an illness because they don’t really know what causes it. A syndrome is a collection of symptoms. With FM, the body is in a constant state of fight/flight, which is a reaction to pain. Many of my FM patients over the years had had at least on abusive relationship in their lives. Depression also gets physically keyed into the body and affects serotonin levels. I believe that when we are in dysfunctional relationships, it affects us on the physical level and can create many different diseases. This is the body’s response to internalizing stress and internalizing anger.
Stargazer,
I agree with you about fibro & trauma being held in the body.
I think my fibro had 2 causes: 2 TIAs, in 85 & 87, that screwed up my nerve wirings. AND having been married to my 3rd hb for 6yrs—the one who had psychotic episodes, & who “beat & tortured me in the finest hotels all over the world”….terrorizing me for days at a time when he’d nut out. I finally ran for my life from him for the last time in 86.
The fibro symptoms started in 88, but had gotten severe by ’90, which was when I started trying to go to doctors for it.
Anyhow, I had lots of body & energy work done, starting in about 1988…..& like you said, lots of screaming & crying, trying to release the emotional trauma. It was bizarre….people trying to work on me in an office with people in close proximity! OMG. And, yes, when the physical emotional trauma from the abuse would leave my body, it was almost like I’d go limp. It took probly several hundred sessions with different workers, but by the time I found my deep tissue massage therapist in 96, & then the neuro-chiropractor in 98, I’d released most of that emotional trauma, so they could concentrate more on my muscles & my nerve wirings, but they did continue to release even more trauma over the years.
So, yes, I totally agree with you, Stargazer.
LL, I couldn’t “afford” massage therapy either…..but I couldn’t NOT afford it…..I’ve gone without lots of other things over the years to be able to get my body work. The neuro-chiro, I was just fortunate that my mother was still alive then, & I was in such bad shape that she paid for his work for 4yrs (about $400 a month.)
Dear Yes:
Many of the FM clients I’ve had over the years didn’t have much money and were only marginally employed. They were struggling with depression and insomnia. But they responded so well to the massage therapy – any form of massage, whether deep tissue or just relaxation. Most of them could not afford my prices, so I offered it to them for deeply discounted rates and sometimes for free. Interestingly, they were the most fleeting of all my clients, rarely taking me up on my offers. It’s as if they were so beaten down by the illness they just didn’t have the motivation.
But anyway, this is why I feel talk therapy can only go so far with trauma survivors – because the traumas are held in the body. I used to have a bodyworker who had this bumpersticker: The Issues are in the Tissues.
Not all “alternative” therapies are quacks—and massage (deep tissue and otherwise) has always been effective (the “laying on of hands”) for decreasing stress related problems. I have two books science and research books right now I am reading about how ESSENTIAL TOUCH is to the human body and mind…literally… babies cannot live without it.
There are SOME nut “alternative therapies” and “theories” that like NeverAgain said…and I don’t want some kook telling me that if I will just open my mind and like that Ray guy that charged $10,000 to go through the “sweat lodge” routine (and if you survived!) you’d reach nirvana—he, by the way is on TRIAL for manslaughter for what he did to those people 3 of whom died and many got sick. Still even after this there are those who think he is some kind of farking guru!!!! There is “one born every minute” as old P. T. use’ta say! But that doesn’t mean that we should not be OPEN TO REASONABLE ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES AND THEORIES…we should be, but we should also look at the BENEFIT VERSUS RISK RATIOS of anything we do…even doing nothing has a benefit versus risk ratio.
We also need to keep in mind that there is not a Mind AND a Body, there is a mind-body and the TWO ARE ONE. If our mind is sick our bodies are sick and if our bodies are sick our mind is sick….we are a WHOLE BEING. In order to be healthy we have to work at being WHOLE.
None of us are going to beat the grim reaper in the end, we are all going to die, but how we LIVE is what is important and I think we are under an obligation to take as good care of ourselves as we can. I HAVE NOT ALWAYS DONE THAT…I smoked and I lived in CONTINUAL STRESS….and I didn’t eat right. Now I have finally decided to take care of me FIRST and to be KIND TO MYSELF. So I stopped smoking, started eating right, exercising better and keeping my life PEACEFUL and LOW STRESS.
Someone mentioned today that “boring is good” and yes, it IS GOOD if that means that there is no “excitement” here in terms of DRAMA or ADVENTURE (BTW “adventure is the result of poor planning!) LOL I’ll take “boring” and calm, and peaceful and GOOD.
During the three years the booger man was with me I lost twenty pounds, my back and hip were in constant pain, I could not think right, the hypervigilance and anxiety made me look and act like a scizoprhenic.. I was twisted into a pretzel trying to please him. He was playing cat and mouse with me, I think he was drugging me with sleeping meds, so he could stay online all nite and plan hook-ups while i was at work the next day. Anyway to make a long story short, he damn near loved me too death…I do know rejection is a horrible emotion, but he was not rejecting me. I rejected him, asked him to please find some place to go and he would say “but i love you ‘ or attempt killing himself..he lied like nothing I have ever seen…I really dont know what he was, have stopped trying to figure him out – I just know he is dangerous – demonic and angelic at the same time – ok I will shut up…
Dear Hens,
You have been sounding SANE for quite some time now, and I have no doubt that you were crazy as bat chit during the time he was there…I had a pretty good case of INSANITY myself—doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
It doesn’t work, and the only thing we can do is to get out of the cycle—NO CONTACT—until our bodies and minds can start to heal.
When we start to heal a lot of the stress responses we have had from head aches, cloudy judgment, mental and physical pain starts to go away as we start to get to a level of “normal.” We sleep better (and believe me lack of sleep is a killer!)
I realized when I was in Texas in January that I was under stress there from the time I got there until after I got home, but even though I “lost” a friendship I had treasured for over 30 years and kept going through “thick and thin” I realized that it was time to move on from that relationship. It wasn’t all bad, it just had a point that it was no longer good. I still have some wonderful memories and she was here for me the week my husband died, I can’t imagine going through that without her help, and I will always appreciate it. She was here for me too when my step dad was sick and my egg donor had surgery and I needed someone to stay with the egg donor while I was with dad and vice versa. We’ve done some fun things and some sad things together, but it is time to let that go. I could not have done so if I hadn’t healed from some of this other trauma in my life. It hurt, but not like it would have previous to this…I think we learn to deal better and more easily with the grief of loss with the practice we get dealing with the psychopaths.
Not everyone who is “not good for” us is a psychopath, but learning to deal with the tremendous losses and betrayals that the psychopaths do to us makes it so much easier to deal with an “ordinary” loss. I realize that my friend is in pain, and she is depressed, sad and needy and her way of (not) dealing with her problems is to be cranky and snarky—but that is HER PROBLEM, not mine. I can’t and I won’t make it mine. I have empathy and sympathy for her—but it will be from a distance. I won’t allow her husband to abuse me and I won’t make her problems mine.
At the time I knew he was the cause of my physical decline. Many people thought i had cancer or something worse. I had so many people tell me you look like chit ~! whats wrong? It took me awhile to regain my sanity and my weight, no chronic back pain…now I am just a senile old fart with crs – but that’s better than a bad case of exploititis…
I thot i would never recover physically but I have, I feel great, have lots of energy..the emotional toll simply changed who I am and like i have said I am trying hard to make that a good thing. still have little snipit’s of missing what he never was…
Oxy,
You are right, there are so many forms of alternative healing that WORK, and I encourage everyone here to try a few. Of course massage, acupuncture, and Reiki. I had an amazing experience the other night giving a massage. The client asked for a combination nurturing massage with energy work. She is going through a break-up and is in a lot of pain. The only energy work I do is Reiki, but it’s something I rarely ever use, and didn’t even think I would remember how. I just put my hands on her in various places and let the Reiki do its thing. When my hands got over her heart, they heated up and started tingling. Her body started shaking, and she cried. The Reiki was just going where it was needed and helping her to grieve. Afterward, she commented that she felt so much better. When she left, I was still in a “Reiki field” as my old Reiki master used to call it. So I Reiki-ed myself. And that’s when all this abandonment stuff came up and I got to process a bunch of it. Reiki is a form of energy work. There are many different kinds. I have experienced many of them. They really do work. There is even a place in my town where the students give free aura cleansings. They are extremely effective in grounding and helping to clear foreign energies. So many of us can use that if we have compromised boundaries. We become like psychic sponges, picking up and carrying around other peoples’ stuff. I encourage everyone here to try Reiki if you have never experienced it. There is a special part of it that is for emotional healing. I used it a lot when I got discarded by my selfish ex 10 years ago. I had just gotten my level II Reiki certification, and I was using it all the time back then.
Star ~ I have not heard of Reiki. Does it have to do with Eastern medicine? It does sound like a powerful practice, from what you described in your post.
It comes from Japan, but the practice has been around for a long time. In order to do Reiki, you need to get initiated by a Reiki master. Then you invoke it for healing. The energy is not personal to you, however. It is a universal energy that is sometimes compared to the Christ energy. It is just a universal energy. I don’t completely understand it. But it works. I have many stories to tell about it. Here’s one:
Shortly after my Reiki II initiation, I was sitting in massage class with my hand on my massage partner’s knee, just randomly. All of a sudden my hand heated up to a point where it was almost burning through his jeans (!). I had never experienced that before. My hands and feet tend to be cold all the time. Then my partner told me he had been suffering with a mysterious pain in that knee for some time. After the incident with my hand, his knee was mysteriously healed.
I believe cats are also little Reiki masters. My Siamese before he died used to selectively climb on the table on top of certain clients and just sit on some part of their body and purr. My clients would very frequently tell me that the part he was laying on was giving them trouble, and now it feels better. The same cat always knew when I had an upset stomach. He would lie with his little velvet paws on my tummy. It was the only time he ever did that. I know it sounds crazy. But I used to call him my “intuitive assistant” and I even had his picture on my business cards. My clients came to see him as much as me! I miss him so much. And now I have to stop talking about him because I’m starting to cry. He died a year ago in January of old age related illness (renal failure). It was one of the most painful events of my life.