How to Navigate Physical Pain: From Medicine to Mind, Body to Spirit l S2E099

You're going to learn about how to understand your physical pain, managing this pain, and communicating with your pain. Because when you realize and hold space for the realization that you're not defined by the pain that's going through your body and that your pain is more effective when you tune in. Rather than tune out and push it away, and it doesn't mean that you're damaged. And so my guest today is a repeat guest and she's also a dear friend and her name is Jackie Morgan. She is a psychologist with a master's degree and has spent the last six years working in a private practice and at. Psychiatric care facility. She has an interest in couples therapy and the influence of attachment styles on relationships and functioning within the workplace. Jackie and her husband moved to Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. That's how I met her. And she's been there with us for two years. She's come all the way from Johannesburg, South Africa, and she continues to consult with her South African clients online and looks forward to opening an in-person practice in Owen sound as well, and living with chronic back pain. Jackie shares with us what she has found helpful along her pain journey. So welcome Jackie. Welcome back to A Call for Love, and I wanna say you were on episode 52 when you had newly arrived in Canada and we discussed embracing change. So welcome back. Thank

you. Wow. Yes. That was. A long time ago. Um, what feels like a long time ago, and you know, what can be so similar to that is our experience and our journeys with pain. Because although I've only lived with chronic pain for the last three years, it's a relatively. Short history, but it feels like the longest journey. And so yeah, just a voice of encouragement to all your listeners today, Linda, that no matter if you've had pain for the last few months or years, it feels long because it really is testing, it is trying, and I feel like I can connect with that. And I've come a long way in my journey, but I still have a long way to go. So I hope that I can share some of my insights with you today.

Yeah, I think it's really important. I know that pain can just influence every area of your life, your sleeping, your eating, your, your relationships, and how you relate to your body and your self, and it's relentless.

Hmm, absolutely. It's all consuming. Um, it, and it's complex and, you know, there's this, uh, favorite saying of mine from CS Lewis regarding pain. He says, we can ignore even, but pain insists upon being attended to. And, and that for me just describes so beautifully how pain arrests our attention every day, all. And so it, it can erode parts of your life and relationships, even your, even your work life. I think it would be remiss of us to not mention identity loss, uh, that one can go through when it comes to a pain journey.

Yeah, I think that. What you're saying is pain is all consuming. You can't ignore it. It's in your face and it's so this is the journey, right? Mm-hmm. When you are faced with something that is here in your life, for better or for worse, what are you gonna do about it?

Mm mm Exactly that. As with all misfortunes, it can bring out the worst or the best in us. And, and so this has really been my personal experience with Pain two. Um, yeah, it really is a deeply personal journey, so there isn't a one size fits all, and, and I'm by no means an expert on the subject. I just hope to be really be sharing my personal lived experience with you. And so I, I just wanted to mention to everybody that. It has been confusing at times along the way with all the different types of interventions that there are out there, but that not any single one of them I would safely say that I could do, have done without. Uh, I, I honestly can see the benefit of having gone through. All the layers and of all the dimensions because as pain infiltrates our lives on many dimensions, so it is with the interventions that we need to consider. So another encouragement just for people to keep learning about their pain and keep trying to understand what there is available for them out there to do to alleviate some of their suffering.

All right. Why don't you just give a brief explanation of what pain you've gone through, and then we're going to discuss how you have begun to understand the concept of pain in your physical body and managing it.

Hmm. So I have lower back pain. It's due to a bulging disc, which is incredibly common around L four, L five, S one, s two, around that region due to various reasons, whether it's the aging process or actual injury or a combination of, of both. Uh, I experience a lot of pain in my lower back. It has confused me at times when I've looked at images of my MRI and gone. Wow, that's not a bad looking MRI, you know, so it's, it's difficult to understand that what you see on an X-ray is not equal to what you're experiencing per se in your body. That my experience of pain is different to somebody else's experiences of pain. Mm-hmm. My physiotherapists tell me that some patients have terrible x-rays or MRIs and experience no pain. But for me, I know that every day, at several times during the day, my pain stops me from doing the activities that I would like to do. And it also inhibits me from doing some of the sporting activities that I used to be able to do and that I still hope to be able to do. Um, and so there is, uh, a real tendency to want to have to. To want to sit back and, and try to manage pain by not doing anything because of that fear response. But what I've had to do is go, wow, no matter what I do. Or how little I do, my pain stays the same.

Mm.

And so it's caused me to have it, it's caused me to really dig down into what it is that I'm experiencing and to talk to different medical professionals and to reach out to different resources out there, uh, to be able to understand it a whole lot better and come at it from a new angle. So this is some of what I'll be sharing with you.

I agree. The thing about pain is you look fine. So people can't see underneath what you're experiencing, and that becomes a challenge because you look fine, but you're not feeling well.

Mm-hmm.

A hundred percent. And, and also to be a, a younger person

mm-hmm.

With invisible pain. And people say, but you're too young to be experiencing that. It, it also, I think, just throws you into another category of feeling very isolated.

Mm.

Um, and, and that people can't really identify with you. And, and that's the danger in the mental health field is that people will feel isolation, that they'll start to feel hopeless, um, and start to feel like they don't know which way to turn. I think that's the risk with pain. It really does erode your mental health. So we, we need to speak about pain and we need to speak about all its different tactics so that we can claim some of that victory back and some of that control back.

That's so fascinating because I think that it's a double end sword. What happens is, is you're experiencing the pain and you want to, um. Not completely identify yourself as pain, but explaining to others that you're experiencing pain, you're almost reinforcing the pain. Yeah.

You couldn't have said it any better. Um, I remember that at that there just was a time when all my conversations would lead with how I was doing in my pain journey. Um, and I both needed people to ask me how I was doing, but I also didn't wanna be defined by it. So there was that real point of tension and conflict within me that needed to be seen, but that also wanted to remain invisible so that I could continue to live a normal life. So it really is, uh, a, a, a tricky double-edged sword like you say. Yes, there's so much more to us than our pain and, and so much more to our bodies than, than the experience of pain within them. And so I would just like us to try and claim some of that real estate back, some of that emotional real estate back.

That's our first point. You are not defined by your pain, but what do you do so that you're not defined by it, even though you're experiencing it acutely?

Mm-hmm. So I think the first, the first quiver in your bur should be that there is an understanding of pain that has to be had with, with all. Challenges that we meet a, a firm understanding of something is half the battle one. And so what I wanna just explain today is that pain is a result of many different factors. It is not one plus one equals two per se, and that pain does not equate to damage. But that pain is something that your body. Send signals from your pain receptors, which are your, your nociceptors. Whether there is a pressure or a burning or a chemical threat on your body, those chemical signals are sent via your spinal cord up to your brain for your brain to then receive that signal and. Anticipate some kind of a threat and then initiate a protective response. So that's

a physiological response to pain.

Yes. It's physiological and. The two other mechanisms that, that there are is an an emotional component. So your emotional part of your brain then receives those signals that have been interpreted and further goes on to process and say, well, let's think about how we process this in our fear centers of our brain and in our, um, centers of. Appraising it. Do we like it or don't we, you know, all those judgment zones. So all of that is handled in the Amy, the, um, emotional centers of our brain and, and then cognitively our frontal lobe comes online and says.

Hmm,

well, what should we pay attention to now and how do we further interpret this information and how do we contextualize it and, and how do we make decisions based on this incoming information? And so there's, there's the conversation that's happening between all those three points. And so this is why I'm so pleased to have come across that thoughts and emotions. It can directly influence how we perceive pain. So pain is a physiological response. The pain is real. I'm not saying it's not, it definitely is. I know it is. But there is also a perception Yes. Zone that's happening at the same time. And that is where we can intercept this very unhelpful pain cycle. And so that's, that's where we'll go to next. Is how to intersect at those points.

Yeah. Turning into your pain as opposed to pushing it away. Correct. Yes.

I think the real temptation for me was to try and use distraction as a technique because I didn't know what else to do along my journey. Um, and distraction can work up to a certain point and it can be helpful in some situations. But it doesn't last for very long. And so what I needed to do was find a way of working with my pain because distraction inherently had something quite resentful about it, or even repressing about it. And it, it introduced conflict within my own body. There was a split in my mind in how I could be present. And so I needed to try something different, and so I started to tune into my pain and exercise certain pain management techniques that way. And that was tremendously helpful because then what I found was that I was intercepting those factors that involve the immune system and the nervous system's response to pain. And so. Even if you hear something during your day or smell something, taste something, touch it, something that you hear, something that you do, something that you believe, um, people in your life, anything can set your, your nervous system on edge and it can start to create something of an inflammatory process, which can tell your brain that there is a threat. Your brain is gonna fire off these pain signals into various parts of your body. You become infused with them. So as I started experimenting with meditative techniques on pain management, I found that I could calm my entire nervous system down. Um, another way that I, I got a bit of distance from my pain was to think of it. A voice, so still a voice within me, but there's still a little bit of distance was to ask pain that if it were to be able to tell me something now, what would it be telling me?

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, it, it, it's helpful because then, um, you know, at times pain would be saying to me, uh, that I need to have a boundary. Somebody, perhaps there's something that I didn't really want to be doing or something that I felt I couldn't really be saying, um, that I would then ask this very helpful voice. I was starting to use pain as a signal to me for protection, which is what pain was invented for, was there to keep us alive. And it still is, but it's been misinterpreted along the way. And sometimes along the way we get so used to the pain that we've developed, habits of feeling our pain, connecting with our pain, and coping with our pain. And so we entrench old neural systems, neural pathways within us. That keeps us going along, what can sometimes be very unhelpful ways of dealing with it. You know, for instance, just turning to medication. Uh, and I'm, I'm not advocating for turning away from medication because we know, uh, that medication is medically appropriate as, uh, a course of treatment sometimes for a, for a person's lifetime, sometimes just for the acute stage. But we also have to be mindful of its effects on us. And, and how and when we use it and it, it, it's got to be prescriptive and it's got to be, um, managed responsibly.

Well, I think we're, when we're in the throes of deep pain, certainly that's the time for, you know, that intervention of medicine. I do wanna share though, that, I mean, I've been fortunate I haven't had a lot of pain in my life, but when I do. I do seek a doctor's opinion and possibly medicine if it requires it. And then I also go the psychological and the spiritual route. I, I would be amiss not to mention that Louise Hay has the book. You can Hear Your Life. So for every part of the body that kind of breaks down, she says emotionally what it's connected to on an energetic sense. And so I would, in my circumstances, um, very simple, very little example. I had a style in my eye and, uh, so I got the drops. This is not a huge thing, but it's just an example and I looked in Louise Hayes book and it's like. What are you seeing? What are you perceiving in your life? So then I did both. Mm-hmm. I did the soulful work, the energetic work, and then I did the, the conventional medical route.

Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and, and I think the more that we can become more melted dimensional in our approach to illness and pain, the better often and the more balance we achieve through doing. So, I don't think there's any one of those dimensions that, that we should minimize or discredit because I think they're all incredibly valid and helpful. So this, you know, usually I, I don't know that I would've turned to a meditative source, uh, outside of something as robust as our biomedical model, which I, I can't do without, but it touched, it touched a nerve that the biomedical model couldn't. For instance, it just went somewhere else in my body that my medication wasn't doing for me and still isn't doing for me. And so I'm finding that that balance between taking, taking pain management meds and doing other mindfulness meditation practices and continuing with moving my body and exercising, because I noticed that not moving. Leads to other problems. Yes. Not moving creates it, its own pain. Um, and, and so I'm trying to do a little bit of, of everything that's helpful, including consulting with a pain coach from South Africa. And, and so there's a little piece of advice that comes either from a family member who's had pain, like my, my, my cousin in the states. Who can share some of her gold nuggets with me, or it's my physiotherapist, or it's my pain coach, or it's my neuro, you know, I've got a whole team of people that are helping me to manage what I'm experiencing in my body and it's all helping.

Yeah, and I, I think what you said is very important. I went to Sri Lanka and some healers, Ayurvedic practitioners work on my physical body at frozen shoulder. That was like debilitating pain. But anyways, uh, they said the doctors had told them to stop moving, like, stop playing golf, stop playing tennis. And um, I almost feel like that hurts us. Of course, we cannot do those same things to the same degree, but even as a yoga teacher doing one 20th of it and just even feeling a little bit into your body. Is really good for, for your psychological wellbeing too. And, and it does bring energy because if, if you think about our energy system, we could have stuck dis-ease. It's, it's the, the energy's not flowing well and a bulging disc. 'cause you said the energy is not going up and down your spine really well.

Yeah, exactly. And, and what you're saying there is the, um, the helpful and beneficial release of brain chemicals that we get when we exercise. And so they are really, uh, really important for our overall wellbeing. And there's all, there's also something quite psychologically positive that happens once we've moved our bodies and we've survived it. We bank on a victory. That goes into a little bit of an unconscious memory that, oh, we are not broken and our bodies are inherently strong, and that there is. A wisdom about our bodies that knows what it needs to heal and moving is part of that healing. And we come back to ourselves and we also find enjoyment in our bodies again, because paint takes so much away from us and our enjoyment of our daily lives and our bodies, and, and so exercising in a graded. Activity, fashion can really help you to take those little steps back to that victory. Um, and, and my physiotherapist, I could not have done this without him. He helped me to see and to look back and go, Ooh, three months ago we were only walking for 10 minutes and now we're up to walking for 45 and this time in a few weeks time, we'll be here. And so having those goals and walking with somebody. Um, to babysit you, if you like for a better word, because otherwise, you know, one might be tempted to do too much too soon or to not do enough. So depending on your personality profile, it's really helpful to, to be with somebody who knows what they're talking about.

Yes, this is a beautiful conversation because we've come to the circle that pain does not mean we're damaged. And I, I'd like to add one more thing. I was. In Cuba and a barracuda bit through my foot, sliced through my big toe. And um, it was a very big mess and they were stitching my toe and I placed my hand on my heart. I said, okay. My heart, my spirit, the love I have for the people around me and for life is not in pain, is not hurt, is not damaged. It's my body. I kind of created a little bit of a separation and I was like nurturing, and I kind of talked to my body. I said, you know, you are really hurt. They're taking care of you. They're stitching you up, but you're okay inside. And I had this conversation and I could kind of separate the two, and it really, really helped when I was in the midst of this fully conscious, watching all the stitches and the blood. And so I found that really, really helpful. Nice.

So what you said there is so good because there's that self-compassion that we've got to have when we are experiencing pain or something frightening. Um, and then there's the ability to slightly separate or buffer yourself. From your feeling self so that we can still think about our feeling selves and then we become observers of our pain.

Yes.

Not saying that the pain is not part of us because it's so intricately part of us, um, but we, we can then allow this pain in its own way to talk to us, which helps us further our acceptance of that pain. So when we can notice whether it's a burning or an aching or a stinging, whether it's um, flittering around or whether it's stabbing, uh, you know, when we just allow ourselves to notice something without judging the pain and where it's coming from and blaming ourselves or that car accident or whatever it was to cause it, we just kind of go into. The, the body's process of this pain, and then we can welcome it by saying, well, it just is. Mm-hmm. And it's interesting to note that it's in that leg and not the other leg. And if we take a part of our bodies that isn't experiencing a pain and we notice how that's feeling, our brain starts to interpret not only just what negative feels like, but also what positive feels like. Yes.

Which is so healing.

That's so healing. And then to mindfully place something soothing, whether it's cooling or warming onto that injured area, sending it a lot of love and care just like you did in that moment. You know, you surround it with, with yourself, um, around reminding yourself that you don't need to feel overwhelmed by the pain, but that you can be with your pain, but that it is. Not

you because this is a call for love. I can say the Buddha said that suffering is caused by pushing away or grasping, but when we hold space for it, which is an awareness without judgment, it's being heard, and so the pain is being heard and you don't identify it as your whole self being damaged. It's just the experience you're going through in the moment,

it's part of you and it, and it doesn't have to overwhelm you. Yeah. And I've noticed that, that when I take the stance with my pain, that it reduces.

Yes.

And you know, other management, uh, techniques that I still engage in are things like grading my level of pain. Um, and grading my activities for the day. So if doing laundry is, is a five and I'll run through what the pain rating scale is, um, but if I say that doing laundry is a five, 'cause by the end I feel that level of pain. I know that I can't combine two or three level five worth activities Oh, I see. On the same day. Um, and, and so that helps me to take some control back and it, it also helps me to really work with myself and not against myself.

It's kind of like a bank account you don't wanna overspend. Yes. When you're thinking of how much pain and how much effort in one day when you're saying grading, uh, a 10, you don't wanna overspend because then your body is going to not be happy and you probably will pay the next day.

Yeah. Yes. You can't overspend, you always pay the price the next day, and so you've gotta be quite calculated and think about your activities and wonder what it is that it's gonna cost you. But I wanna balance that again with what I said earlier on, that there is a cost to also. Doing and not mobilizing. Yes. And not building your confidence back in your body.

Well, you don't wanna be too stingy in life and you don't wanna be too frivolous. So it's the same thing with your pain. You want to continue to move your body. I personally believe we're energy bodies and I, I know that even, okay. Say I'm having pain in. My hand, my arm, my shoulder. Well, my legs are okay, so I can move a little bit of my legs. I'm still moving my body, I'm still shifting my energy. I'm still relating to it and getting those successes. And that's what makes the difference. Yes. Yeah.

And, and there are so many helpful resources through medical professionals and, and also, uh, available out there, um, you know, bioness and. Sports physiatrists that can help you to think about how best to mobilize and continue to build strength while still protecting that injured area. So, you know, with backs it's always a good idea to improve your core, um, legs, arms, everything around that because you've still gotta pick up grocery parcels and you, you, you know, you still got to clean your house and, and. Drive your car and do all the things that you wanna do. So there's just so much that you can do, and the stronger you feel in general, the better you, your, your area of vulnerability feels, the better you support yourself. Um. Then I think just lastly, in terms of communicating one's pain, I found it incredibly difficult to help myself and to help others to understand one bad day from one good day, you know, because it's so fluctuating and we all have good days and bad days with pain. Um, I would use words like, today is not a good day, is not a good back day, but. More than that, I needed to give it a number. And so the pain rating scale is quite helpful also when talking to medical professionals. Yes. That if you can say to them that, no, I'm on zero pain with no pain at all, or I am on a 10 that I cannot think right now, I'm in so much pain. So I encourage everyone just to go and have a look at that pain rating scale and then to work out activities for the day based on that and to work within it. In always shapes and forms.

Yeah, that's beautiful. When we work within it, we're honoring our body. We're honoring the moment that we're in, and then we can hold space for it. Know that we're not damaged, we're just, just in the mode of healing. Instead of sick, I like to think that we're healing. It's a progression, and then we can hold space for it. So I really thank you for joining a call for love and sharing about the pain body because we're going to have pain in and out through our life and navigating through it and learning those tips can make that journey a lot smoother. Thank you. Yes. All the best. Yeah. Thank you, Jackie. So thank you for listening, everyone. You can reach out to Jackie. I have her links in the show notes, and just wishing everyone peace and pain-free living from my heart to yours. Namaste.