Happy Pain

This is not the most joyous of holiday emails, I admit. It’s about pain. But it’s also about learning to listen, appreciate, and even love the things we literally can not bear. This may be the most Episcopalian email you will ever receive from me.

As I have grown in my practice I see how trauma manifests in many ways. My beloved clients have parts that vigilantly protect them, reminding them to stay small lest they get hit. They have shaming parts that berate them for stepping out of line lest they get bullied. And they have radical, angry parts that insist on being loud because they believe no one will listen to them any other way. 

But the body really does keep the score. Trauma can show up in chronic conditions, just as chronic conditions can be seen as parts wanting to say something—often wanting, actually and finally, to be loved. 

I just finished a book called A Headache in the Pelvis by David Wise. Wise, who dealt with chronic pelvic pain, makes the case for something he calls extended paradoxical relaxation. This is a cool way of saying: Lie down and notice your body's tensions. Like for a really, really long time.

I am not entirely sold on relaxation as a cure for pain. But with my clients who live with chronic pain I do address energetics. I witness the pain as it ebbs and flows. I remind my clients that their body is intelligent, and intelligence can also be a balm, giving the body love while it screams. 

This is the ultimate internalization of Jesus’s injunction to “turn the other cheek,” to meet hostility with love, to meet aggression with equanimity and non-violence. 

(I told you I’d get a little Christiany.) 

This is the hardest internal work a person can do. I always remember an interview with Leonard Cohen in which he said years of severe living landed him in a place where whining wasn’t an option anymore. As he died, he found compassion for himself. His body’s needs. Is that where the whining stops? When we greet our pain with love? 

I end with a Jew, of course. Happy holidays, everyone—and may you all enjoy your cracks where the light gets in.

With love,