Learning to feel again
After living with pain for a long time 2+ years I needed to re-train myself on how to feel. This realization actually came on 5 years after the initial injury, when I started wondering how much of the pain I feel currently is still related to the initial injury. I didn’t know anymore.
Every sensation in my body presented as a threat. ‘Oh no, I feel something and it is uncomfortable - I need to fix it.’ I developed a lot of fear around feeling.
Deeper into my treatment and therapy, I actually learned that when humans experience chronic pain (pain that lasts longer than 6 months), their brain re-wires. Certain parts of their brain are overactive, like the amygdala and hypothalamus. The body centres of regulation. I’m not an expert in this, just interested, so I will leave it there.
There are layers to living and recovering from physical systemic injuries. I learned a lot about my body and how it works and this takes time. The learning is also never over, because we change over time.
It is not good enough to only learn about pain and the body, but it needs to be accompanied by actions. Really tiny, minuscule actions that make your day a bit better in each moment. These tiny actions add up, and over years bring results.
I have moments and days I want to give up and I let myself have a temper tantrum and get all of that out, because it is fucking hard to live with pain, even when it does change or I see little bits of progress here and there. Sometimes it just fucking sucks and I let it suck, until I’m ready to get up again and keep trying.
A couple years into my journey I started questioning whether chronic pain is really chronic. Before I looked into this I thought chronic pain meant that I will feel pain forever and this is a very grim perspective to have. It feels like I lost the battle before it even begun.
No doctor explained to me what chronic pain meant. I only got diagnosed with chronic pain 4 years after the initial accident.
If I had the money, I would pay for private health care and get all of the tests, including the ones of my brain, mostly because I think it’s cool and I love to see the brain and what is going on in there and because it also informs treatment.
I’m confident now to pull in the practitioners I need at the time I need them.
Most of the progress and improvements in my life came from me advocating for myself, finding practitioners that could help me, and doing the work on a daily basis. I also opened up to any and everything and was willing to try anything that helped me heal, no matter how crazy my mind thought the intervention was.
Now, there is so much access to information and knowledge (thankfully, because I probably would have given up long ago if I were to rely on doctors for information) that I was able to improve things for myself at home.
When Corona hit, I wasn’t allowed to see any of my doctors and practitioners. I didn’t know how long I wouldn’t be able to see them for. I was relying on treatments to walk.
Something clicked in me and said ‘we need to keep moving and addressing the physical aspects of this pain or we will regress to square one.’ And so I started to to daily stretches and exercises and being really diligent with them.
I learned two really important things through that experience. Okay, maybe three - no 4:
It doesn’t matter what movement I do, any movement is better than no movement.
I needed to scale back to the movement that I could do on my own. So the brain said running - and I said lying on the ground and lifting my leg. Sometimes it was as simple as standing on my yoga mat and allowing my body to guide the movement.
I am the only one who lives in my body and can feel what is happening. It is important for me to communicate that as accurately as possible to the practitioners I work with, no matter how crazy the thing that is happening.
Some of the stuff I would experience is my practitioner pushes a point on my quad and a spot in my back or neck lights up.
Standing on my mat and some muscles start twitching or tingling.
My body spazzing and contracting in ways I haven’t felt before.
My body needs a lot of rest and recovery. I was seeing practitioners weekly that worked on my body. It was a lot. When they were all gone, I realized that my body needs a lot of time and space to integrate the treatments, like a lot more then recommended. It took time for physical changes to take effect. I was continually overloading my body and it was never really fully recovering. The cadence of the body work slowed to 1x/ month when we were able to go back to see practitioners once restrictions lifted. And the treatments I returned to were really gentle and felt aligned with what my body needed to relax and rest and recover.
This post went places I didn’t expect and there is still more to write on this. But for now I will leave it here.