A few years ago I stepped on something outside my door. It was so painful that I assumed that a thorn or splinter had gone straight through my foot and was afraid to even look.
When I eventually did, I saw it was just a tiny splinter in my thin soled shoe and I pulled it out quickly without much afterpain.
Ouch. That’s what over a decade of pain had changed me into? This whiny, extremely oversensitive person? Except, I was sensitive before my chronic pain started and one should not use this word at all (what does it mean anyway. It’s like saying “you are over-lefthanded”) and especially not in in this context….
It reminded me of a story I once read, experienced by Lorimer Moseley, a clinical scientist from Australia who studies pain in humans. The very short version:
When he was bitten by a snake once, he was in a lot of pain and had to recover.
One day, he was walking in nature and thought a snake had bit him again, as he experienced the same pain and agony. But he had just brushed against a thorny bush…..
If a (new) pain is extreme, then to me it is more about duration, less about the severity.
How long will it take and how long will you have to endure it? If you knew this at the start, it would be a very different experience. I would say the key word is uncertainty. It’s the not knowing what you are facing and for how long (will it get even worse?) that makes it much harder and your brain registers it more as danger.
“The longer you have pain, the better your spinal cord gets at producing danger messages to the brain, even if there is no danger in the tissue” Lorimer Moseley
There are ways to retrain-the-brain and I am looking into these.
How is your experience? ❤
The chronic pain challenge 