Recently, a reader reached out to me with a question. A truly heroic woman, she pulled herself out of a debilitating case of CRPS after a severe car accident and, after 3 years of hard work was able to get to about 80% improvement. But then she stopped getting better and even started getting worse.
We talked a bit about her situation, and she finally realized that it was the fear of symptoms that held her back. It took her almost 3 years of very hard work to get to the 80% improvement, and she became worried that she would never get to 100%. Exactly when success was so close, she was again disabled by fear. Is there a solution? First, Dr. Sarno described this phenomenon in his books. He called it extinction bursts. When you seem to be on the path of improvement, symptoms return, or even new symptoms appear. Yes, a solution exists.
I suggested two things.
First is to re-focus her recovery effort from the physical symptoms to the emotional ones, which are fear and anxiety because ultimately, we develop pain symptoms because of our inability to alleviate our fears and anxieties. At the same time, do not try to ignore your symptoms, because the more we try to ignore something that bothers us a lot, the more it bothers you – A LOT! Rather acknowledge them and accept their existence as a temporary condition, an obvious nuisance but not an irreversible catastrophe.
Second is to stop working too hard. At some point, you will simply stop thinking of your symptoms at every waking moment of your life. It will not happen if you continue telling yourself to work on getting rid of symptoms; it will happen by itself because internally your brain will accept that nothing is wrong with you and will stop sending the fear signals. If you completely re-focus your attention from your symptoms to managing your fear and anxiety, it will eventually happen organically.
8 years ago, my hands were engulfed in neuropathic pain, numb, swollen, and lost mobility. It took me 2 years to get to 99% improvement, with slight numbness still present. To this day, I have a clear boundary on my hand where numbness ends. Mild numbness used to start at the tips of my middle and index fingers and reach all the way to the wrist, and that was about time I stopped worrying about it, 6 years ago. It now ends at the middle of my middle finger. It expands slightly when I am stressed, fearful, or tired, and shrinks back as soon as I regain my composure. It is my reminder that I am who I am and I need to work on my stress management, obsessive negativity, and unjustified fears – for the rest of my life. But I am still living my life to the fullest, numbness never stops me from doing everything I wish.
Once you accept in your heart that you may never see the complete disappearance of your symptoms, but accept 99% or even 90% as good enough, that would mean that you defeated that stubborn perfectionism and brutal expectations of yourself that led you to become sick. This is when 99% will magically occur!
Leave a Reply