Saving your own life

When a suffering human comes to me, whether it be with pain of the body, heart, or spirit, I explain to them that there are three facets of my work: Believe, Do the Work, and Patience and Kindness for Yourself. If we want to heal as robustly as possible, all are necessary. When I say Believe, I am referring to taking back your power. You have, without wanting to, given away your power for a lifetime. Sometimes this is traumatic, at the hands of abusers and tyrants of childhood. Sometimes this is passive, in the grip of societal stereotypes that tell us that we are "too much" or "not enough."

Sometimes we don't even know we've forsaken ourselves, gaslit by norms that tell us that we shouldn't want for more than we have. In any case, the power that we thought was in the hands of others, is indeed ours for the taking. We simply must believe that this is true. Once we do, we are primed for the imperative task of "doing the work."

"What is the work?" you might be wondering. Ah, yes. The dreaded work. Why do I say dreaded? Because it is likely that you will experience the equally dreaded resistance to the work. The work I assign is called JournalSpeak. It is a deep and unapologetic 20-minute vent from the viewpoint of your inner child. That sweet little guy or gal or they who has been left behind out of necessity. If we were to have listened to their rants every day of our lives we would likely be paralyzed by the amount of emotions they brought up. Yet, when our reservoir of repressed emotions begins to build within us over years of repression out of necessity, the effects must be felt somewhere. Each person will experience this in their own unique way: headaches, stomach issues, crippling anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia nerve pain, skin disorders, pelvic pain, fatigue, and the like. Although these syndromes look diverse at first glance, in my field of mind/body medicine they are actually perceived as exactly the same. This is brain science, and the brain and nervous system express our "fight or flight" reaction in the form of pain for a strange and unique reason: to protect us.

You see, the brain perceives our repressed emotions (that screaming inner child) as a greater predator than our physical pain. When we are triggered by something that makes us feel angry or scared or ashamed or sad, our protective mechanisms kick into place, and the pain or symptom signals fire to slow us down — return us to equilibrium. As we get quiet, cancel plans, lay down, engage others in our care like doctors and specialists… we are seen as oddly safer and the nervous system seeks to keep us there. I like to call this, "safe in the unsafest way." Life is stuck, small, sad, painful. But the brain is happier here. What to do?

When we attempt a JournalSpeak practice, the first thing to do is to accept that this will feel hard. Of course it does - the effort of saving our own lives and rewiring our neural pathways should not be light. 

Resistance itself is actually part of this protective mechanism - calling us away from our emotions which feel dangerous and precarious! However, once we realize that this is simply normal functioning, we can say "thank you for sharing" to our resistant inner voice, and do what's hard anyway, with patience and kindness for ourselves. This is a daily challenge, even for me at times, but when we show up for ourselves no matter how we feel about it, we begin to build the kind of trust that heals us, body mind and spirit.

REMEMBER: When we show up for ourselves no matter how we feel about it, we begin to build the kind of trust that heals us, body mind and spirit.

@nicolesachslcsw
thecureforchronicpain.com

From this week’s guest series, "The Life You End Up Saving", with a subscription, in the App.