CHAPTER 1
What Is Pain Really?
Before we begin the process of eliminating your pain, let's first take a look at what pain really is. Just for a moment, imagine a life where pain is nonexistent. You wake up, jump out of bed, and feel great. You are running late though, and because of your rush, you trip on the way into the bathroom, landing face-first on the floor. It doesn't hurt a bit, so it doesn't slow you down and you keep on going. You continue on to get ready for the day, heading into the shower. The water is steamy, scalding to the point of blistering your skin, but you don't really notice it because you feel no pain. You later head to the kitchen to make yourself breakfast, and in your rush to not be late for work, you accidentally cut your hand wide open, and blood is dripping everywhere! But no worries, it doesn't hurt, so you just put a bandage on it and head out to your job. Do you see where I'm going with this? When you think about pain this way, would you consider that pain may not be your enemy but instead, it may be your protector?
Many times pain is an indicator — a warning, if you will. It lets us know on the outside that there is something wrong on the inside. It's a message telling us that our bodies have had enough. It's the result, the effect, of something else.
When we are discussing pain, we need to talk about the different types of pain there are. When an injury or event first occurs, the pain that is experienced is considered acute pain. Many times this type of pain, if treated soon after the injury, will go away with traditional methods. But when left to its own devices and fueled by the emotions associated with it, it becomes what is called chronic pain or suffering pain. Even though the POP Method works with acute injuries as well, especially when we can easily identify the initial emotions we associate with the injury, the type of pain we are really focusing on in this book is the chronic type.
The development of chronic pain is a process, and it isn't the result of just one thing. Of course, if you are in an accident and have pain immediately, you know that the primary cause can be directly traced back to that trauma, the acute pain reaction, but if the pain lingers on and on, well past the treatment plan and the customary time it takes a person to heal from an injury, that's chronic pain.
Maybe you got some relief but never felt like the problem was resolved. That lingering pain was still a result of the accident, but maybe it was not from the physical nature of the wreck but instead from the emotions surrounding the event. Pain can develop from the feeling part of your body, and if that part isn't addressed, the pain keeps coming back.
Pain lets your conscious mind know that something is wrong. It's like the warning light on the dashboard of your car. When we see the light come on, do we just cover it up and keep on driving without addressing the reason the light came on in the first place? Of course that sounds ridiculous to us because with our cars, we know we have to correct the problem that caused the light to come on or our car will eventually break down. Just like our cars, our bodies provide a warning signal, and although we want the pain alleviated quickly and easily, if we only address that outer symptom, or warning light, if you will, and ignore the underlying feelings that fuel it, the pain will continue to come back. And furthermore, what other problems are going to result because of that initial issue?
Usually when I introduce the POP Method to patients and explain the concept of the process, the knee-jerk response is that they can't think of any emotion or feeling that they connect to the pain. Even past that, they can't fathom why they would hold on to something that caused them grief and would result in chronic pain. The majority of people I encounter who have chronic pain just attribute it to age or some activity that they did for so many years. While overexertion and repetitive physical activities over a course of time can be the culprit, if the pain is not responding to traditional methods, chiropractic or medical, then there has to be something else keeping it active.
Let's consider this: could it be possible that working for so many years doing some activity for all those years made you feel frustrated, angry, disrespected, and so on, and those feelings are keeping that pain tied to you? It's a different way to think about your pain, isn't it? Sometimes it's hard to believe that our feelings about our circumstances, our work, or any event, for that matter, could be keeping us chained to the pain. It's hard to imagine that our feelings on the inside can be reflected physically as feelings on the outside, but many times, that is the reality.
To get a better understanding of how emotions and feelings can anchor pain, I want you to think of the difference between how a child responds to an injury versus an adult. When young children have a fall, for example, they respond to the actual sensation they have as a reaction to the fall. If it doesn't really hurt, they get up and get moving again. No problem. If they do experience some pain, they may cry initially and be upset about it, but then once they begin to get involved in some other activity and their minds wander, the boo-boo is forgotten.
On the other hand, when adults fall down, all different kinds of emotions can come up. Maybe at first they experience the shock of falling, then the possible embarrassment of someone seeing them or the fear that they might have broken something. Maybe they worry that they won't get better quickly or that it is going to keep them from the activities they love to do. They are already creating a mental picture of this incident causing lasting pain and problems. Can you see the difference? Of course, this analogy does not always hold true, but I'm using it to establish that we, as adults, have many emotions that can get tied in with an injury and with our pain.
One of the main reasons why we have such trouble identifying our feelings is because, as a society, we have been made to believe we shouldn't express them. We have become stuffers — we stuff our true feelings down deep and act as if everything is just fine. For a while, that works out all right, but eventually too much has been stuffed in and it begins to erupt. Those feelings must be dealt with, and in our bodies, if it's not, all of that stress and turmoil inside becomes an outward manifestation instead ... namely, chronic pain.
Think of the millions upon millions of sufferers who are out in the world each day. Why do so many people hurt? The answer could be that we have never dealt with the feelings we have buried within us! Those feelings have transformed into something physical, and our bodies are begging us to do something. The warning light is glowing, and it is time to look for the cause.
Let's think about this for a moment....
