Pain is a construct of the brain. Pain is created in order to protect us, and yet the key is to understand the mechanism of pain. Only then can you overcome it. Contrary to what you might believe about pain, there are no pain signals being sent to your brain. Instead, there are pain perception signals –this is called nociception. These are Noxious / danger signals that are being sent to your brain, for it to decide whether you should feel pain or not. You can have pain without nociception and nociception without pain.
There’s no ‘pain’ molecule in the physical world, pain only exists because your brain takes a benign signal from a nerve and decides to tell your conscious mind that it’s painful.
If we take for example a person who has been in a car accident. This is a case where it will be paramount to treat the trauma, because the untreated trauma will likely play into their perception of pain and will reinforce the pain cycles. This is because any experience that triggers the fight, flight and freeze response in our bodies sets a new threshold for pain association. In the future, an innocuous trigger might remind the body of this original trauma and thus decrease the pain threshold and all the associated emotional concomitants.
When pain is associated to trauma, there are numerous other health conditions that can be attributed to the autonomic nervous system becoming frozen in this state of protection. Let’s not forget that the ANS regulates the digestive system through the enteric nervous system, our detoxification pathways through our liver, kidney and skin, our respiratory and circulatory systems etc. Basically, our body believes that the trauma is not over even if our mind has another version of reality.
