How People with Chronic Pain Respond to Pain by Joey Gonsalves
The nervous system is like the electrical system in your house. The wires in your house run from the junction box to the lights or other electronic devices you may have plugged in. The nervous system is like that. Often time this pain creates referral pain for other parts of the body.
If you were to hit your thumb with a hammer, the signal is sent through the nerves in your arm through the spine to the brain. The nerves travel to your brain where it registers that there is pain in your thumb. These nerves move to parts of the body and activate adjacent cells in the body called glial cells. The glial cells play an important role in the modulation, amplification and distortion of pain when interacting with other nerves. They influence the other nerves to also amplify, modulate and distort pain. The result: a positive feedback loop where the nerves continue to send the signal around the body over and over. Pain is constantly activated. So the next time you are hit with the hammer you not only feel pain in your hand but other parts of your body as the pain is amplified 100 times over.
The mind gets shaken when our body is in pain and worse when the pain in amplified. Our feelings can be at their worse during pain. We feel angry, sad, tense, depressed, invalid and agitated. Those feelings become stronger in reference to the pain size. For people who’ve suffered with pain for a long time we recognise the onset of pain and acknowledge bad feelings it brings.
NLP acknowledges the feelings that are present when you are in a constant state of pain. It then challenges you to change one of those feelings to see the results it brings. To change one feeling has an effect on the others.
