We're starting to look at a very important topic to veterans (and their families): managing acute and chronic pain with PTSD.
Earlier today, I ran across some interesting thoughts in a book about the ancient Eastern healing art, Qi Gong (there are multiple spellings, including Chi Kung and other variants.) I include it here for several reasons: One, it helps us to look a pain in a new way -- in terms of the encoded lessons it may have to teach us. Second, it sets up the balance between pain and awareness, and how awareness without the ability to address a particular condition might be more difficult than the pain itself. Third, it reinforces what Claude Anshin Thomas, a decorated Vietnam vet and now Buddhist monk, said about how it's not really our suffering that's the enemy, anyhow. Fourth, it suggests there is definitely a "payoff" to the body for not addressing physical pain until we are ready, which probably perpetuates the state of chronic pain. And finally, this passage lists a number of beneficial conditions to have in place before healing can be addressed.
It's nice to see these spelled out, and it may help you to just see them in print. There's an old faux-Asian saying about, "When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears" -- and if there's any truth to that, it just might be, that nobody's really ready to address their own healing, no matter how badly they might want it, until they have some key supportive conditions in place first -- to make the journey somehow softer and better. We need all of that we can get. Here's the passage, and I'm going to go ahead and highlight some of what stood out to me when I read it, including those supportive conditions.
In my opinion, we hold onto toxicity mainly for protection. It is an automatic response from ourselves comparable to muscular armoring. Muscular armoring is an involuntary contraction caused by emotional charges. These contractions allow one to mobilize the body's stress response, bringing up involuntary avoidance reactions before any emotion can be felt. In the same way, there is a strong tendency to accumulate toxicity: we hold onto it because there is only so much that we can allow ourselves to feel, given our mental state, level of emotional maturity, and our support system. Accumulating toxicity, along with muscular armoring, is a strategy of protecting oneself from getting emotionally hurt.
Feelings compel us to react and process, but if for some reason (lack of energy, maturity, safety, or a weak support system), we can't afford to let ourselves feel something, then the unprocessed issue has to be stored until we can afford it. This is the reason why we "forget" about childhood traumas and other overwhelming stressful situations in our lives. The body does not forget: it just makes the choice not to remember. The information is still there, held in different areas, in different ways in our bodies, protected by tension and the accumulation of toxicity. A part of our self is in charge of making sure that an emotional charge is not accessible unless an opportunity presents itself to access it safely enough.
Elsewhere the same author writes, somewhat repetitively but with some new emphasis:
The Price of Awareness:
The power that keeps us unaware of tensions in our bodies and the underlying emotional charges is our mind. It tries to protect us from getting in touch with places that don’t feel so good. It will not let us feel anything that might make us remember a traumatic experience too hard to handle. Our minds help us organize ourselves to avoid bumping into painful spots, facing them, or touching them when we don’t have sufficient energy, maturity, or an adequate support system. We avoid any movement in these areas of our bodies, which includes not allowing movement of the breath.
Our bodies hold patterns of tension, or involuntary contraction, which generally reflect emotional charges coming from unprocessed states of feelings. That’s how we are recognized as angry of scared, enthusiastic, joyful, worried, and sad; how we hold our bides reveals our feelings. After many repetitions of the same kind of emotion, if they are not processed, the patterns of tension become familiar, and we are unable to remember how it feels to be free of these tensions. We experience a numbing that paradoxically expresses very clearly to others what we generally don’t want to admit to ourselves. It becomes a posture, an attitude that typifies and characterizes our personality.
Awareness is information and, as we very well know in the Western world, information is the most expensive item you can find. There is a good reason why we don’t let ourselves be aware of certain things: awareness has a price and we need to be able to afford it.
So part of it, even if it’s an unconscious part, is always thinking about how much awareness will cost. We have a financial adviser and bookkeeper hiding within us. The bookkeeper within holds us back when we are about to invest ourselves in something we can’t afford in terms of some vital force, support system, and emotional maturity. But without some kind of inner protective mechanism no healing process would be possible, and the human mortality rate would be much higher. The art of the practitioner is to recognize that this bookkeeper, keeper of the door to our feelings, protects us from being asked to pay more than we can afford. It is an ally in the process of healing. Recognizing its role, giving it credit, and making that guardian feel safe will let [people] become more in touch with parts of themselves they have had to hide.
Source: Healing from Within With Chi Nei Tsang: Applied Chi Kung in Internal Organs Treatment, by Gilles Marin. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books (1999).
(To learn more about Chi Nei Tsang, or to find a practitioner in your area, go to the main website, linked here.)
