How personal history and trauma affect chronic pain: A case study in somatic healing

One of the hallmarks of my work helping people leave behind years or decades of chronic pain is that we get to the root cause. The root cause is very personal to each individual and is the reason why formulaic solutions don’t reach beyond superficial relief. An important step in root causing is discovering the unconscious narrative or story behind the pain pattern. 

Our personal identities are inevitably expressed in our posture and body movement habits

Usually the physical pain in one’s hip or knee (or shoulder, fill in with your specific pain) is the result of a physical pattern in the way a person moves their whole body in simple everyday activities like walking, sitting, standing etc. 

The physical pattern has a parallel in an underlying personal narrative that runs in the background and we are rarely aware of it. And because we are rarely aware of it AND its connection to our chronic pain, the relief from purely physical solutions can be temporary.

Let’s get into what determines this narrative. It’s determined largely by the circumstances of our upbringing. It could be how we were treated at home, or school or even by a healthcare practitioner. It could be a single traumatic event but is usually an accumulation of what we were surrounded by in our formative years that resulted in us creating certain beliefs about ourselves, about others or how life is. 

That personal story was our best coping mechanism for the circumstances that created it. It becomes the bedrock of our existence, our identity. Because it worked. It’s what helped us get through difficult situations and even thrive in spite of them. 

The key to surfacing it in my practice is to work backwards from the body pattern. When I see a person holds their chest (or back or shoulders or legs) a certain way, I get curious. I ask them about it and often enough this is the beginning of unravelling the narrative. We ponder on it, let it unravel some more.

When we’ve take the time to acknowledge all the reasons why this narrative made perfect sense, our nervous system automatically takes an out breath and becomes less digged into it. Then I educate them exactly how, anatomically and functionally, this habit is perpetuating their muscle tension, imbalance and pain, they have a chance to reconsider this body pattern and the related personal narrative.

Naomi’s journey of healing from hip pain: A case study

Naomi (name changed) came to my practice with severe pain in her hips so bad that she could barely walk or sit. She had tried osteopathic, manual therapy and yoga with some relief. But this ‘thing’ had been going on for a couple decades off and on and she was ready for a root cause resolution. 

She also hated that she had to keep going back to her therapist for relief but didn’t know how to help herself. It was like being dependent on an insufficient dose of a ‘secret medicine’ provided behind ‘black curtains’ that she wasn’t privy to. She loves yoga but it was hard because all she could feel in the poses was her tightness and imbalances.  

A couple sessions in, Naomi was having increasing pockets of time that felt ‘amazing’, no pain. At this point, we started to have a good sense of the physical pattern/body habit causing her pain. It was time to start teaching her the tools so that she could be a partner in the process and feel empowered. 

She would often say that when you guide me, it changes everything. But I can't do it myself. I reminded her that it's not her turn yet. So how does she know that she won't be able to do it herself when she hasn't even tried it yet. After this happened a few times, I pursued it with her. That's when she opened up and said - "That's what I do. I put myself down. It's been a really good strategy for me." 

When we got into why that is, she shared that she spent her early childhood In Russia as an immigrant in very hostile conditions. Back in the day, educators put children down. Every single day.  They would yell at children and deliberately tell them that they would suck at everything. They'd do that to feel in control and in big part for the child's ‘benefit’. 

At this point, you must be wondering what child would benefit from being shown how inadequate they are? It had to do with the totalitarian nature of Soviet Russia. They felt that in order to be a part of society, the child mustn't disobey rules or they would get in trouble. It's like they were trying to make you fit in. To prepare you to be the ‘right’ person in society. 

Why were these adults so obsessed about keeping their kids out of trouble? Because they had experienced the horrors of ‘standing out’ during World War II. Standing out could get you in the gas chamber, and cost you your life in the most cruel way imaginable. Hiding could make it that you could sneak out of horrible situations unnoticed. 

So the difference between hiding and standing out was the difference between surviving and perishing. No wonder that the strategy for survivors like her great grandmother was to HIDE. It worked very well. She and the few like her managed to live when those that stood out got wiped out. Her paternal grandmother was one of two survivors in the family while 40 of them ended up in a mass grave.

Naomi had spent a lot of time with her great grandmother in those early years. She started to reminisce about how she’d inherited her fearful, anxious nature and the pattern of 'not standing out', ‘not drawing attention to herself’. 

Patterns like this can be passed on for generations, running our lives in the background, creating not just emotional struggles but also physical pain of chronic nature. This pattern transcended generations and Naomi wants that to stop now. She owes it to herself, her daughter and her future grandchildren to work through this pattern and not pass it on unconsciously. 

Your chronic pain narrative could be the result of seemingly benign experiences in your past

You don’t have to be a Jew raised in Soviet Union to have a personal story on the lines of 

‘I’m not good enough.’
‘I need to try hard’ so I can prove that I’m enough. 
‘I don’t want to be noticed.’

It could be a well intentioned admonishment repeated often enough by a loved one. It could be a comparison repeatedly drawn with a sibling that made you feel ‘not smart enough’. Or even an ‘expert’ telling you that something is ‘wrong’ with you that you’ve bought into and repeated to yourself often enough. 

Or maybe you were laughed at when you wore those fluorescent orange shoes in kindergarten and you remembered the humiliation from being laughed at in the playground. So you decided to never be bold or loud because drawing attention to yourself had a strong association with being laughed at and that you want to avoid at any cost. 

If Naomi continues to put herself down, it’ll hold her back from taking ownership of re-learning how to move in her body so that she doesn’t tense up her hip so bad that she can’t sit at her desk. She will need to clean up the ‘working too hard’ in places where it's counter-productive; rethink situations where hiding or not standing out is a good strategy and where it's not necessary and is actually hurting her. 

She’s being reflective of this and is starting to make some different choices one step at a time. When she acknowledges her patterns and can laugh at how they show up, she comes alive and playful in our movement explorations. She’s able to bring forth and prioritize fluidity and deliciousness in her movement practice and not just try too hard by tensing up or making big, but jerky movements that don't feel good. She is making things 'better for herself'.

This is potent because now we’re using that history, not as talk therapy, reliving the trauma but as a concrete and sustainable basis to turn around her chronic pain. She will always have that history but she won't be bound by it in ways that it don't serve her. 

If you’d like a sustainable sulution to your chronic pain, one that helps you surface, acknowledge and reconsider the personal narrative that might be perpetuating your chronic pain, schedule a 1:1 consult with me. I look forward to supporting you!