Stop Pain Recurrence

It is common for people to be in some form of ongoing pain that lingers for months, years or even decades, caused by some past traumatic experience or injuries or simply poor posture from bad sitting or standing habits.

Often times, after getting relief from an ongoing pain from successfully breaking the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle (see Figure below), the pain will end up returning intermittently for various reasons. This leads to recurring pain. The good news is that there are solutions to address these reasons, preventing pain recurrence and making the initial pain relief permanent.

Often times, after getting relief from an ongoing pain from successfully breaking the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle, the pain will end up returning intermittently for various reasons. This leads to recurring pain. The good news is that there are solutions to address these reasons, preventing pain recurrence and making the initial pain relief permanent.

If a pain once persisted for long, there is a high chance for there to be factors that would reinforce it. These factors can either be caused by the pain itself or even existed before the pain to cause it in the first place. Even after breaking out of the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle, factors like faulty movement patterns, stress caused by unresolved emotions and daily stress caused by incoherent thoughts can bring someone back into the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle, causing pain recurrence.

Exhibiting faulty movement patterns, which are common among people who are in pain, can bring someone back into the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle. This can be in the form of daily physical activities (walking, climbing stairs) and exercising (jogging, weight training, and sports). Going through physical therapy, rehabilitation and resistance training would help to stop the pain from returning.

Stress caused by unresolved emotions can bring someone back into the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle. The average person has many unresolved emotions. These emotions are subconscious, which makes people unaware of the stress they are experiencing. Worse still, these emotions lead to self-sabotaging actions that can bring one back to the chronic pain cycle.

Daily stress caused by incoherent thoughts can bring someone back into the Chronic Pain Vicious Cycle. Repetitive patterns in occurrences of incidents in daily life also results in stress, which nutrition and lifestyle habits can only address the symptoms but not the root cause. These patterns are caused by the individuals' preferences towards the use of certain brain functions over the others, resulting in a thinking pattern that cause similar reactions and responses giving rise to similar outcomes.

The way to solve this pain recurrence problem is by addressing the three factors mentioned above. This can be done with appropriate physical training, subconscious intervention and thought coherence respectively.

The best way to overcome faulty movement patterns is to replace these with new movement patterns. This can be done with appropriate physical training. Depending on the severity and complexity of compensations, you may want to hire a physical therapist. For minor cases, just regular weight training with sufficient load using proper techniques would do.

For cases that faulty movement patterns are subtle or manifest only during fatigue, rehabilitation would be helpful. This is often the case for people who are regularly weight training but experiences pain. Regular weight training would mean recurring pain issues subside during training with proper warm up and optimal load but more likely to surface during inactive times. This is so as proper lifting techniques help to activate the muscles, readjusting people anatomically to overcome faulty movement patterns temporarily. This occurs with proper warm up and optimal load, since overloading results in compensations that can reinforce these faulty patterns.

Beyond the physical aspects of pain, there is also an emotional component. For recurring pain to be relieved permanently, healing has to that place, which means the emotions have to be addressed. This includes not just emotions associated with the initial injury in the case of trauma, but also other unresolved emotions that happened way back. Any extreme emotions like anger or sadness, when repressed, can result in pain years later.

Majority of these repressed emotions started occurring since birth, sometimes even before, during prenatal period or even inherited. A lot of them are still held on and causing problems without people knowing it even though the actual incident is already over and they no serve any purpose to be held on to. These can cause dysfunctions in the bodily systems, leading to unexplained pain and prolonged pain at sites that injury has long healed physically, or even in the absence of one.

A practical and self-sufficient way of allowing one’s repressed emotions to be brought to light would be to freely express yourself in any form of avenue safely. That can include free form writing, talking (out loud to yourself or to a trusted friend), singing, dancing, drawing or painting. The more one allows oneself to be spontaneous without overthinking about the process, the more one would be able to uncover things that one have repressed. Bear in mind that uncovering something should not be done with force. If one finds oneself to be resistant, it may mean one is not ready to tackle a particular issue yet.

Another self-sufficient way of allowing one’s repressed emotions to be brought to light would be to reflect on a recurrent pain and look out for the pattern around it. For example, if one’s pain recurs specifically while getting out of bed or walking on rocky roads, there is a chance that some emotionally charged incident happened to occur in the past while one is getting out of bed or walking on similar rocky roads, resulting in the subconscious trigger. This narrows down the possible past and the corresponding emotions, which can then be uncovered.

Everyone, being unique individuals, have different preferences. These preferences apply to thought processes as well. This cause us to overuse certain cognitive functions while underusing others, leading to not just imbalances in the brain chemistry but also an increase in daily stress.

From a brain chemistry’s point of view, someone who is clinically diagnosed with a mental illness have a significant case of brain chemistry imbalances, which will certainly cause severe dysfunctions in the bodily systems. Ongoing pain would not be the biggest concern for such an extreme case. For majority of the people, minor imbalances in the brain chemistry occur when either a more preferred thought process gets overused, in the case of high ego, or underused, in the case of poor self-esteem. This leads to minor dysfunctions in the bodily systems.

From a daily stress’ point of view, the lack of use of an important thought process, whether a less preferred one, in the case of high ego, or a more preferred one, in the case of poor self-esteem, can lead to poor observations or decision making. This leads to more daily stress.

To enable use of all thought processes in unity, thought coherence must be instilled. Based on the nature of thought processes order, as theorized by Carl Jung, and the human needs, in line with what Tony Robbins advocates, associated with these thought processes, by working on developing the differing human needs to support one another, thought coherence can be instilled. These four human needs are shown in the table below.

Among these, there are 2 paradoxical pairs of human needs, #1 and #2 as well as #3 and #4. By being paradoxical, it means they are on opposite ends of the spectrum and tend to contradict one another. A common solution given is to strike a balance between both. Instead of balance, it would be much better to strive for the opposing ends of the spectrum to unite with each other. For example, having a stable base that grants Certainty/Security allows more resources to be available to explore Uncertainty/Variety, achieving unity in the use of both. Similarly, a sense of self-importance can be instilled more strongly with the approval of an individual by many others within the same community. This achieves unity between Significance/Recognition and Belonging/Connection.

By achieving unity between the paradoxes among the human needs, the respective cognitive functions are used more coherently, achieving Thought Coherence.

To conclude, the underlying reasons behind pain recurrence can be complex and not easy to solve. Patience is required to address recurring pain and it is necessary to look at many different factors.

Which of the solution to pain recurrence amazes you the most? Share with me in the comments section below!

I do work closely with individuals to relief chronic and recurring pain by stopping pain recurrence as part of a holistic pain solution illustrated in my other article "Permanent Relief From Recurring Pain".

In efforts to stop pain recurrence, I may work on Thought Coherence, illustrated in my other article "A Deep Dive into out Thoughts and Human Needs", to reduce daily stress to prevent someone from getting back in the chronic pain vicious cycle.

Contact me for more information if you are looking to stop pain recurrence, instill Thought Coherence or overcome ongoing pain!