I am a big fan of the podcast Hidden Brain. It discusses various subjects of psychology and even had couple excellent episodes about chronic pain and the power of placebo effect, which I found very relevant to the subject of my blog.
One of the recent episodes was about mistakes and the learning process, which got me thinking about mindbody healing. You can find the episode here: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/learning-from-your-mistakes/
In fact, the process of re-wiring your brain is about helping your brain learn new ways of processing information, which in our specific case means learning new ways of processing signals from our nervous system.
As every learning process, it is not always easy. In my own recovery from CRPS, I had to learn how to respond to the outside stressors and my internal demons in a new way, so I would unlearn my pain, as one of my heroes, Dr. Schubiner, puts it. Einstein ones said that doing the same thing time and over again and expecting different results is insanity. If my previous way of life had led me to the life of pain, I needed to learn how to do things differently to get myself out of the old patterns.
It took me a long time to figure out that I needed to look at myself as an outsider and reflect on how I respond to the events of my daily life. Introspection and mindful analysis of my own actions was very difficult, because it is always hard to look at your own actions with a critical eye. But once I broke through the wall of self-deception, I knew to look for my own mistakes, better understand what went well and what did not. The hardest was to learn how to notice and recognize my own emotions and how to handle them, especially the fear of CRPS and anxiety over my inability to heal.
It was a long road, but eventually I slowly changed my behavior and fully recovered!
Leave a Reply