Do you need relief from pain that nothing seems to help?
This article may give you answers to your most important questions about pain.
An interesting thing about pain is that it often has emotional components that support and maintain it. Typically, when your stress or emotions rise, pain increases; and when emotions settle, pain often decreases.
When I work with clients in pain, I find that pain has its own mechanisms. What I aim to do is help clients unlearn pain. The mind stores data—experiences of how and when to feel pain—and it also has reasons and purposes for the pain itself.
It would be nice if pain were purely physical, untouched by emotions. But that’s not the case. Emotions frequently play the leading role in our pain.
According to research that supports this view, 75–90% of doctor visits involve stress-related issues.
To understand this, we need to understand how the mind and body cooperate.
One thing we recognize in FasterEFT is that even pain can be a “success”—the system successfully doing what it learned to do.
Pain is built from memories, belief systems, and automated unconscious programs.
Most of us already know that when we experience things in life, our body expresses them in some way. When you recall a happy memory, it becomes physically real in your body. When you recall something painful, that also becomes real in the body.
Pain is a waving flag — the body speaking to us on an unconscious level!
I’ve worked with clients whose pain doctors couldn’t resolve. And then, within 15–30 minutes (sometimes longer), the pain significantly reduced or disappeared. I keep records of these outcomes in the form of client and friend testimonials, for example in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq4C4zxZ8MQ
Sometimes physicians can’t do much because they don’t address the structure of the pain and the mind. That doesn’t mean they’re not doing a good job—only that they are working within what they were taught about the mind–body relationship, and they use the tools available to them.
In FasterEFT, we recognize that pain has a history and a supporting system at the subconscious level.
Yes, some pains have a physical origin—for example, a traumatic event or injury. But tissues generally heal over time (if we allow them to), and the pain that remains—though it feels very real—may be largely psychological.
People sometimes feel the same pains their parents had and adopt beliefs about “inherited conditions.” That’s not the whole story, because we can influence our genes through thinking and specific practices—effectively changing our own biology.
People often adopt the belief that “this is just how it is”—that because their mother had back pain, they must have it too. What actually locks things in place are emotional bonds that prevent us from letting go and living without pain.
Sometimes (and this applies not only to pain but also to illness) people develop symptoms because, for example, as children they received attention only when they were sick. The mind may then equate pain/illness = love or attention.
There are many reasons we may be in pain or unwell.
When you try to focus on your pain in order to resolve it, you must understand the warning signal that tells you to address something familiar (especially memories) and to resolve them (note: not just understand them logically—logic alone rarely solves it).
You need to work through how you feel in relation to the pain—your emotions, meanings, and judgments about it.
Robert G. Smith even talks about pains that were clearly physical—one client wore morphine patches on his side for nerve damage confirmed by medical reports—yet after two hours he walked away without pain.
How is that possible? We need to understand how the body “speaks”. I’m glad we now get to focus on this part as well, and in our seminar we can address pain and illness. Lesson five of the seminar is dedicated to the body, pain, and how to heal it.
Many seminar participants already see how it all fits together and report releasing long-standing pain on their own. That makes me genuinely happy.
“What if my mind is blank, smart guy?!”
Maybe I just asked what you were thinking…
A moment ago we talked about the history of pain—that it has a kind of support system, and so on.
So what about people who have no memories?
If that’s you, it’s okay.
Now do the opposite of what you usually do: don’t run from the pain and don’t try not to think about it. Instead, notice the pain, step into it, observe its size and spread, and also the emotions and judgments you hold about it.
If you want to resolve pain, this is the best place to start—and the pain begins to fade, taking with it what needed to be addressed, because pain is, in essence, a memory.
Use what you’ve learned in other articles—change your pain, stop holding it inside, and allow it to leave.
Did this article help you understand how pain works?
Need to learn more?
Keep going—join others who suffered with pain their doctors couldn’t resolve, and who succeeded with me or even on their own.
Remember: when you take the “happy pink pill”, you’re only switching off the warning light. It’s like cutting the wire to a car’s check-engine lamp so it stops glowing. The visible sign is gone, but the problem remains. Unfortunately, that’s the issue with many medications that suppress symptoms without addressing the cause—and they can even create further issues elsewhere in the body.