If you are an occasional or chronic sufferer of pain, it may seem odd there are actually benefits to pain, both immediate and ongoing. The immediate benefits are more obvious, but it is the ongoing which can be unconscious and therefore not as quickly or easily treated. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is particularly effective for the latter, and complements more common pain treatments such as acupuncture, massage, osteopathy, physiotherapy and Frequency Specific Micro-current (FSM is available at Paddington Clinic Brisbane).
Pain is our body’s way of communicating that something is wrong, and action needs to be taken to remove ourselves from the source of the pain. During the healing process pain persists as a reminder to take care of the injured part. It’s important to seek help during this stage as untreated pain in one part of the body can in turn injure another. For example, limping with a sore leg for a few days throws our hips and subsequently back out of alignment.
(Pain during childbirth is different. It can be signalling to the mother to move position to assist baby’s progress, but unfortunately the agony many women experience comes more from fear [the body tensing and resisting], and expectations of childbirth pain from the stories heard and movies seen. The mind-body connection with pain is significant, and nothing illustrates this more than the magic of watching a tranquil Hypno Birth, or the amazing orgasmic birth – if every woman could experience one of those our population would explode! In these situations the mother’s mind convinces her body that birthing is safe, natural and achievable without significant discomfort or pain, and her body and baby totally agree.)
The benefits of ongoing pain are less obvious, and even the concept of Secondary Gain can be quite confronting to a sufferer. On a personal note, once I was introduced to the concept, my years and years of vomiting tension headaches made sense, and I was able to develop strategies to manage then prevent them occurring. For me, the Secondary Gain, or benefits of an otherwise negative situation, were time out from a stressful job, avoidance of situations out of my comfort zone, a catch-up on sleep, sympathetic attention and some tender loving care from loved ones.
For pain that is ongoing for more than 6 weeks, there is commonly an underlying emotional reason or benefit, and often there is no conscious awareness of that. This is when NLP can be invaluable in both identifying and removing the underlying cause, if desired, or simply training the brain to communicate to the body in a different way so the pain is alleviated. The obvious benefit of the former is that the problem won’t later resurface in a different way i.e. back pain replaced with stomach aches.
Remember pain is one way our unconscious mind communicates with our conscious mind that something needs to change. Whether we choose to listen and act, or not, is a personal choice.
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