Mindbody Therapy
Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2014 7:04 am
It is time for me to move on. I will just recap below some of the things that helped me. I suffered for 11 long years and I had 2 failed PNE surgeries but I recovered 100% from debilitating PNE pain by doing mind-body exercises.
My recovery time with the mind-body technique was roughly a year. I had to quit my job as an executive at a fairly large publicly-held company due to PNE. I was out of work for 5 years. I am back at work full time as I write this. I do not have any PN pain anymore. I sit as long as I want and travel internationally once again. I am an engineer by training and I was not open to the mind-body connection initially. Yet, I eventually defeated chronic pelvic pain by doing mind exercises.
The pain is real. It is not in our *heads*. Our muscles spasm and squeeze the pudendal nerve, but it is the brain that controls our muscles. By doing mind exercises, you can indeed release muscle tension. The key is to work on negative emotions that are stored in our implicit memory (sometimes called the reptilian brain and physically located in the amygdala) and bodies.
Why negative emotions? We do know that pain and emotions are processed by the same area of the brain. You can read about it and there are several theories including from distinguished scientists such as Dr. Candace Pert (John Hopkins, NIH - Book: "Molecules of emotion"), Dr. Robert Scaer (Uni of Rochester- Book: "The body bears the burden"), Dr.Peter Levine (UC Berkeley - Book: "Waking the tiger") or Prof. Robert M. Sapolsky (Stanford - Book: "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers").
The following Pert interview is a good intro:
http://www.naturalworldhealing.com/emot ... erview.htm
A misconception is that psychosomatic pain is due to stress. The misconception is partially due to the book a headache in the pelvis. That is a fallacy. Stress will indeed start the pain cycle (it lowers your pain threshold), but that is not always the cause. One of the causes may be the fact that we cope indeed too well with stress and repress the negative emotions associated with it.
In short you have to reconnect with a lifetime of repressed negative emotions. By definition they are repressed so you do not know what they are, you can only guess. What we are feeling on the surface is irrelevant. What is relevant is what we are NOT feeling and are repressing from our consciousness. We can be happy and fulfilled people but below the surface (and 100% unconsciously) we may be repressing our fear of aging or death for example.
The following video was a great source of inspiration for me and a good introduction to negative emotions as a culprit of chronic pain.
The video is made by Dr. Eric B. Robins MD, a board certified urologist and surgeon that practices at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Torrance California. He is a believer in the mind-body connection and cured his own back pain.
http://youtu.be/Au4QnLXvBIM
Some good resources I found are from mind-body coaches that work with patients and are the following:
Monte Hueftle:
http://www.runningpain.com/important_tms_updates
Pay attention to the "Sitting with your Feeling or Emotions" paragraph.
I also highly recommend Abigail Steidley's free ebook "The Key to Your Healing Journey":
http://abigailsteidley.com/
Abigail suffered from pelvic pain and cured herself.
What they wrote helped me clarify what it means to connect with emotions. It is short and it is a very good reference. It is all I needed to get cured.
As a disclaimer, I have never contacted Monte or Abigail. I recovered completely by myself.
TMSwiki and TMShelp are 2 forums dedicated to mind-body. While it is interesting to go searching for information, I would advise against participating to those forums for very long. While you participate to forums or research information on the internet, you are distracting yourself and not healing. If you want to heal using the mind-body technique you must work on your emotions and stop searching for answers.
I am also skeptical of the numerous structured mind-body programs (Schubiner, Schechter et al.). It is too constraining for me but YMMV.
If you go to the TMSwiki or TMShelp, you will notice that those forums promote Sarno's ideas. Sarno believes that repressed negative emotions are the cause of most chronic pain. So far so good, but he then says that by simply being aware of the mechanism, you can heal. That did not work for me and for many others (maybe it worked before the Internet when there was no access to a plethora of conflicting information). Monte or Abigail start from Sarno's postulate but advocate to work on emotions directly. I agree with them.
In any case, the way is to be 100% dedicated to your recovery and not be distracted or discouraged. You should first get examined by a doctor to make sure that you do not have an obvious medical problem that explains your pain.
The only maintenance I do now is that I am mindful of my emotions in my day to day life. I experience my emotions (emotions are a physical sensation in reaction to a thought) instead of repressing them.
My recovery time with the mind-body technique was roughly a year. I had to quit my job as an executive at a fairly large publicly-held company due to PNE. I was out of work for 5 years. I am back at work full time as I write this. I do not have any PN pain anymore. I sit as long as I want and travel internationally once again. I am an engineer by training and I was not open to the mind-body connection initially. Yet, I eventually defeated chronic pelvic pain by doing mind exercises.
The pain is real. It is not in our *heads*. Our muscles spasm and squeeze the pudendal nerve, but it is the brain that controls our muscles. By doing mind exercises, you can indeed release muscle tension. The key is to work on negative emotions that are stored in our implicit memory (sometimes called the reptilian brain and physically located in the amygdala) and bodies.
Why negative emotions? We do know that pain and emotions are processed by the same area of the brain. You can read about it and there are several theories including from distinguished scientists such as Dr. Candace Pert (John Hopkins, NIH - Book: "Molecules of emotion"), Dr. Robert Scaer (Uni of Rochester- Book: "The body bears the burden"), Dr.Peter Levine (UC Berkeley - Book: "Waking the tiger") or Prof. Robert M. Sapolsky (Stanford - Book: "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers").
The following Pert interview is a good intro:
http://www.naturalworldhealing.com/emot ... erview.htm
A misconception is that psychosomatic pain is due to stress. The misconception is partially due to the book a headache in the pelvis. That is a fallacy. Stress will indeed start the pain cycle (it lowers your pain threshold), but that is not always the cause. One of the causes may be the fact that we cope indeed too well with stress and repress the negative emotions associated with it.
In short you have to reconnect with a lifetime of repressed negative emotions. By definition they are repressed so you do not know what they are, you can only guess. What we are feeling on the surface is irrelevant. What is relevant is what we are NOT feeling and are repressing from our consciousness. We can be happy and fulfilled people but below the surface (and 100% unconsciously) we may be repressing our fear of aging or death for example.
The following video was a great source of inspiration for me and a good introduction to negative emotions as a culprit of chronic pain.
The video is made by Dr. Eric B. Robins MD, a board certified urologist and surgeon that practices at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Torrance California. He is a believer in the mind-body connection and cured his own back pain.
http://youtu.be/Au4QnLXvBIM
Some good resources I found are from mind-body coaches that work with patients and are the following:
Monte Hueftle:
http://www.runningpain.com/important_tms_updates
Pay attention to the "Sitting with your Feeling or Emotions" paragraph.
I also highly recommend Abigail Steidley's free ebook "The Key to Your Healing Journey":
http://abigailsteidley.com/
Abigail suffered from pelvic pain and cured herself.
What they wrote helped me clarify what it means to connect with emotions. It is short and it is a very good reference. It is all I needed to get cured.
As a disclaimer, I have never contacted Monte or Abigail. I recovered completely by myself.
TMSwiki and TMShelp are 2 forums dedicated to mind-body. While it is interesting to go searching for information, I would advise against participating to those forums for very long. While you participate to forums or research information on the internet, you are distracting yourself and not healing. If you want to heal using the mind-body technique you must work on your emotions and stop searching for answers.
I am also skeptical of the numerous structured mind-body programs (Schubiner, Schechter et al.). It is too constraining for me but YMMV.
If you go to the TMSwiki or TMShelp, you will notice that those forums promote Sarno's ideas. Sarno believes that repressed negative emotions are the cause of most chronic pain. So far so good, but he then says that by simply being aware of the mechanism, you can heal. That did not work for me and for many others (maybe it worked before the Internet when there was no access to a plethora of conflicting information). Monte or Abigail start from Sarno's postulate but advocate to work on emotions directly. I agree with them.
In any case, the way is to be 100% dedicated to your recovery and not be distracted or discouraged. You should first get examined by a doctor to make sure that you do not have an obvious medical problem that explains your pain.
The only maintenance I do now is that I am mindful of my emotions in my day to day life. I experience my emotions (emotions are a physical sensation in reaction to a thought) instead of repressing them.