Fibromyalgia Pain & Your Emotions
When your pain spikes, what emotions do you feel? That might sound like a silly question -- you're obviously not going to feel joy and elation, right?
The reason I'm asking is that it's scientifically proven that pain and emotion are somehow entangled in the brain. It's a relationship no one fully understands, but it's clearly there. Basically, when you feel pain, your brain records the emotions you're feeling at that time. When you experience pain later, the brain essentially "plays back" that recorded emotion. If you've frequently felt fear along with pain, pain is likely to cause fear over and over. Same goes for whether you've been depressed, frustrated, angry, you name it.
My personal pain-emotion is shame. I've had chronic back and neck pain since I was 10, and occasional "unexplained" pains since my early teens (I now know much of it was radiating pain from undiagnosed myofascial pain syndrome.) My pain threshold has always been low, so these pains and pain from injuries were always a significant problem for me. However, after one horrible doctor told my mother my back shouldn't hurt and other pains had no obvious source, my parents (somewhat understandably) decided I must be a hypochondriac or just trying to get attention. I got the message that it was "wrong" for me to be in pain, and I came to treat it as a shameful secret. I questioned my own symptoms, sometimes telling myself they weren't really there.
When you don't want to admit to pain and you find yourself with fibromyalgia ">fibromyalgia, you've got a real problem! I do still struggle with some feelings of shame, but over the past few years I've been able to admit to myself and others that I hurt and that it puts limitations on what I can do. I've practiced staying calm while in pain, and the more I've done it the more I seem to have over-written my earlier emotional recordings. That's what we can take away from the knowledge that pain and emotion are linked -- if we can recognize and take control of those embedded emotions, we can change them.
A very wise woman named Renee touched on this in a recent Readers Respond comment about living with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome:
"I have lost a lot of abilities that I once had in my life as all of us have I got to the point where I realized that I am a disabled person, there are things that I can not do.The shame of it still surfaces at times, many many times, this is when I need to tell myself that this is what is occurring and that I must not feed into it. I do this by phoning someone to talk about my feelings or journaling them onto paper the best that I can."
If you don't have someone you can call to talk about it, try my forum; it's full of people who understand what you're going through.
What emotions surface when you're in pain? Do they make the pain experience a lot worse for you? Why do you think those particular feelings are tied to your pain? Share your experience by leaving a comment below!
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Suggested Reading:
- Living With Fibromyalgia & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome + Readers Respond
- Developing Better Coping Skills
- Reaching Acceptance & Its Role in Getting Better
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Comments
Thanks for this very interesting question. I thought that maybe I was the only one who had an emotional response when the pain comes.
For me, the initial emotion is fear almost to the point of panic. I do my best to talk myself off the ledge and usually I end up feeling more dread and loneliness, anger, too. The reason that fear and panic come first is because in the last 6 years my symptoms, injuries, both financial and personal standings have all fallen off dramatically. It was Febraury 2004 when I was finally unable to work anymore after 30 years. I filed for disability and four years, to the month, I finally saw the judge. Within a week he had approved me and it was not long until I finally received some money. In those four years between filing and being approved I lost everything. A 4-bedroom home, very nice car, most of my friends (who were work-related) and a boyfriend. I became a shut-in. I was totally dependant upon my family just to survive. When we moved from the house, to an apartment four years ago I injured my back more (ruptured a disc). I KNEW I had done something serious; however, I could NOT find a doctor to help me. They all thought I wanted a pill. It was demoralizing, victimizing, and terrifying. Finally I found a GP who treated the fibromyalgia, (thank God for Lyrica, which was just coming out) but that disc was apparently unable to detect, through xrays, and mri’s although an eeg showed nearly 50% nerve damage in my right leg. Finally, a new GP sent me to a Pain Clinic who did a Discogram 2 months ago, voila! as I had said 100 times over those four years, I had ruptured a disc. That panic that I felt when it would start to hurt and I knew I’d get no help still comes but I assure myself I have two good DRs now and try my best to quell any dread or fear that they, too, will abandon me.
For me it’s rage and/or helplessness, when the pain gets really bad and nothing helps. Thankfully it doesn’t happen often but when it does, my whole world comes to a halt. I hate everyone and everything in existence. It’s not something I like to admit, and I never know what to do with my anger other than let it mutate into desperation and powerlessness.
With the pain comes an onset of depression, which I have trouble dealing with as I don’t get depressed often. For me depression is a selfish emotion, a waste of energy. The saddness overwhelms me, cry all the time when I usally can keep a happy face for my world as tiny as it is. Being housebound really takes it’s toll when the pain gets MAD crazy!
I feel very alone with my pain.
Pain brings with it the concept that I’m totally useless and I’m not always aware that it’s related. When the pain incapacitates me in the late afternoon and all I can do is sit in front of the TV, I berate myself for being a couch potato. Other emotions are from having the onset of severe fibromyalgia and losing my husband and ability to work at the same time. Not fun. I try to think self-nurturing thoughts, as in “what would a friend say to me-that’s what I want to tell myself” and “think positive thoughts–they’re free, less likely to cause pain and who knows, they may even be true.