January 1, 2024 • 42 mins
How much of our physical pain is a reaction to our emotional pain? How could we release that past to improve our physical form in the present time? Is life without pain available to us?
These questions and more discussing trauma therapists Barb Smith Varclova from Your Steps Counselling (https://your-steps.co.uk) and Danijela Mrdak from Mindfreedom Therapy (mindfreedomtherapy.com)
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Episode Transcript
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(00:13):
Hello and welcome to our new episode of
the podcast Way Out of Childhood Trauma.
It's our episode eleven.
And I'm Barb Smith Varclova
from Trauma Response Reprogramming.
And here with me is Danjiela Mrdak
from Mind Freedom Therapy.
Welcome Lela.
(00:35):
Hi, Barb. Thank you.
It's an honour to be on your podcast again and happy
that today with our topic we are going to help so
many people because I think that pain and chronic pain are
very important from the perspective of mental health.
(00:56):
And we feel pain from the moment of conception.
We feel the pain of our mother,
we feel all of her emotions.
So throughout our life pain is something
that is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
And there are many therapies that can
(01:17):
help people to manage their pain.
Because pain has its own anatomy, emotional anatomy and can
go from your mind to your body because mind and
body have this amazing connection that can never be.
(01:45):
Can you help me fully understand is it
because there is so many influences between that?
So it's sometimes very hard to
understand how it's all working.
But we're getting knowledge about
that and that's really important.
And you are absolutely right, the pain is so important.
I know lately a lot of people becoming almost like
(02:09):
angry that they are refused to being given painkillers by
doctors and told that they should find a different ways.
And because people really start to believe that
pain is really something medical which needs to
be diagnosed and needs to be medicated.
(02:32):
So only just kind of suppressing
it and not really looking.
What are these reasons why we have the pain?
What is actually a role of the pain in our lives?
And the fact is that pain in our lives
isn't the problem, it is actually the sign post
(02:54):
that points you in the direction of the problem.
So pain sensations are expressed through a
special sensory nerve pathway called nociceptors.
And when you experience something painful which is
called noxious stimulation, these special nerves send a
(03:16):
signal through your spinal cord up to your
brain and then the brain detects the noxious
and generates an emotional or behavioural response.
Responses like crying or grabbing the area of the
pain or shifting your weight to lessen the pain.
(03:38):
And I have seen that with so many clients.
If you can decrease their anxiety, depression, stress their
sleep problems and improve the quality of their sleep,
then you can also get the pain levels down
to two or three points and on the pain
(03:59):
scale so that life can become more manageable.
Because the sleep component is very important
because the lack of sleep has to
do with anxiety and depression and stress.
But we can get clients to get on a
(04:22):
good schedule of sleeping and have this sleeping routine
that is one of the probably biggest things that
we can try to do to help them.
Because when they have regular sleep cycle they
can also decrease their levels of stress.
(04:42):
But other thing that is also very important is that
they get enough rest and fullness is also important.
Trying to get clients brains to slow down is
also very important when it comes to thinking about
anxiety because depression is always about our thoughts being
(05:07):
trapped in the past in the past experiences.
And anxiety is always about the future,
the feel of future, what future holds.
So there is a link the relationship between pain and
depression and you can think of it as bi directional
meaning because each entity influences the other pain worsens or
(05:32):
can even cause depression and depression worsens.
The pain tolerance and the worsening of your
pain is not just your perception because you
feel down depression increases your sensitivity to pain
you cannot tolerate the pain anymore and ask
(05:52):
yourself when will I get better?
What if I don't get better?
What if I get worse and when will this pain stop?
So if your pain doesn't stop after three months,
then it means that you now have chronic pain.
So if you are depressed, you will probably feel
(06:14):
pain more intensively because this is related to what
we call the somatization of depression or the tendency
to feel depression in your body.
Depression can affect you physically, even if
you don't have any pain problems.
(06:34):
Because when you get depressed, you get to be
more sensitive and your body sensations are more sensitive.
And everything you experience, every negative experience, you
feel it more intensified and can have a
(06:55):
complaint of joint pain or headaches or dizziness
or fibromyalgia myalgia or migraines.
And you may feel bloated as well, or constipated.
And it's not because you're depressed that you
have these problems, it's because you neglect yourself,
(07:16):
you neglect your fluid intake because when you
get depressed you neglect yourself and then you
have slower moving bowels and then your mental
state magnifies the intensity of this experience.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
(07:37):
And you explain it so well, so people can
see it in their relationship with their anxiety, with
their depression, with their symptoms of PTSD, that the
sensitivity is heightened and any pain, it's feel more.
But also important.
(07:58):
It's that things which are now very well
researched and it's actually not new research.
It's started it's already in 40s last century,
so some of them even in 20s.
So some of that research is already 100 years old.
So that's not really novelty for us to realise
(08:18):
that if the doctor is saying that your pain
is psychosomatic, it doesn't mean you are crazy.
And some people like don't tell me I am
crazy, don't tell me that I don't have pain.
And they say we don't telling you that you
don't have pain, we're just telling you that your
pain is not caused by some virus, bacteria or
(08:39):
injury and that's actually unfortunately the biggest source of
the pain in current world is that pain which
is caused by our mental state.
And it's about how it's beautifully described
in the book Body Keep the Score.
(08:59):
All traumatic events affecting our body and
development of our body are suppressed.
Emotion are stored in the body and they
not supposed to be there, is it?
So body trying to do something with that.
And one of the way how
it start manifesting is the pain.
It's autoimmune disorders and it's a pain in
(09:20):
the joints or muscles or procuring inflammations.
And it's very important to be willing to work
with that, be willing to look at that.
And that's unfortunately, a lot of
(09:42):
people still don't understand this relation.
It's calling quantum healing and that relation between our
mindset and our body and the deepness and that
level of it a lot of people don't understand.
They still kind of feel that they need to get
some medication for it or they need some painkillers or
(10:02):
they should have some surgery but that's not really helping.
But I did help myself because I really
started this journey because of extreme pain.
I had I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue
syndrome when I was 17 years old.
And he said you're not supposed to have
this situation when you are so young.
(10:25):
Even it's usually like people
between 30, 40s have this.
But when I start looking at that,
I said I cannot live like this.
I have to do something with that.
I cannot be my achievement of
the day going to the toilet.
And then what brought me even on this journey finding
(10:49):
how the mind influencing the body and how we can
help ourself or others when we start understanding the reasons
behind the pain that the pain is messenger.
The pain is messenger from the
mind telling us something is wrong.
You need to change something.
It's not right. How are you saying?
(11:10):
And it's not that you are crazy.
It's not that your reasons are not logical but they
are logical in some point of view as the child
which will start to be afraid and not expressing themselves
and get to the freeze mode and totally suppress their
anger then that freeze that stuck in start
(11:35):
creating the pain in the body.
We would have it even athletes would say like
if you're running the marathon after marathon you feel
tired and your muscles will be painful.
And if somebody keep running from situations because of mental
awareness of danger for them the muscles reacting the same
(11:58):
way they get tired and they get painful.
So it's really important to start understanding that
pain can be helped with mental therapy.
And for many people it's still not
like do you understand how it's linked?
(12:19):
And I ask one person if you were willing as
proof to do with mental therapy for fibromyalgia.
And she said, okay, I want
to try because it's really hard.
I will give it try.
(12:41):
And she was so surprised.
She was so surprised that after
three months we worked together.
She was without flare ups, she wasn't tired,
she has no pain and she's a completely
different person than she was before.
She's happy, she's moving, she's doing
(13:03):
her thing, she's writing the book.
And I think that it was very brave of
her to look on the path, which was very
hard, very traumatised person since childhood, through adulthood.
And I'm not surprised that she had so many
physical pain because she had so much emotional pain.
(13:24):
And it's about that, that pain, that weight of
emotional pain has to show up somewhere and that
emotional pain will show up as the physical pain.
So that link between being depressed, we have anxiety and
have the pain is there and it's very strong.
(13:49):
Yes, it's like the pain is saying all the
time see me, look at me, I'm here.
And the pain really can stay for so long
in our emotional body and after some time it
can become illness because there is a somatic component
(14:12):
where you have body manifestations of the pain.
So let's say if you have a back injury
or some other source of pain like arthritis, if
you also have depression, it will make you more
sensitive to the pain such that you will experience
(14:34):
pain longer and you may not respond to your
regular doses of medicine the way you should respond.
So the relationship between pain and depression
is also the relationship with chronic pain
(14:55):
because this is unresolved pain.
If you have pain that you haven't resolved in
a longer time, then you will have physical manifestations.
So sensation of pain that comes from
somewhere, someplace in your body, it can
be from everywhere in your body.
(15:17):
But this sensation of pain gets interpreted in your
brain and then the brain produces an emotional response.
And the place in the brain where this decoding
of pain information take place is close to the
areas of your brain for mood regulation.
(15:37):
So you can imagine that the injury pathways and imagine
how easy what is going on on the injury area
gets spilled over the mood area and vice versa.
It is very close connection.
So a proposed process for
(16:00):
this is called neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is defined as the ability of
the brain to form and reorganise synaptic
connection, especially in the process of learning,
experience or following an injury.
So you can also think of pain
(16:22):
or depression as injury states, because injury
states are associated with looser connections and
poor communications between themselves.
But not everyone with chronic pain will get
depression as mental illness, as a condition.
(16:44):
If you have chronic pain, you can feel discouraged, you can
feel low, you can feel that this pain will never end,
but that doesn't mean that you will be depressed.
So I think one of the hardest components of people with
chronic pain is when you complain to someone, when you tell
(17:09):
somebody how you feel and people say to you well, your
pain is ridiculous, it is something in your head.
And sometimes it is very surprising when doctors
say to their patients oh, this is all
in your head, everything is okay with it.
There is nothing wrong with you because doctors are
(17:29):
there to help you, to listen to you and
when they are dismissive it really hurts you because
your pain wants attention and wants to be validated.
It's just like every emotion wants to be validated.
If you don't express healthy anger and if you just keep it
inside it come back in uglier ways it will become pain or
(17:53):
it will become rage because it wants to be seen.
It's saying I'm here, I'm here in
your heart, I'm in your head.
I'm trying to be notice me.
And I have worked with one lady that was using
morphine and she was feeling a lot entire life because
(18:18):
when she was eleven years old she has experienced the
loss of her parents in car accident but also she
lost her leg so she lost a body part and
she felt a lot of physical pain.
She was in a coma and she never
grieved the loss of her both parents in
this accident and throughout her entire life.
(18:40):
She had so much emotional pain and
grief and sadness and this unexpressed grief.
Grief over losing your loved ones, your caregivers,
losing your body part is so complicated.
(19:01):
And over time it became more complicated and
created a lot of health issues for her.
So it is very important to get the help you need
because if you start asking yourself what if I get worse?
When will I get better?
(19:22):
What if I never get better?
What if this condition never ends?
Or what if there is no help for me?
If you're asking yourself these questions you
should probably start looking for professional help.
I think that you very well said that what
doctors saying there's nothing wrong with your body in
(19:46):
the way of they measure as the western uni
medicine that it's all in your head.
They are actually right of course it's
very insensitive way they telling the people
but they are right about that.
Pain which is mythis is really not always on
(20:07):
something which can be dealt in medication or something
like that but unfortunately people still don't have access
or information about that they can be helped.
For example, with me, when we're
working with RTT, rapid Transformational Therapy.
It's the one of the things we do.
(20:29):
We're helping people with the pain exactly.
When their source of the pain is emotional pain.
From childhood, from accident.
And you can see it.
And it's very well actually documented from the
recovery centres of people with the injuries or
your example of people with the lost limbs.
(20:50):
That attitude and belief and mental
state, is that actually critical?
Thing for them for recovery, for what
will be quality of their life.
And they very well know that working with people with
their belief, with process that was happened, the grieving process
(21:15):
it's the part when it's necessary for them today and
they would say like somebody had some injury and they
are much worse off than somebody who has much harder
injury and maybe has the more physical damage.
And they are better off because they believe they
keep going, they not give up on the life.
(21:36):
They process that feelings of loss, they process that feeling of
change and accept that change and adapt their life on the
different world than compared to those who hold on on that
path and hold on on what they lost.
So you are absolutely right that it's insensitive
(21:58):
the way how the doctor is telling them
and the pain of people is real.
But it's also important to what I want to say
is that if listen to us, anybody who has the
pain and chronic pain or don't know where it's coming
(22:21):
from or it's not getting better, reach for help.
We have both of us, many
clients which help with the pain.
I had a lady which had a really severe back pain
that's stopping her from walking and just after one session it
was gone because it was something what was stuck there from
(22:42):
the past and tried to remind her or something.
Very often the pain is a reminder of something when
we trying to suppress or forgot or we didn't process
and it can be released and can be gone, just
can be absolutely body has so powerful recovery function.
(23:02):
Sometimes people ask me like how is this possible?
How is this possible?
The pain is there because the
nerves are squashed or something.
I feel like yeah, but the body
has so enormous, like a recovery function.
Is it like when we take that you have broken bone
in six weeks, eight weeks, it will be totally rebuild.
(23:25):
And you will watch how they're building up the new
connections and the stem cells will change the bone cells
and all these name of the fibres that you will
get there and the organs will start producing the things
which needs to be for calcium will be taking from
the bloodstream everything that power of body to be able
(23:49):
to rebuild what need to be rebuilt. It's amazing.
So yeah, maybe we can speak
about that it's on physical level.
We have somewhere some squashed nerve or some hardening
of the nerve covers like with multiple sclerosis, stuff
like that but doesn't mean that it's forever.
(24:11):
We can actually ask the mind to change the
orders, change the orders and go different way and
do it and I really love it's.
A cartoon series for children making in
France in a few decades back.
This is the life.
And it's explaining for children how this how
(24:35):
how the cells changing, how they're connecting, how
they're repairing things, and exactly how the commands
for doing that coming from the brain, like
the little messengers running there with the little
leaflets, like, here is information.
Do this, do this, do this.
And how it's working if they messed up
and running somewhere else or something like that.
(24:56):
But it's about that.
If we give the mind the right order
to rebuild that disc in the spine, we
rebuild that joint cartilage, we rebuild attendance, we
rebuild that vascular structures, stuff like that, the
body is absolutely capable to do so.
And when we do, then pain is gone
(25:19):
because that pain is that messenger running or
not be able to run on that nurse.
And when we say like, yeah, I do hear you, I
know what you want, I know what you're calling for, I
giving you to he can stop running, he was hurt.
(25:41):
I want people encourage to give it try and
reach for the therapists who working with the pain.
Because I know that it still seems very sci fiction
for many people and I heard all these reactions.
So if you have them, it's fine.
I think probably has all of them, but it's
(26:03):
proven, it's many research behind from last literally century.
There is so much research by Deepak Chopra, by
Jose Silva, by Rudigher Dalke, by Gabor Mate, but
there is a wide range of researches about linked
between mindset and body, about how the body managing.
(26:29):
So pain is the one of this part which
can be held, which can be changed, which we
don't have to live in the pain forever, we
don't have to learn to live with the pain.
Sometimes people like us, therapists can be trained
(26:51):
to lower their anxiety so that when our
brain goes into this fear response, we can
be trained to say I'm fine, I'm okay.
But there is no real danger.
This is all imaginary danger.
(27:12):
But the body can say the opposite.
The body can say no, you're not okay.
So we have to listen to our body.
And the biggest enemies of the chronic
pain are fear, worry and stress.
So the anxiety comes from because we don't
(27:36):
want to duplicate the negative, painful, traumatic experiences
from our past and we fear that we're
never going to be safe in the world.
But depression comes from things that usually
have happened before in our past and
we have unresolved trauma, unresolved pain.
(27:59):
And that's why sometimes the doctors or the official
medicine cannot find the cause of your physical pain.
It's embodied in somewhere in some organ,
in some system of your body, but
they cannot detect what is the cause.
So sometimes when I have clients with chronic pains as
(28:19):
a presenting issue, I also spend time explaining them that
when they have anxiety, when they have fears and worries,
it is very important to practise mindfulness daily because this
is in a way for a nervous system.
(28:40):
Also, I wanted to say that it is
very important to teach our clients that they
don't say that the pain is mine.
They don't say my pain.
They should say the pain.
Because this is the neutral way
of speaking about the pain.
Because when you say it's my pain, my old
(29:03):
pain, it becomes something that you own and you
never want to lose something that you own.
Your brain doesn't love losing something that is part
of your identity, a part of your body.
That's why people also have problems with
losing weight and weight management because the
(29:24):
brain doesn't like this command, losing something.
And when you do have the combination
of pain and depression, or pain and
anxiety, you have different approaches for both.
So you have to treat both problems.
(29:45):
So cognitive behavioural therapy is good when it's
targeted on the pain management or depression.
Hypnotherapy is an amazing tool, a specialised therapy
where a therapist gets you into trancelike state
and then speaks positive suggestions about your pain
(30:10):
and that you internalise and act on.
And this all happens in Alpha brain wave.
So you're trying to say that this is the pain
and in hypnotherapy, hypnotherapist will help you to access the
(30:31):
root cause from the subconscious level of your mind.
But also very effective is self hypnosis.
And you can easily learn self hypnosis.
But there is an amazing therapy called
Rapid Transformational Therapy and it is helping
you reframe your thoughts around your pain.
(30:54):
The meaning, the interpretation, the pictures you have
created about this pain in your mind.
And you can easily eliminate them
in Rapid Transformational therapy session.
And you can also eliminate the
cause, the root of the pain.
And you will also get the transformational audio
(31:15):
recording which is remarkable because it can give
commands to your subconscious mind to start releasing
the pain from every part of your body,
but also from your mind, from your heart.
Because one of the most powerful things we can do
with our mind is to let go, to let go
of our past, let go of our pain.
(31:38):
And also this recording will give you great coping
skills to work with this pain management and decrease
the pain levels from ten to eight, then from
eight to five and to lessen and decrease the
pain levels throughout the time.
And having regular sessions, getting help regularly is also
(32:01):
very important because many of our clients get the
help and they feel amazing, they feel better and
then they stop coming for their session which is
not good for their recovery, right? Barb?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
We know that it's very powerful and it's working,
but it's usually we need more than one session.
(32:22):
If somebody have the really chronic pain, if they have
one of pain or particle area under the pain, that
quite often can be resolved with just the one session
or one month of kind of treatment.
But if somebody had the chronic pain, then we would
find more often that it's related to the childhood trauma.
It's why we put it as the topic of
(32:43):
arteries episode on the podcast the Weight of childhood
Trauma because the pain is one of the often
symptoms of people with the childhood trauma.
So then it's needed more sessions and it's really
about to believe that there is available life without
pain and that's sometimes that the hardest part.
(33:04):
People need to overcome that, believe that they do
deserve and they can and is available for them
the life without pain, that it's not something they
need to accept to have pain.
Because a lot of people have
this, like, oh, I'm getting older.
That's normal, have the pain, or I had the children.
(33:24):
It's normal, have the pain, or I had
the injury, so it's normal, have the pain.
It's not normal to have the pain in any age.
So yeah, when we get older, very often we have the more
what we didn't process but you would find a lot of people
which are in old age and they don't have any pain.
(33:45):
Here I'm living in Scotland, I'm living in the rural area
and actually in Har village there are like a lot of
people going that's not a very uncommon age to go on.
And these lady and guys, you will see
(34:05):
them keep walking around going for like three
mile walk, like working on the garden.
They kind of never slow down and stuff
like that when you be with them.
They have very positive outcome of the life
and they just believe that they deserve to
(34:25):
have the good life and enjoy the life.
They are probably one of the last people who remember
the war, second war so they so value the life
and they just believe that life is great and life
is amazing, that they don't have any pain.
(34:46):
They manage to process all that what happened
to them and their families and their children,
and they're just enjoying the life.
And that's great motivation for me to work
with people with pain, because, as I said,
I went personally through a lot of pain.
(35:07):
So I know how people feel.
And I know that sometimes almost easier to
start belief like, oh, it cannot get better.
Just give me some pills.
But the pills never function long term, they never solve
the issue, it will keep coming back or it's kind
of taking edge off, it's not like fully off.
(35:29):
So get to that state when you don't have
pain, when you can just be yourself, when pain
is not something which limits you from activities you
like because very often pain is the reason why
people not exercise, not dance, not socialise, not going
to cinema, not going to out with friends.
(35:51):
So it's kind of way of isolation.
So again, we all deserve to be with other people,
be connected and do what we enjoy to do and
the pain not necessarily has to stop us from it.
It is available and I'm really glad that we was
(36:14):
able to speak about this on this episode because as
we always saying, we're doing this to bring the hope,
bring the hope to the people and I think it's
really important for people who suffer with pain, chronic pain,
fibriomalgia or other autoimmune diseases, that there is hope.
There is hope that even if it sounds
(36:36):
now strange for you, maybe you hear it
first time or you don't understand it fully.
There is direct link between our mindset and how
it's manifesting in the body as the pain.
And when we change the mindset, when we change what's happened
in the past, when we process it, when we reprogram it,
(37:01):
the pain can be gone and there is truly thousands of
people around the world which can wow for it, which went
through it and get off the pain.
I am one of them, but I help many
and I know many which went through it.
There is plenty of books and research so if you
want to learn more about that, go and do it
(37:23):
and look for quantum healing or body and mind relaxing
or holistic medicine and stuff like that.
You can find a lot of information about that also now.
So that's something which now even some
(37:45):
universities already start teaching to medical profession
and it's a true be told reason.
For example in UK was now giving directive about
lowering the pain medication described to the people because
they're not working, they're not solving the issues and
they know that the solution is somewhere else.
(38:11):
What will be your last advice to people with the pain?
What do you would recommend them?
Well, I would love to say
that pain is absolutely natural.
It's absolutely natural to feel
pain, but it's not normal.
And as society we tend to normalise things that we
(38:35):
cannot explain and we create some kind of myth around
pain, but it is really something that is not normal
and if it's not normal, it's not acceptable.
So you have to do something about that pain.
And I think that there is a lot of pain us
(38:58):
from prenatal period of our life before we were even born.
So there is a lot of old pain in all of
us and I've witnessed that in my sessions with my clients
when they had memories, when they were in the womb and
they felt unsafe, they felt that they shouldn't be born or
they felt unwanted and maybe life threatened.
(39:21):
So I think that I always love acronyms and
I remember that I've read something amazing about pain
and it says pay attention inwards now.
So pay attention inwards now.
That's what is pain trying to tell you and it's inviting
(39:43):
you to go inside of your oldest memories and your subconscious
mind is a great library of all your experiences and definitely
find out the root cause of your pain.
If you use the non medication options, and we
(40:06):
mentioned many of them, many of the treatments that
will really help you to resolve this pain and
trauma because medications can help you temporary, but they
will always mask pain and you will feel.
The relief for a moment, but not permanently.
(40:28):
So, just like you said, Barb, hope.
There is hope.
Pain can end, but we have to be
the participants of our own healing process.
I really love that.
I have to remember that pain attention inwards. Now.
That's amazing description of the pain. Absolutely.
(40:52):
Yes. Beautiful.
So thank you very much for being here with us
and I think that if anybody have any question on
us, please contact us on our website on podbean or
you can leave the comment wherever you listen to our
(41:16):
podcast, if it's on the YouTube or on Spotify, Google
Podcast, Podbean, I Heart Radio.
Or if you can contact us on the Facebook,
you find me as the Barb Smith Varclova or Danjiela
Mrdak and we would love to hear from you.
And if you have any questions or topic you would
(41:36):
want us to speak about or you would want to
ask us some questions, we would leave the message and
we would happily speak on that topic.
So see you in the next time.
Bye for now.
Bye.
Hello and welcome to our new episode of
the podcast Way Out of Childhood Trauma.
It's our episode eleven.
And I'm Barb Smith Varclova
from Trauma Response Reprogramming.
And here with me is Danjiela Mrdak
from Mind Freedom Therapy.
Welcome Lela.
(00:35):
Hi, Barb. Thank you.
It's an honour to be on your podcast again and happy
that today with our topic we are going to help so
many people because I think that pain and chronic pain are
very important from the perspective of mental health.
(00:56):
And we feel pain from the moment of conception.
We feel the pain of our mother,
we feel all of her emotions.
So throughout our life pain is something
that is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
And there are many therapies that can
(01:17):
help people to manage their pain.
Because pain has its own anatomy, emotional anatomy and can
go from your mind to your body because mind and
body have this amazing connection that can never be.
(01:45):
Can you help me fully understand is it
because there is so many influences between that?
So it's sometimes very hard to
understand how it's all working.
But we're getting knowledge about
that and that's really important.
And you are absolutely right, the pain is so important.
I know lately a lot of people becoming almost like
(02:09):
angry that they are refused to being given painkillers by
doctors and told that they should find a different ways.
And because people really start to believe that
pain is really something medical which needs to
be diagnosed and needs to be medicated.
(02:32):
So only just kind of suppressing
it and not really looking.
What are these reasons why we have the pain?
What is actually a role of the pain in our lives?
And the fact is that pain in our lives
isn't the problem, it is actually the sign post
(02:54):
that points you in the direction of the problem.
So pain sensations are expressed through a
special sensory nerve pathway called nociceptors.
And when you experience something painful which is
called noxious stimulation, these special nerves send a
(03:16):
signal through your spinal cord up to your
brain and then the brain detects the noxious
and generates an emotional or behavioural response.
Responses like crying or grabbing the area of the
pain or shifting your weight to lessen the pain.
(03:38):
And I have seen that with so many clients.
If you can decrease their anxiety, depression, stress their
sleep problems and improve the quality of their sleep,
then you can also get the pain levels down
to two or three points and on the pain
(03:59):
scale so that life can become more manageable.
Because the sleep component is very important
because the lack of sleep has to
do with anxiety and depression and stress.
But we can get clients to get on a
(04:22):
good schedule of sleeping and have this sleeping routine
that is one of the probably biggest things that
we can try to do to help them.
Because when they have regular sleep cycle they
can also decrease their levels of stress.
(04:42):
But other thing that is also very important is that
they get enough rest and fullness is also important.
Trying to get clients brains to slow down is
also very important when it comes to thinking about
anxiety because depression is always about our thoughts being
(05:07):
trapped in the past in the past experiences.
And anxiety is always about the future,
the feel of future, what future holds.
So there is a link the relationship between pain and
depression and you can think of it as bi directional
meaning because each entity influences the other pain worsens or
(05:32):
can even cause depression and depression worsens.
The pain tolerance and the worsening of your
pain is not just your perception because you
feel down depression increases your sensitivity to pain
you cannot tolerate the pain anymore and ask
(05:52):
yourself when will I get better?
What if I don't get better?
What if I get worse and when will this pain stop?
So if your pain doesn't stop after three months,
then it means that you now have chronic pain.
So if you are depressed, you will probably feel
(06:14):
pain more intensively because this is related to what
we call the somatization of depression or the tendency
to feel depression in your body.
Depression can affect you physically, even if
you don't have any pain problems.
(06:34):
Because when you get depressed, you get to be
more sensitive and your body sensations are more sensitive.
And everything you experience, every negative experience, you
feel it more intensified and can have a
(06:55):
complaint of joint pain or headaches or dizziness
or fibromyalgia myalgia or migraines.
And you may feel bloated as well, or constipated.
And it's not because you're depressed that you
have these problems, it's because you neglect yourself,
(07:16):
you neglect your fluid intake because when you
get depressed you neglect yourself and then you
have slower moving bowels and then your mental
state magnifies the intensity of this experience.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
(07:37):
And you explain it so well, so people can
see it in their relationship with their anxiety, with
their depression, with their symptoms of PTSD, that the
sensitivity is heightened and any pain, it's feel more.
But also important.
(07:58):
It's that things which are now very well
researched and it's actually not new research.
It's started it's already in 40s last century,
so some of them even in 20s.
So some of that research is already 100 years old.
So that's not really novelty for us to realise
(08:18):
that if the doctor is saying that your pain
is psychosomatic, it doesn't mean you are crazy.
And some people like don't tell me I am
crazy, don't tell me that I don't have pain.
And they say we don't telling you that you
don't have pain, we're just telling you that your
pain is not caused by some virus, bacteria or
(08:39):
injury and that's actually unfortunately the biggest source of
the pain in current world is that pain which
is caused by our mental state.
And it's about how it's beautifully described
in the book Body Keep the Score.
(08:59):
All traumatic events affecting our body and
development of our body are suppressed.
Emotion are stored in the body and they
not supposed to be there, is it?
So body trying to do something with that.
And one of the way how
it start manifesting is the pain.
It's autoimmune disorders and it's a pain in
(09:20):
the joints or muscles or procuring inflammations.
And it's very important to be willing to work
with that, be willing to look at that.
And that's unfortunately, a lot of
(09:42):
people still don't understand this relation.
It's calling quantum healing and that relation between our
mindset and our body and the deepness and that
level of it a lot of people don't understand.
They still kind of feel that they need to get
some medication for it or they need some painkillers or
(10:02):
they should have some surgery but that's not really helping.
But I did help myself because I really
started this journey because of extreme pain.
I had I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue
syndrome when I was 17 years old.
And he said you're not supposed to have
this situation when you are so young.
(10:25):
Even it's usually like people
between 30, 40s have this.
But when I start looking at that,
I said I cannot live like this.
I have to do something with that.
I cannot be my achievement of
the day going to the toilet.
And then what brought me even on this journey finding
(10:49):
how the mind influencing the body and how we can
help ourself or others when we start understanding the reasons
behind the pain that the pain is messenger.
The pain is messenger from the
mind telling us something is wrong.
You need to change something.
It's not right. How are you saying?
(11:10):
And it's not that you are crazy.
It's not that your reasons are not logical but they
are logical in some point of view as the child
which will start to be afraid and not expressing themselves
and get to the freeze mode and totally suppress their
anger then that freeze that stuck in start
(11:35):
creating the pain in the body.
We would have it even athletes would say like
if you're running the marathon after marathon you feel
tired and your muscles will be painful.
And if somebody keep running from situations because of mental
awareness of danger for them the muscles reacting the same
(11:58):
way they get tired and they get painful.
So it's really important to start understanding that
pain can be helped with mental therapy.
And for many people it's still not
like do you understand how it's linked?
(12:19):
And I ask one person if you were willing as
proof to do with mental therapy for fibromyalgia.
And she said, okay, I want
to try because it's really hard.
I will give it try.
(12:41):
And she was so surprised.
She was so surprised that after
three months we worked together.
She was without flare ups, she wasn't tired,
she has no pain and she's a completely
different person than she was before.
She's happy, she's moving, she's doing
(13:03):
her thing, she's writing the book.
And I think that it was very brave of
her to look on the path, which was very
hard, very traumatised person since childhood, through adulthood.
And I'm not surprised that she had so many
physical pain because she had so much emotional pain.
(13:24):
And it's about that, that pain, that weight of
emotional pain has to show up somewhere and that
emotional pain will show up as the physical pain.
So that link between being depressed, we have anxiety and
have the pain is there and it's very strong.
(13:49):
Yes, it's like the pain is saying all the
time see me, look at me, I'm here.
And the pain really can stay for so long
in our emotional body and after some time it
can become illness because there is a somatic component
(14:12):
where you have body manifestations of the pain.
So let's say if you have a back injury
or some other source of pain like arthritis, if
you also have depression, it will make you more
sensitive to the pain such that you will experience
(14:34):
pain longer and you may not respond to your
regular doses of medicine the way you should respond.
So the relationship between pain and depression
is also the relationship with chronic pain
(14:55):
because this is unresolved pain.
If you have pain that you haven't resolved in
a longer time, then you will have physical manifestations.
So sensation of pain that comes from
somewhere, someplace in your body, it can
be from everywhere in your body.
(15:17):
But this sensation of pain gets interpreted in your
brain and then the brain produces an emotional response.
And the place in the brain where this decoding
of pain information take place is close to the
areas of your brain for mood regulation.
(15:37):
So you can imagine that the injury pathways and imagine
how easy what is going on on the injury area
gets spilled over the mood area and vice versa.
It is very close connection.
So a proposed process for
(16:00):
this is called neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is defined as the ability of
the brain to form and reorganise synaptic
connection, especially in the process of learning,
experience or following an injury.
So you can also think of pain
(16:22):
or depression as injury states, because injury
states are associated with looser connections and
poor communications between themselves.
But not everyone with chronic pain will get
depression as mental illness, as a condition.
(16:44):
If you have chronic pain, you can feel discouraged, you can
feel low, you can feel that this pain will never end,
but that doesn't mean that you will be depressed.
So I think one of the hardest components of people with
chronic pain is when you complain to someone, when you tell
(17:09):
somebody how you feel and people say to you well, your
pain is ridiculous, it is something in your head.
And sometimes it is very surprising when doctors
say to their patients oh, this is all
in your head, everything is okay with it.
There is nothing wrong with you because doctors are
(17:29):
there to help you, to listen to you and
when they are dismissive it really hurts you because
your pain wants attention and wants to be validated.
It's just like every emotion wants to be validated.
If you don't express healthy anger and if you just keep it
inside it come back in uglier ways it will become pain or
(17:53):
it will become rage because it wants to be seen.
It's saying I'm here, I'm here in
your heart, I'm in your head.
I'm trying to be notice me.
And I have worked with one lady that was using
morphine and she was feeling a lot entire life because
(18:18):
when she was eleven years old she has experienced the
loss of her parents in car accident but also she
lost her leg so she lost a body part and
she felt a lot of physical pain.
She was in a coma and she never
grieved the loss of her both parents in
this accident and throughout her entire life.
(18:40):
She had so much emotional pain and
grief and sadness and this unexpressed grief.
Grief over losing your loved ones, your caregivers,
losing your body part is so complicated.
(19:01):
And over time it became more complicated and
created a lot of health issues for her.
So it is very important to get the help you need
because if you start asking yourself what if I get worse?
When will I get better?
(19:22):
What if I never get better?
What if this condition never ends?
Or what if there is no help for me?
If you're asking yourself these questions you
should probably start looking for professional help.
I think that you very well said that what
doctors saying there's nothing wrong with your body in
(19:46):
the way of they measure as the western uni
medicine that it's all in your head.
They are actually right of course it's
very insensitive way they telling the people
but they are right about that.
Pain which is mythis is really not always on
(20:07):
something which can be dealt in medication or something
like that but unfortunately people still don't have access
or information about that they can be helped.
For example, with me, when we're
working with RTT, rapid Transformational Therapy.
It's the one of the things we do.
(20:29):
We're helping people with the pain exactly.
When their source of the pain is emotional pain.
From childhood, from accident.
And you can see it.
And it's very well actually documented from the
recovery centres of people with the injuries or
your example of people with the lost limbs.
(20:50):
That attitude and belief and mental
state, is that actually critical?
Thing for them for recovery, for what
will be quality of their life.
And they very well know that working with people with
their belief, with process that was happened, the grieving process
(21:15):
it's the part when it's necessary for them today and
they would say like somebody had some injury and they
are much worse off than somebody who has much harder
injury and maybe has the more physical damage.
And they are better off because they believe they
keep going, they not give up on the life.
(21:36):
They process that feelings of loss, they process that feeling of
change and accept that change and adapt their life on the
different world than compared to those who hold on on that
path and hold on on what they lost.
So you are absolutely right that it's insensitive
(21:58):
the way how the doctor is telling them
and the pain of people is real.
But it's also important to what I want to say
is that if listen to us, anybody who has the
pain and chronic pain or don't know where it's coming
(22:21):
from or it's not getting better, reach for help.
We have both of us, many
clients which help with the pain.
I had a lady which had a really severe back pain
that's stopping her from walking and just after one session it
was gone because it was something what was stuck there from
(22:42):
the past and tried to remind her or something.
Very often the pain is a reminder of something when
we trying to suppress or forgot or we didn't process
and it can be released and can be gone, just
can be absolutely body has so powerful recovery function.
(23:02):
Sometimes people ask me like how is this possible?
How is this possible?
The pain is there because the
nerves are squashed or something.
I feel like yeah, but the body
has so enormous, like a recovery function.
Is it like when we take that you have broken bone
in six weeks, eight weeks, it will be totally rebuild.
(23:25):
And you will watch how they're building up the new
connections and the stem cells will change the bone cells
and all these name of the fibres that you will
get there and the organs will start producing the things
which needs to be for calcium will be taking from
the bloodstream everything that power of body to be able
(23:49):
to rebuild what need to be rebuilt. It's amazing.
So yeah, maybe we can speak
about that it's on physical level.
We have somewhere some squashed nerve or some hardening
of the nerve covers like with multiple sclerosis, stuff
like that but doesn't mean that it's forever.
(24:11):
We can actually ask the mind to change the
orders, change the orders and go different way and
do it and I really love it's.
A cartoon series for children making in
France in a few decades back.
This is the life.
And it's explaining for children how this how
(24:35):
how the cells changing, how they're connecting, how
they're repairing things, and exactly how the commands
for doing that coming from the brain, like
the little messengers running there with the little
leaflets, like, here is information.
Do this, do this, do this.
And how it's working if they messed up
and running somewhere else or something like that.
(24:56):
But it's about that.
If we give the mind the right order
to rebuild that disc in the spine, we
rebuild that joint cartilage, we rebuild attendance, we
rebuild that vascular structures, stuff like that, the
body is absolutely capable to do so.
And when we do, then pain is gone
(25:19):
because that pain is that messenger running or
not be able to run on that nurse.
And when we say like, yeah, I do hear you, I
know what you want, I know what you're calling for, I
giving you to he can stop running, he was hurt.
(25:41):
I want people encourage to give it try and
reach for the therapists who working with the pain.
Because I know that it still seems very sci fiction
for many people and I heard all these reactions.
So if you have them, it's fine.
I think probably has all of them, but it's
(26:03):
proven, it's many research behind from last literally century.
There is so much research by Deepak Chopra, by
Jose Silva, by Rudigher Dalke, by Gabor Mate, but
there is a wide range of researches about linked
between mindset and body, about how the body managing.
(26:29):
So pain is the one of this part which
can be held, which can be changed, which we
don't have to live in the pain forever, we
don't have to learn to live with the pain.
Sometimes people like us, therapists can be trained
(26:51):
to lower their anxiety so that when our
brain goes into this fear response, we can
be trained to say I'm fine, I'm okay.
But there is no real danger.
This is all imaginary danger.
(27:12):
But the body can say the opposite.
The body can say no, you're not okay.
So we have to listen to our body.
And the biggest enemies of the chronic
pain are fear, worry and stress.
So the anxiety comes from because we don't
(27:36):
want to duplicate the negative, painful, traumatic experiences
from our past and we fear that we're
never going to be safe in the world.
But depression comes from things that usually
have happened before in our past and
we have unresolved trauma, unresolved pain.
(27:59):
And that's why sometimes the doctors or the official
medicine cannot find the cause of your physical pain.
It's embodied in somewhere in some organ,
in some system of your body, but
they cannot detect what is the cause.
So sometimes when I have clients with chronic pains as
(28:19):
a presenting issue, I also spend time explaining them that
when they have anxiety, when they have fears and worries,
it is very important to practise mindfulness daily because this
is in a way for a nervous system.
(28:40):
Also, I wanted to say that it is
very important to teach our clients that they
don't say that the pain is mine.
They don't say my pain.
They should say the pain.
Because this is the neutral way
of speaking about the pain.
Because when you say it's my pain, my old
(29:03):
pain, it becomes something that you own and you
never want to lose something that you own.
Your brain doesn't love losing something that is part
of your identity, a part of your body.
That's why people also have problems with
losing weight and weight management because the
(29:24):
brain doesn't like this command, losing something.
And when you do have the combination
of pain and depression, or pain and
anxiety, you have different approaches for both.
So you have to treat both problems.
(29:45):
So cognitive behavioural therapy is good when it's
targeted on the pain management or depression.
Hypnotherapy is an amazing tool, a specialised therapy
where a therapist gets you into trancelike state
and then speaks positive suggestions about your pain
(30:10):
and that you internalise and act on.
And this all happens in Alpha brain wave.
So you're trying to say that this is the pain
and in hypnotherapy, hypnotherapist will help you to access the
(30:31):
root cause from the subconscious level of your mind.
But also very effective is self hypnosis.
And you can easily learn self hypnosis.
But there is an amazing therapy called
Rapid Transformational Therapy and it is helping
you reframe your thoughts around your pain.
(30:54):
The meaning, the interpretation, the pictures you have
created about this pain in your mind.
And you can easily eliminate them
in Rapid Transformational therapy session.
And you can also eliminate the
cause, the root of the pain.
And you will also get the transformational audio
(31:15):
recording which is remarkable because it can give
commands to your subconscious mind to start releasing
the pain from every part of your body,
but also from your mind, from your heart.
Because one of the most powerful things we can do
with our mind is to let go, to let go
of our past, let go of our pain.
(31:38):
And also this recording will give you great coping
skills to work with this pain management and decrease
the pain levels from ten to eight, then from
eight to five and to lessen and decrease the
pain levels throughout the time.
And having regular sessions, getting help regularly is also
(32:01):
very important because many of our clients get the
help and they feel amazing, they feel better and
then they stop coming for their session which is
not good for their recovery, right? Barb?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
We know that it's very powerful and it's working,
but it's usually we need more than one session.
(32:22):
If somebody have the really chronic pain, if they have
one of pain or particle area under the pain, that
quite often can be resolved with just the one session
or one month of kind of treatment.
But if somebody had the chronic pain, then we would
find more often that it's related to the childhood trauma.
It's why we put it as the topic of
(32:43):
arteries episode on the podcast the Weight of childhood
Trauma because the pain is one of the often
symptoms of people with the childhood trauma.
So then it's needed more sessions and it's really
about to believe that there is available life without
pain and that's sometimes that the hardest part.
(33:04):
People need to overcome that, believe that they do
deserve and they can and is available for them
the life without pain, that it's not something they
need to accept to have pain.
Because a lot of people have
this, like, oh, I'm getting older.
That's normal, have the pain, or I had the children.
(33:24):
It's normal, have the pain, or I had
the injury, so it's normal, have the pain.
It's not normal to have the pain in any age.
So yeah, when we get older, very often we have the more
what we didn't process but you would find a lot of people
which are in old age and they don't have any pain.
(33:45):
Here I'm living in Scotland, I'm living in the rural area
and actually in Har village there are like a lot of
people going that's not a very uncommon age to go on.
And these lady and guys, you will see
(34:05):
them keep walking around going for like three
mile walk, like working on the garden.
They kind of never slow down and stuff
like that when you be with them.
They have very positive outcome of the life
and they just believe that they deserve to
(34:25):
have the good life and enjoy the life.
They are probably one of the last people who remember
the war, second war so they so value the life
and they just believe that life is great and life
is amazing, that they don't have any pain.
(34:46):
They manage to process all that what happened
to them and their families and their children,
and they're just enjoying the life.
And that's great motivation for me to work
with people with pain, because, as I said,
I went personally through a lot of pain.
(35:07):
So I know how people feel.
And I know that sometimes almost easier to
start belief like, oh, it cannot get better.
Just give me some pills.
But the pills never function long term, they never solve
the issue, it will keep coming back or it's kind
of taking edge off, it's not like fully off.
(35:29):
So get to that state when you don't have
pain, when you can just be yourself, when pain
is not something which limits you from activities you
like because very often pain is the reason why
people not exercise, not dance, not socialise, not going
to cinema, not going to out with friends.
(35:51):
So it's kind of way of isolation.
So again, we all deserve to be with other people,
be connected and do what we enjoy to do and
the pain not necessarily has to stop us from it.
It is available and I'm really glad that we was
(36:14):
able to speak about this on this episode because as
we always saying, we're doing this to bring the hope,
bring the hope to the people and I think it's
really important for people who suffer with pain, chronic pain,
fibriomalgia or other autoimmune diseases, that there is hope.
There is hope that even if it sounds
(36:36):
now strange for you, maybe you hear it
first time or you don't understand it fully.
There is direct link between our mindset and how
it's manifesting in the body as the pain.
And when we change the mindset, when we change what's happened
in the past, when we process it, when we reprogram it,
(37:01):
the pain can be gone and there is truly thousands of
people around the world which can wow for it, which went
through it and get off the pain.
I am one of them, but I help many
and I know many which went through it.
There is plenty of books and research so if you
want to learn more about that, go and do it
(37:23):
and look for quantum healing or body and mind relaxing
or holistic medicine and stuff like that.
You can find a lot of information about that also now.
So that's something which now even some
(37:45):
universities already start teaching to medical profession
and it's a true be told reason.
For example in UK was now giving directive about
lowering the pain medication described to the people because
they're not working, they're not solving the issues and
they know that the solution is somewhere else.
(38:11):
What will be your last advice to people with the pain?
What do you would recommend them?
Well, I would love to say
that pain is absolutely natural.
It's absolutely natural to feel
pain, but it's not normal.
And as society we tend to normalise things that we
(38:35):
cannot explain and we create some kind of myth around
pain, but it is really something that is not normal
and if it's not normal, it's not acceptable.
So you have to do something about that pain.
And I think that there is a lot of pain us
(38:58):
from prenatal period of our life before we were even born.
So there is a lot of old pain in all of
us and I've witnessed that in my sessions with my clients
when they had memories, when they were in the womb and
they felt unsafe, they felt that they shouldn't be born or
they felt unwanted and maybe life threatened.
(39:21):
So I think that I always love acronyms and
I remember that I've read something amazing about pain
and it says pay attention inwards now.
So pay attention inwards now.
That's what is pain trying to tell you and it's inviting
(39:43):
you to go inside of your oldest memories and your subconscious
mind is a great library of all your experiences and definitely
find out the root cause of your pain.
If you use the non medication options, and we
(40:06):
mentioned many of them, many of the treatments that
will really help you to resolve this pain and
trauma because medications can help you temporary, but they
will always mask pain and you will feel.
The relief for a moment, but not permanently.
(40:28):
So, just like you said, Barb, hope.
There is hope.
Pain can end, but we have to be
the participants of our own healing process.
I really love that.
I have to remember that pain attention inwards. Now.
That's amazing description of the pain. Absolutely.
(40:52):
Yes. Beautiful.
So thank you very much for being here with us
and I think that if anybody have any question on
us, please contact us on our website on podbean or
you can leave the comment wherever you listen to our
(41:16):
podcast, if it's on the YouTube or on Spotify, Google
Podcast, Podbean, I Heart Radio.
Or if you can contact us on the Facebook,
you find me as the Barb Smith Varclova or Danjiela
Mrdak and we would love to hear from you.
And if you have any questions or topic you would
(41:36):
want us to speak about or you would want to
ask us some questions, we would leave the message and
we would happily speak on that topic.
So see you in the next time.
Bye for now.
Bye.
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