Pain is a useful tool of our body to direct our attention to a body part that needs it. If we do so, our body has the best chances to recover from what causes the pain.
Chronic pain isn’t useful for our body. It happens when for some reason our body wasn’t able to recover from the original pain and encapsulates it. Often, chronic pains are a consequence of tensions and rigidity caused by pain in another part of the body. So, e.g. we’ll tense the hip due to a pain in the knee, and this can lead to a headache. When keeping the tension for a long time, it might develop a chronic pain – and nobody finds the reason why.
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.