On Pain

Welcome to On Pain.

Pain that will not go away takes up an enormous amount of room. It eats your energy, your plans and quite often your patience with people who mean well.

This is a small, practical place. Nothing here promises to cure you. Everything here is something I use myself.

I was injured in a workplace accident many moons ago and, after a surgeon pushed a surgical screw into my l5 nerve root, I was left with footdrop, retrolisthesis, chronic secondary pain + neuropathy 🎻 and am an ambulatory wheelchair user as a result. Rather than let it define me, I rolled with it (ha).

After becoming disabled, I faced life's challenges head-on (eventually, after sulking, flouncing and doing the self-ableism work)(still working on the self-ableism, that is not pretty), using my experiences to deepen my understanding of healing and well-being.

I use the techniques I teach and share in my own life, every day. When I say a hypnotic-meditation helps with pain, I mean it helps me to cope with and manage my pain.

Pain is not a message sent up from the damaged part of you. It is produced by your brain, every time, after it has weighed up everything it knows about the situation.

How much you hurt and how much damage you have are two different numbers. They are often nowhere near each other.

Chronic pain carries on long after tissue has healed, and sometimes with nothing to point at on any scan. It is still entirely real.

Scans find frightening things in people who feel nothing at all. They find nothing in people who can barely stand up.

Somewhere along the line you were probably told it was stress, or anxiety, or that you were not coping. You were not making it up then either.

Being believed once does not change much. Having something to do when it is loud does.

Pain gets sorted into two kinds. Primary, where the pain is the condition in its own right. Secondary, where the pain comes from something identifiable, an injury, a disease, an operation that went wrong.

Mine is secondary. A surgical screw in a nerve root is not a belief I can be talked out of.

The biopsychosocial model is the accepted way of understanding pain, and it is right. Pain is biological, psychological and social, all at once, in everybody. What happens in practice is that the psychosocial half gets the attention and the bio quietly falls off the end.

So everybody is handed the same thing. Breathing, pacing, a course about unhelpful thoughts. Useful, all of it, and I teach some of it. None of it is a substitute for somebody looking properly at the part of you that is damaged.

If your pain is secondary you will know this already. You will have sat in a service that treated your body as settled and your mind as the thing worth adjusting.

The toolkit opens with a Wayfinder. What you want or need ~ and it points you straight to the right thing. Tells you what to click.