Chronic Pain and the Emotional Toll

I am just going to say it, you can repress all you want, you can be as stoic as you want, as zen as humanly possible… and pain is going to get to you. Not every day. Not all the time.

But there will be days.

And we do not have to fake being positive. We are not bubbling rays of sunshine.

I’ve had some extremely high pain days lately. It might be a new normal for me to experiencing that level of pain sometimes so I will have to cope with that. However, dealing with that heightened my emotions and led to a flux in my emotional responses. Which is perfectly normal. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. I’m not a robot.

When I feel emotions. Or express them. I have learned over the last few years to understand the value to this experience and to have self-compassion for my pain experience.

It is okay to not be okay.

I know we mask our pain for a variety of reasons. Anyway, we can get pretty used to being stoic. But we have a right to be upset. Angry. Frustrated. Sad. And a whole range of emotions. We have a right to express those emotions in many ways without feeling guilty about expressing them.

We have the right to smile and laugh and not be miserable 24/7 and be in pain without people assuming we were spontaneously cured by the chronic illness fairy. Well, likewise we are allowed to be in a crappy mood when things really suck because, hey, we are an actual human. And this is a constant stressor we are experiencing. It’s exhausting to cope with all the damn time. It’s relentless. It gets to us.

Just don’t feel guilty for having a bad mood day.

Some days I cannot function and am so drained. Unable to do a damn thing. I have some feels about that. Who wouldn’t?

It will upset you that:

• You have to miss some days of work and your co-workers and depending on you
• You have to miss some plans and disappoint some people
• That you’re not as social as people want you to be
• When your career begins to falter and you struggle to find ways to hold onto it
• That you cannot do all the things you want to
• That you cannot have all the goals, desires, and ambitions you want
• That you may feel like you are failing loved ones
• Even feel like you are failing at life.

And these are all problems and thoughts that come with chronic pain. But you see, emotions, they twist thoughts. Especially when we are tired, fatigued, at the end of a long day, sad, or in high pain. Thoughts can slip and slide down.

Fact is, pain and emotions are linked in the brain. Stub your toe and you’ll have an emotional response all right. And we feel pain all the time so we deal with emotions all the time. A constant flux. That has a massive impact on us. We may smile through it a lot but it is extremely stressful for us.

When we have an emotional experience due to pain:

• We should think about the Thoughts we are attaching to those emotions. Because sometimes we attach thoughts to emotions just automatically without thought. Like I should feel useless, worthless, guilty and other things. Worse things.
• It can be beneficial to do an emotional diary where we write down the emotion that is occurring with the pain, the thoughts that come with it, and what we are doing to cope with those thoughts.
• Sometimes it helps to just tell yourself, yes, I’m feeling this emotion and, yes, it’s perfectly normal. I don’t need to think anything in response. I just need to feel it and let it flow through me.
• And sometimes it helps to just distract ourselves from the emotion and from the pain.
• Part of self-care is taking care of our emotional well-being and if you know of your self-care things that relax you, calm you, or make you feel good about yourself these are your go-to for bad mood days.
• And I really do recommend a good psychologist you vibe with.

Things to worry about:

• Unmanaged depression
• Unmanaged anxiety

This is something we need to manage because it greatly complicates pain and coping. It can be difficult to manage as well and we have to pay attention to it as its own entity. Because our mental health is just as vital as our physical health.

What I think we should never feel but do:

• Blame
• Shame
• Guilt
• Worthlessness
• Uselessness
• Like a failure

It’s a big tangled mess. And that’s why coping is not a linear line where we work through it and acceptance is this achieved end goal. Bam. Done. No, it’s all over the place. Not a circle. But a web. Anger. Guilt. Depression. Acceptance. Back onto Denial. Then anger again. We can linger a day in one. Or years. It is just a constant flux. And sometimes we need support to wrap our heads around it all. So that we don’t blame ourselves. So we don’t begin to attach negative thoughts to those emotions. The brain just does that because it is really just trying to make sense of why it is feeling that emotion but then the thought becomes habitual and we feel miserable because of it. It can take a long time to realize, hey, that stupid thought is so Wrong. I’m not to blame at ALL.

It gets really rough sometimes when we have a rapid decline in health and functionality and it can take a while to find our balance again. We have to tread carefully sometimes. I have lost myself to deep, dark emotions before thinking it normal because, well, pain but that was just hell. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I needed a psychologist, pain management, and depression medication, in my particular case.

Just remember your overall well-being is important. And that includes your emotional health. We can’t always hide it. Sometimes we need to talk about it with someone.

Emotions are a completely normal experience of pain. And in high pain, it’s normal to feel anger or sadness. This is because pain, in the brain, is in a circuit with our emotional center. Pain incites an emotional response. The last long stretch of brutal 9 level morning migraines had me feeling irritated and also just sad. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But I want you to know it is possible to think of those emotions without attaching meaning to them.

You can say:

1. I am in pain it is normal to feel this emotion
2. Emotions are normal with high pain and stress
3. I do not need to think about it. Just feel it.
4. Emotions are a normal human response. And I am only human.
5. This emotion is fleeting. It will pass

That these emotions come with the pain but they are like a river. Every time you dip your toe in there is a new emotion. They pass even when the river is full of dangerous rapids. We just have to get through high pain in whatever way we can. But when I feel the emotions that come with it I tell myself it is normal to have them and that they will pass. And it is not tied to my beliefs or perception of pain. It is fleeting and a normal response. That reacting to anything has an emotional response. And this is the one I’m feeling for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Name it and let it go

Name the emotion is also a good idea. I am feeling sad. And I feel it in such and such an area in my body. This emotion is sadness. And it is fine to feel sad when I am in a lot of pain and can’t function the way I want to, or wish I could. Just let yourself sit with that feeling for a moment. Breathe in and out. Don’t think about all the quite legitimate reasons for it, just let it be. And then let it go when you are ready.

I tie no thoughts to that. It will pass. It’s normal. I try to let it just be, without delving into it. Just sort of flit across the surface of it, feel it and know it will pass. I feel it, acknowledge it, have self-compassion for knowing I feel it because of the pain I am in, and then I release the emotion. And sometimes I fail and I feel so much more suffering. Coping with mood and emotions and pain isn’t easy for any of us. But just taking some deep relaxing breaths and trying to say to yourself what I have listed may help you cope with the emotions that occur. We are human. We are only human. Emotions and moods will come from such a powerful experience that is pain.

The thing about emotions

The thing about emotions is that we think we should suppress them. Or control them. Or reason them. That they are not running the show. That in some way they are ruining the show with all their messiness. If we could just reason our way through life it would just be so much better. Wouldn’t it?

Well, fact is thinking is a sideshow. It is slower than emotions. It is reactive and it guides and thinks it runs the show but, sadly, it does not. No, our emotions are running the show. And I don’t mean with pain and illness. I mean the whole damn show of life. Desire is what motivates every action. Emotion is what motivates action. Without emotion we would not be motivated to do anything at all. We do because we Feel. Then we think about what we did. Or we try to guide what we Feel like doing with some thoughts and maybe we do guide it and maybe we don’t but it is hard because emotions don’t like to be reigned in all that much.

So when pain is like every damn thing in life, we have an emotional reaction to that experience. And due to that we make values and beliefs about that experience if it keeps happening and we can do nothing about it. And sometimes those values and beliefs are rather dark because the emotional toll is so damn hard to bear. There is no contrast. There is no solution. There is no resolution to balance it out. No positive emotion to balance the life equation out for us to make a different value or belief.

That is why often we do cognitive therapy or acceptance therapy to help us adjust how we think and feel about pain and illness. Mostly because on our own we try to think our way out of the puzzle and it doesn’t work. It isn’t a rational puzzle. More like we will think ourselves into a dark place. It is an emotional puzzle. We have to look at that dark place. We have to look at it, feel it out, investigate that emotion and dig into it until we understand where its roots are.

Its roots lie in as I said: Blame for what we do not own, guilt for something that is not our fault, shame for something we never did wrong, fears that consume us, worries that give us deep anxieties. Once we root these out we can create new belief systems and values. Built our self-worth back up. Value who we are. Know that chronic pain does not define our self-hood or identity.

Emotional reality though makes our story of our self. I value my emotional landscape. I think sometimes we loathe our emotional reality but it is so much of who we are.

See also

Emotional Toll of High Pain

Reprint from brainlessblogger.net

In the land of pain