Different kinds of pain
Human beings notice different kinds of pain:
- Physical pain, caused by a tension, an accident, surgery, or an illness (e.g. arthritis).
- Emotional pain: caused by the loss of a person, by not achieving what we want (frustration), by a past experience which still affects us (a fight, etc.).
What do we do usually when having pain
Both physical and emotional pain are experiences which we feel in our bodies, and usually we adopt an attitude of defense against this pain, aiming to be bothered the least possible.
This attitude is a sum of physical efforts (tensions, postures, ways of breathing, being carefully to avoid the pain to get worse), mental efforts (a specific way of thinking, believing, not being in silence), and emotional efforts (creating humors, atmospheres, feelings).
The area where we have pain becomes with time more rigid, and often we loose sensibility. In consequence, when we have for example pain in one shoulder, with time the arm and the neck start aching also, and finally we get headache. Additionally, we plunge into heavy moods and feel impotent towards the pain. Some people react with resignation, others with frustration, and others with anger.
In our attitude, when we avoid pain, we actually close the pain in the area which hurts, and in this way it can become a chronic condition, which additionally affects our way to relate to our surroundings: we limit our movement and move carefully to avoid pain, we loose vitality, we get tired, our attention is bound, we get obsessed, etc.
In case of an emotional pain, usually we so something very similar to what we do when having a physical pain: We try to close the pain, very often in the chest, the stomach, we do efforts in these areas to avoid feeling hurt, unhappy, abandoned, etc.
Why do we have pain
Pain is a body function, which reminds us that the affected area is imbalanced, and that it needs our attention to re-equilibrate again.
When trying to avoid pain, we move away our attention, and therefore we try to ignore what our body tries to tell us.
How do I teach to deal with pain
As practitioner of the Grinberg Method, I teach my clients to deal with pain, this means, I teach them to stop suffering with pain, and to use it as a source of recovery.
To achieve this, I teach them to quiet down their mental noise and to bring their attention to their body, and to gain control over the efforts they do when having pain. So they can stop these efforts. I teach them to be relaxed with pain. I teach them to draw their attention to the area where the pain is and to notice the pain as it is. I teach them to stop automatic attitudes which are meant to feel less pain (e.g. feeling unhappy and blaming the world for having pain), and to take personal responsibility: The client stops fleeing from the pain, he faces it, and in this way he stops being a victim of the pain.
On the one hand, the client recovers the energy that was used to keep these efforts (because he doesn’t do them any more), and on the other hand, the body can use the energy of the pain to recover in its best way possible. In this way, we gain vitality, flexibility and strength, and this allows us even more to deal with pain with more quietness and confidence.