Day 11 I’m in so much pain and I don’t know what to do

My back hasn’t been hurting for the past couple as weeks as bad or as often since starting but my back yesterday and all of today has been in so much pain. Not just my lower back. I’ve been asking myself what’s stressing me out, journaled, told my mind that the pain isn’t good and to let me feel the emotions and nothing helped. I am going to bed but I can’t deal with another full day of pain tomorrow it was so bad today. Any advice for what to do when the pain shows up?

 

Hi @chananya - it sounds like you're doing all the right things, but when you're in a flare the best thing you can do is to simply try to soothe yourself any way you can. For me for example the only thing that helped when things were really bad was taking a shower and running the water alternately hot and cold; later I found out that is a way to regulate your vagus nerve, so no wonder it gave me some relief. For you it might be something different.

I totally remember feeling as you do, fearing the next day; your goal is to slowly reduce your fears around the future and be more in the moment, even though that is impossibly difficult when you're in a ton of pain. It will shift though as you keep doing the work. Expect that tomorrow will be better.

I found watching movies or reading books I enjoyed as a kid to be a great comfort. I oddly found a lot of parallels/metaphors for recovery in the Studio Ghibli movies upon rewatching them, and silly as it sounds, those stories gave me a way to recontextualize what I was going through, and on top of that I found them extremely soothing.

I also would recommend reading one of the books by John Sarno if you haven't already (Healing Back Pain or The Mindbody Prescription are the ones I read). And if you have, check out The Great Pain Deception by Steve Ozanich and Mind Your Body by Nicole Sachs. All of those really helped me—and believe it or not gave me some significant relief while I was reading them!

 

Alan Gordon describes the technique of Somatic Tracking for when pain flares up. It's also referred to as Mindfulness. Basically, it is practicing a non-judgmental awareness of the pain in the present moment. Here's Alan's description:

https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/day-9-somatic-tracking.16532/