The Best Advice A Man Can Get
Straight to the point: learn how to deal with your emotions. I’ve learned from reading a book called The Great Pain Deception, which deals with a lot of the nature of pain, that much chronic pain and unexplainable pain comes originates from our emotions. Undealt with emotions don’t just disappear, they come out in some form in the body. Pain distracts us from the emotions we aren’t dealing with.
Burying, or suppressing, your emotions is not a solution. Solving the problem that is creating your emotional stress is a nice solution, but not all of our emotional problems are currently solvable. Some of them may be deeply rooted, some from our past, even our distant past, some from powerfully ingrained cultural beliefs and so on, the point being: not everything you are dealing with is right this moment. However, let me give you an example of a pain I’ve been having, a right-this-moment emotional problem, and how I am doing now after having a little “knowledge therapy (from the book)”.
Situation: I walk a lot for my job.
Pain: I feel the type of pain one feels when you directly press on a muscle knot, but it’s on the inside of my heel, I believe where the tendon connects to the bone of the heel. My achilles’ heels have been stiff and sore, mostly after work, but can extend into my days off. A lot of stiffness in my tendon in the morning. Can make my heel tendon pop a lot from flexing foot upwards.
Emotional Issue: I took on this walking job as a part-time, actually no, as a temporary seasonal position, so I could lose weight gained from my previous stressful job. Felt very beat up and tired a lot after work, but I didn’t have any chronic pain that made me suspect something wrong with my tendons. The emotional issue is that once my job hired me on and I continue to work there, I feel like I am there long after my expiration date from my original plan. My side-job free-lance work has mostly failed and I am still a ways off from learning to competently code. As such, I feel like a bit of a failure, like the job I’m doing is the best I can do, and at my age it feels like a slap in the face, especially when I see some of my younger co-workers moving on to bigger and better things. I was beginning to resent my job and started to wish I wasn’t there. I no longer had secondary work to boost my spirits. My favorite people who I worked with have all left, which has also affected me more than I imagined.
Knowledge: I realized my foot pain was about the emotions I was feeling from work and was my body’s way of solving the problem for me, to get me to quit because I couldn’t physically keep it up much longer with how much I was in pain. I was on the verge of calling a podiatrist and making an appointment because the pain was becoming almost unbearable for a full-shift.
Cue my wife reading this book on pain (separate pain issue for her, where she was having severe icepick headaches and was at her wits end; she has had pain injections and steroids to deal with it, and those things didn’t deal with it; after she read the book she stopped having the headaches after one final day of experiencing headaches all day long.) and solving her problem. It was so profound for me to see her turn around that I became a believer. After all, I don’t have much of a problem with some of the beliefs required, such as are mind-body connection, that the brain is connected to everything in the body, and knows everything that is going on (even if you consciously don’t). Emotions are connected to our autonomic systems, and so can’t always be controlled, and thus extend into our body. So, even when you don’t deal with something your body still has to find a way to deal with it, and pain is one very effective way of doing that.
Anyway, I have begun to the read the book, and during my shift at work, whenever I felt my tendons wanting to ache, I’d remind myself that pain was actually a distraction. I started to coach myself through my feelings I was experiencing at work. I knew why my body was sabotaging me at work. It didn’t make sense that a young, physically fit person like me was getting tendonitis from a part-time job where I walked a lot, especially when I had morbidly obese co-workers spend just as much time on their feet and not complain or call in sick with the same kind of problem. I knew my mind was fighting against the reality that I was still at work and hadn’t succeeded in my secondary ventures.
And before long, in fact, within one day, by facing my problems my tendon stiffness went away. The pain in my heel is no longer there when I press on it. My ankle pops less when I try to pop it like before. I feel, well, healed. It astounds me this has happened, because a week ago I thought I was going to be forced to quit and find a sitting job.
My current conclusion then is this: deal with your emotions. Face your problems. A lot of your pain and issues could be nothing more than with undealt stress. There is a TON more to go over, so I suggest you read The Great Pain Deception by Steven Ozanich, but needless to say, I cannot think of any other advice that would have healed my ankles as quickly, or at all. What would a podiatrist say? He would probably subscribe some kind of medical action plan to attack the direct physical problem. I doubt he would ever probe the depths of my mind to discover if I had any emotional problems related to my job. I think a podiatrist would never do that so long as patients idea of medicine is purely physical and ignores emotions. Therefore, stop ignoring your emotions, stop suppressing them, stop burying them, because they will manifest as pain or other problems.
