Can Childhood Experiences Contribute to Chronic Pain in Adulthood? Exploring Recovery

Whether we remember our childhood fondly, or with trepidation, with a mix of both or a refusal to even think about it, it’ll likely be influencing our health in adulthood. Large scale studies since the 1990’s have confirmed this tenacious link.

To understand the link & assist recovery, we first need to update, broaden & lift-up our understanding of pain - the process that leads to the good news!

It’s the brain that produces all pain 100% of the time, without exception. 

Neuroscience explains that pain is the result of many complex processes in the brain & nervous system. It’s never just a result of sensory information coming in from the body.

The experience of pain is based on the subconscious brain’s PERCEIVED evaluation of how much danger the individual or their bodily structures are in.

It’s part of the natural, fight, flight, freeze & fawn survival response. The brain generates pain to PROTECT us – to encourage us to act in some way - but oftentimes, the brain’s evaluation of danger comes from MISGUIDED information.

This is because the brain relies on subconscious thoughts, emotions, fears, beliefs, knowledge & the meaning made of past experiences to help it make its evaluation & compute whether it’s best to protect by causing the sensation of pain or not.

And we’re likely to have

·      inaccurate thoughts…

·      a mind rich in emotional turmoil…

·      deeply held, faulty beliefs… and fears…

·      picked up or been given misguided information…

·      misinterpreted past experiences.

These factors often become bottled together to create misguided fears & complex, subconscious self-protection mechanisms - which can lead the brain to generate pain – even when there’s no real danger to the individual or in the bodily structures that are hurting.

Remember, this all occurs at a subconscious level.

Many experts now believe that the brain may also produce pain to distract from feeling emotions. This is because due to past experiences and conditioning - usually from early childhood – the brain perceives it’s unsafe to feel certain emotions.

For example:

A young child may have been chastised or even beaten for being angry, for maybe answering back or standing up for themselves when they felt unfairly treated or experienced excessive discipline. Perhaps they were taught “Nice girls don’t show anger.”

They may have been chastised or belittled for crying. Perhaps they were admonished “Boys don’t cry”, developing a belief that crying was inappropriate or shows weakness.

Perhaps a child was chastised or scolded for feeling sad. “Think of the poor hungry children in war torn or drought ridden countries. You’re so lucky, you’ve nothing to feel sad about”. Or perhaps they were threatened, “I’ll give you something to really feel sad about.”

A child may have been bullied & lived in fear of verbal or physical abuse, and for whatever reason felt they had no supportive, loving adult to turn to.

The child instinctively learns that expressing certain emotions is ineffective, unwanted or a potential threat to being hurt or cast out & abandoned from the family, the classroom or maybe a friendship group.

So those emotions, those feelings, are pushed down & ignored, unprocessed. But they’re still happening at a subconscious level - and are likely to be continuously re-triggered & repeatedly repressed throughout life’s many experiences.

These accumulative, buried & unprocessed emotions inadvertently fuel the threat level in the brain’s natural fight, flight, freeze or fawn survival response. And pain that becomes persistent is one possible result of this.

Here’s the good news!

No matter the age, the brain is always neuroplastic. It can adapt. It can rewire. It can relearn. This accumulative emotional energy & threat level can be lowered and returned to its “normal”, comfortable and positive variability.

The brain can be trained to feel safe again in the presence of these emotions. The brain can be trained to stop generating pain.

Learning how to feel safe and become aware of the felt-sense of emotion is an important step forward. Compassionately & consciously relearning that it is now safe & “right” to permit emotion to be felt, gradually allows buried emotion to be processed and released.

Retraining means accepting that the pain in these circumstances is a misperception of threat by the brain and that the body part that hurts is not to be feared & is in fact safe, intact and innately strong.

The reason for the persisting pain is therefore alleviated.

These processes, together with many other techniques that induce a feeling of safety into the system, are taught in depth in the Freedom From Pain programme. With guidance & practice, thoughts can be altered, emotional turmoil can be released, beliefs can be corrected, fears can be alleviated, knowledge can be improved & experiences, where appropriate, can be re-interpreted & reframed.

When we understand & accept this more accurate, modern understanding of persisting pain & its connection with emotions, stress & fear we discover a whole new level of possibility for explaining what we’re feeling….

All of which will help launch us forwards to relief and recovery.

To find out more details about what can effectively become a life-changing journey to recovery, here’s the link to a helpful free training webinar.

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