Purposeful Pain vs. NonPurposeful Pain

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Permalink Reply by kathryn monahan sheetz on August 11, 2011 at 10:34am

Pain serves the purpose of alerting us or keeping us us from hurting ourselves immeadiately or more as in continuing to move something when it should be left still. Some in the secondary gain category has purpose is experienced as real pain, it may get us the nurturing we may need pychologically or relieves us of duty or expectations from others or even ourselves. And some pain has served it's inital purpse but just continues aimlessly. Even ramping up as the message is in a loop. Hardly all encompassing but that is my jumping off point. Not terribly clinical.
I wasn't sure what you were needing in the request.
Melissa roth has a nice turn of phrase that addresses secondary gain pain. Looked through my notes but can't find it. Perhaps she will share it with us. I certainly could use it.
Sincere regards. Kathy sheetz

Permalink Reply by Susan French on August 11, 2011 at 11:12am

Thank you so much Kathryn,

 

I'll ask her about her secondary gain phrase.

 

No, unfortunately, though you made some clarification points, my original question was more about determining, especially in a chronic pain situation, if the pain remains bc there is a continuing message that needs to be addressed medically.

 

My question came out of a back injury that I had several years ago.  In looking for how to heal it, I asked questions here as well as to my medical professionals. 

 

It seemed as if nothing could help this pain and the answers I was getting were vague and ambiguous, bc the cause of back pain is so complicated.  While i was checking to make sure that there was NOT secondary gain, so I could eliimnate it from the things I was working on, there were some suggestions that there WAS secondary gain due to an ISE that needed to be determined and healed through age regression.

 

I've had many, many differing feeling about regression.  Actually, I tried it and there wasn't anything.  There was physical damage and it was 1) slow in healing, 2) I had to discover things I was doing in my life that were keeping it from healing, 3) I had use several modalities over a 3 year period before it finally stopped hurting and I could begin to exercise again.

 

Melissa told us a story about a time she broke a little bone in her foot. Though they xrayed it, they couldn't find anything but it continued, despite her efforts, to heal.  Finally she went back in and demanded a more thorough Xray, etc. search and they found a hairline fracture.  Then, knowing that the cause was physical, she could know better how to help it to heal.

 

Bottom line: pain with a purpose for alerting us will continue to hurt despite hypnotic intervention.  Pain that was caused by anger or other stress, that had no "physical" cause should respond to hypnosis.  The problem, though, that tormented me for so long was how in the hell do you know if there is reason for you to go back to the medical people or if it's some emotional problem?  

 

Because: when people who are dying from cancer have pain, it's real pain caused by real medical changes in the body.  In my view, it ssems to me that 1) there is no secondary gain, 2) there is a real medical reason for the pain.  It is a message.  Someday the medical profession may have a technique for relieving that pain, but we can't say that it's psychosomatic.  But: we use hypnotic pain remedies for cancer and other terminal pain and it's usually successful. 

 

My question was about why pain relief works for cancer patients who have real medically related, physical injury pain, but nothing can be done to relieve it.  But it works.  How come?  That was my question.

 

Mainly, though, I was trying to get some guidelines as to how to determine in pain cases other than cancer if the problem needs to go back to the medical people or if we should just continue treating the symptoms.  I hope that makes sense.

 

How can your body know that there is a medical problem but so far the medical people have no remedy?

Partly i was asking because I thought some important distinctions had been overlooked and were being dismissed.

Since I'm such a pick-butt about people having the nerve to discuss pain from unknown causes as being from emotional causes, it climbed  up my back.  And...I guess I'm still not over it...LOL.

 

Susan

http://www.hypno4success.com