Is Psychosomatic Pain Real?
I have had this conversation so many times with so many medical professionals and the answer is, YES, YES, YES. The biggest mistake that you can make is to believe that the pain is not real. The pain may not be caused by an organic cause that can be fixed with medication but none the less the pain is real. The pain is caused by your thinking and that takes place in your brain, your brain is where you register that what you are feeling is organic pain so yes even if it is psychosomatic then you are still feeling real pain.
I have suffered from psychosomatic pain since I was 21 when all of a sudden I had this horrible headache after bashing my head that lasted months and months and month until it, or should I say I, turned it into a brain tumour. At the age of 23 I suffered severe heart problem which was going to kill me. The truth is there was no heart problem, it was chest pain and a host of other symptoms that I had experienced through stress. I knew from then on that stress came out of me in physical symptoms. Unfortunately my brain at the time is unable to compute this, instead it turns the symptoms into an automatic death sentence. Since all of this I have developed a health anxiety to boot. So whenever I have any type of pain or discomfort that doesn’t disappear quickly then all of a sudden I am dying. I haven’t got a muscle strain in my leg, I have a blood clot or I haven’t a persitent headache, instead I have a brain tumour. I catastrophise everything that it is health related with me. Crazy but I just cannot help it, this is just the way it is for now.
I am now in thearpy and my therapist thinks that I do not acknowledge my feelings when I am feeling them, I bury them away and then they morph into a physical symptom as my entire body is shouting ‘Hey, you know what I am bloody stressed, run down and you need to listen up and take note of what is going on’ but my brain doesn’t say it, instead my body reacts to the stress and comes out in a physical symptom. Apparently I have burried my feelings for so long that I don’t even know I am actually feeling stressed. I just accept everything for what it is and move on without actually dealing with anything.
I have also noticed that these ‘near death anxiety psychosomatic’ events seem to occur when there is nothing going on in my life and when I really do have no problems. I cope better under pressure and when there is no longer anything to cope with this is when the bastard gets me. Its like the obligatory Christmas Cold. You get the cold when you are relaxing and this is the way that anxiety get to me.
It sucks but it is just the way it is, or actually perhaps I shouldn’t just accept it, perhaps that is part of the problem and I just need to learn my feelings and deal with the emotions when the occur?
Can anyone relate or am I just crazy all by myself?
