How Pain Works

Just the other day, my toddler son, lost his shit.  This isn’t an unusual occurrence, being that he is almost 3 and has no ability to regulate or even understand his emotions. Does this related to how pain works? I believe so, and I’d like to share why.  Let’s start with what tipped him over the edge?   

I have no idea.  

It could have been that I peeled the banana too soon, that I wanted to get him dressed for school, that the light was too bright, or that he needed to pee.  Yet, the reason doesn’t actually matter. On this particular morning, we ended up on the floor in the hallway.  I was sitting on his clothes and he was screaming with every decibel he could create from his toddler sized lungs. I attempted a few ways to console…none worked.  

So I stopped.

And eventually he swung…hit me in the eye.  And that shocked and surprised me…and hurt a little bit. Afterall, eyes are fairly sensitive parts of the human body.  The word, “Owe!” escaped my lips and in moments his emotions settled back to baseline. He snuggled up onto my lap. 

And I had a question pop into my mind, so I asked him, “Our emotions can get pretty intense sometimes, huh?” He quietly replied, “Yeah, and it’s really hard.” A rush of compassion flooded me. In that instant, I realized he has no foundation yet for understanding emotions and how scary and hard it must be when he gets sad, angry, frustrated or any of the other more intense emotions that we feel. 

Then I realized how this must be the same for many people with pain. When we don’t understand how pain works or what pain is communicating, we think that every instance of pain is a problem. We get exhausted emotionally, physically, even psychologically, when we experience pain for a prolonged time…simply due to a misunderstanding. 

Like my son who thought that because he was angry…yelling at me would get me to “fix” a problem that didn’t exist and stop the intense emotion.  Most of us think that pain is trying to tell us to fix something so the pain will go away.  We think that pain is telling us that there is a problem. But that isn’t always the case. 

I love Lorimer Moseley’s explanation of how pain works, “Pain is an unpleasant conscious experience that emerges from the brain when the sum of all the available information suggests that you need to protect a particular part of your body.”

Here is a short list of potential reasons (not an exhaustive list) why our brain might think that a particular body part needs protection (even when there is no real physical threat present):

• Poor hydration
• High stress levels
• Inadequate sleep
• Poor/imbalanced diet
• Fear of physical activity, movement, positions
• Beliefs that pain is an inevitable part of aging (or similar ideas)
• Identification with a diagnosis

The really amazing thing about all of this, is that overtime as my son grows and we continue to have conversations, he’ll learn how emotions work and how to navigate them. You too, can learn how pain works and how to use this to your advantage to have more peace and freedom in your body and your life.