Somatic Pain: Emotions Re-expressed

In my last post, I talked about emotional acceptance as a different approach to managing one's feelings (as opposed to pushing away, or resisting, them). Interestingly, the very next day I experienced my own way of somaticizing my emotions. To somaticize means to transform one's emotions into physical symptoms. Emotions come with their own inherent physical symptoms:

• Anxiety: heart racing, palms sweating, teeth chattering
• Anger: heart racing, feeling hot, jaw clenching
• Excitement: heart racing, feeling jittery, shakiness

However, when we somaticize, we are getting extra physical symptoms on top of those that come with emotions naturally. This is not by choice or on purpose or even within conscious awareness. That's important to know. We don't choose to somaticize - it simply happens by way of our programming.

I experienced this yesterday, while working on a data project that I don't love. I was rushing through it, with thoughts such as, "I just want this to be over" and "this project is so frustrating". I wasn't letting myself take a break, but not on purpose or to punish myself, simply because I thought, "hey, the sooner I get through this, the sooner it's over." But, in reality, it was merely making my current life miserable to keep delaying gratification (a break) to the future. So, I was feeling frustrated, anxious, angry, and irritated, and not letting myself feel or process those emotions. Instead, I was

• pushing
• pushing
• pushing
• pushing
• to get finished as fast as I possibly could.

I wanted to do this:

But, instead I did this, as always:

I may have looked like I was doing OK on the outside, but in reality, I was "white-knuckling."

In order to hold myself there on that project, I had to ignore my emotions and everything my emotions were telling me to do ("just quit this project, quit this job, you can find something else to do instead!").

I do this a lot, especially with data projects. We all do this a lot. We hold ourselves where we don't want to be, thinking "no pain, no gain" and "anything worth having takes hard work." We spend our whole lives delaying gratification to someday "sleep when we're dead." We don't do this on purpose, we think we're supposed to. We believe that's how you achieve success and win and thrive. However, those emotions are still hanging around. We don't stop wanting to quit, to leave, to try something else. We just keep ignoring those feelings.

So the feelings come out in different ways. And yesterday, I had a perfect illustration of that. My right forearm started hurting and I started getting strange pain in my shoulder when I would move my arm. Totally out of the blue. My first thought was, "oh I started doing push ups again - I must have tweaked something." And then immediately, I realized, "nope, this is my emotions speaking." I am so thankful I know all about somaticizing of emotions and I wouldn't know it without the writings of John Sarno, M.D., who has published on this phenomenon. If you want more info immediately, you can look up some of his books: The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain and The Divided Mind. I like The Divided Mind best, but starting anywhere is great. I should also say that I am in no way connected to Dr. Sarno and receive no compensation or benefits from you reading his book. I've never met him, but think he is awesome and brilliant for publishing on this highly valuable, but controversial, health topic.

If you're not ready to read a big book, just hang here because I'll keep writing on this. I am so passionate about it and believe this information has the power to cure millions of people of debilitating, demoralizing, and expensive disorders that do not need traditional Western medical treatment. This, here, is just a starter post.

Know this - if you're feeling pain related to an injury that you can see with your eyes, that definitely happened (cut your finger, broke a bone, sprained ankle with swelling), then you do have some tissue damage that needs to heal. However, many of the injuries that we expect to cause chronic, unremitting pain do not have to do so. There are other explanations, and other treatments. If you're like me, and suddenly, weirdly, get a pain in your wrist, your back, your head, anywhere - it could very well be related to emotional pain that you've been ignoring and pushing away. Practice some of your emotional awareness and emotional acceptance skills and see what happens.

Feel more, do less!