My Journey with Chronic Pain

I have stories about maladies, body glitches, and serious diagnoses (multiple sclerosis – which I don’t have) that span my lifetime. In my 30s I walked with a cane and I thought I would have to go on disability. After 4 years of being in a medical twilight zone, and when the 3rd neurologist told me that she thought stress was at play in my physical problems, I stopped and listened. I realized I had been going in a circle of illness, stress, and fear. 

As I gained strength and started resuming ‘normal’ life, my new companion was chronic pain that is associated with fibromyalgia – my new diagnosis. Though not debilitating, it has dogged me for decades, and is something the medical community really doesn’t understand. In the 90s there was a great deal of writing about the body/mind connection, but science wasn’t able to back up the claims. Now, after 20 years of neuroscience research, it is understood that ALL pain (and all pain is real) is generated from the brain and sent to areas of body to protect us from danger and further injury.

Chronic pain,  pain that continues after a time of normal healing, is sustained in the neural pathways. That particular neural pathway is caught in a loop and can be exasperated by anxiety, anger, depression, and frustration. Because the brain is very neuroplastic (it can be changed and altered at any time in life), there are tools and strategies that can be employed to turn down and/or eliminate the pain response altogether.