I’ve Been Diagnosed with Stress-Related Pain
To make a long story short, I am in a fairly consistent state of pain. But according to all the scans, tests, and even the invasive procedure I recently had… there is nothing wrong with me.
That is to say, there is nothing wrong with my physical body in a way that can be seen on medical imaging.
So now I feel like a malingerer. I feel guilty for wasting the Dr’s time. But I am still in pain.
This is the struggle of pain caused by stress and emotional trauma. It doesn’t show itself in the same way that physical trauma does, and so our healthcare professionals get stuck on how to help us.
It is not something they can view with a scope or measure with a test.
Perhaps, it is not even something they truly understand.
As a patient, this is both good and bad
There are definitely some benefits. For example, sometimes the pain I feel in my abdomen makes me worry what’s physically happening in there.
- Am I full of cancer?
- Is my gallbladder blocked up?
- Might I just explode one day?
Getting the clear scan results, and knowing there is nothing deadly growing inside me is a huge plus.
Nobody ever wants to face the horrors of surgery, or face the possibility of their lifespan being cut short.
In this sense, having a stress-induced condition is pretty okay with me.
But on the other hand, the level of understanding around stress and pain is low, while the stigma is high.
People judge those of us with psychosomatic problems. Despite all we know about neuroscience and the mind-body connection, we as a species are still not able to really grasp the concept of what pain actually is.
Pain comes from the brain – a simple example
Let’s say you are in an accident and you deeply cut your left arm.
Where do you experience the pain? At the site of the injury, i.e. your left arm.
But where does pain come from? It actually comes from the brain.
At the site of your injury, the nerves in your arm send feedback to the brain – sort of a danger signal, to let your brain know that something serious has occurred.
In your brain is where you process that pain. THIS is technically where your pain comes from.
Now, if you cut your arm you won’t immediately want to hold your brain (where the pain is). You will of course want to hold your arm. This is because your brain contains a somatosensory map of your body, and along with the signal from the nerves running feedback to and from the brain, you know where you are injured.
You will focus on your arm, where the injury is, and not on the brain where you perceive the pain.
This journey between the nerves of the body and the brain is designed for survival.
The pain journey
When you cut your arm, the action at the level of the nerves in your skin is a response called nociception.
NOCICEPTION literally means “to detect a noxious stimuli” i.e. the cut.
This sends nerve signals into your central nervous system (your spine up to your brain), and then the processing of this nociception creates two main things.
Firstly, it creates pain, which is your body’s warning system that something is wrong and needs attending to.
Secondly, your brain sends a new signal back down the same route as the first one came up (from brain, to spine, to limb) to tell you to move your arm away from the danger.
When pain signals go wrong
This is a great design, until something goes wrong in the system.
A brilliant example of this is phantom limb pain – the problem some amputees have after losing a limb. That physical part of the body is gone, but pain can still exist in the “phantom” of that limb.
There is a huge amount of fascinating medical history to this, if it interests you. I would recommend checking out Dr. V. S. Ramachandran’s book Phantoms in the Brain if you want to nerd out to this topic. Or watch him on YouTube.
But for now, I only mention phantom limb pain to introduce the idea that pain signals can go wrong in the brain, and there doesn’t always have to be a corresponding problem in the body for pain to exist.
Indeed, pain can be triggered without nociception from an injury or illness.
My situation
When scans and tests rule out a physical cause for pain, then we are looking at psychological causes. I am delighted that I don’t have anything seriously wrong with me physically. But at the same time, I am concerned that addressing my psychological causes of pain will be trickier.
I cannot have my stress physically cut out from my body, the same way I would with a failing gallbladder. This is because I cannot surgically remove my traumatic memories or the sources of stress in my life.
There are talking therapies, antidepressants, and relaxation techniques. There is support in our health system.
But I do worry that when one major source of life stress is our floundering economy and impossible cost of living, I will never really get the solution that I truly need.
- I need work-life balance.
- I need to not fear the next bill coming in.
- I need to not feel compelled to work every free day in my calendar.
- I could do without traumatic memories resurfacing at inconvenient times.
- I need to not feel guilty for prioritising my health.
- I need to learn how to break the cycle of staying busy in order to not feel helplessness.
- I also need to not feel shame for having a stigmatised psychological condition. This is why I am sharing it here.
In all honesty, I don’t know what the answer is. This story will not come to a satisfying conclusion here and now. It is going to take time to figure out my next move.
I am fairly used to being in pain, but I think that this in itself is part of the problem. I have spent much of my life disassociating from pain, and therefore not really making my body a safe space to live in.
When my pain flairs up badly, I tend to think of this as my body demanding my attention.
If I’m right about this, then I might find some relief in grounding into my body more and doing some somatic-based therapies.
This is next on my list of things to try, now that the medical explorations are over.
I will come back and share an update soon.
