Learning to connect emotions with the pain

I'm on day 6 of the program and I'm starting to see a clear pattern between emotional pain and my neck pain. All these years, I was trying to figure out which activity, sleep position, exercise, etc. was triggering the episodes of pain and I could never see a pattern. It was so frustrating. Now I understand why: it was never anything I was doing with my body, but always what was going on inside.

So what is going inside? The main trigger is when I don't take care of my inner child, when I neglect my needs, when I put other people first instead of discussing and negotiating with them to find a solution that is suitable to everyone. In other words, my people pleasing is the big problem. Harriet Lerner, a therapist I really like, calls that "deselfing." I've always really love that concept and now that I can see how deselfing leads to physical pain, I am so much more motivated to take better care of myself. It's almost as if my body needed to go this far to get my attention. Wow! What a revelation for me.

I'm in a situation now where family members want to come and visit from out of town. Although I'd love to see them, their visit is complicated and pretty inconvenient for me. When figuring it the logistics, I clearly saw myself go into people-pleasing mode, but I couldn't help it. Then, of course, I started to get the pain. Once I figured what had happened, the pain stopped. But now I'm left to deal with the problem of saying no to people and disappointing them. I guess that's better than a headache, but it still feels scary.

Another issue is that the flip side of people pleasing is the anger and the need to cut people off. I get to a point where things are just so overwhelming that my only solution is to picture a world without all these people making demands on my time and energy. It's my go-to solution. Intellectually I know that between the two extremes of people pleasing and cutting people out of my life, there has to be some kind of middle ground. I guess learning to find that middle is my starting point.

 

Blake this is a great post, thanks. You are doing an awesome job on connecting your emotions to your pain. Keep up the good work and keep us all posted. Awesome,

Now to your question, Really you don't have to be a people pleaser or be disrespectful -- you just have to be in a calm mood when the family is around. I know this sounds hard right, but its this time when they are around that you get to practice your calming abilities and also your visualizations.
I had the same issues as I was healing and I want to tell you what I did ok.
1) Right now tonight you can start practicing calming affirmations that you can use when your family is around or anytime you might feel that you have to be what the ego wants you to be instead of who you really are, I bet you really just want to be calm and relaxed, patient and confident when your relatives are around, right? So the affirmations I used that got me through a lot of family matters and lots of other matters are I'm calm, relaxed, patient and confident. Take these four words and say them over and over to yourself in your mind throughout the day ok. Actually say them over and over and over till they become second nature to you and then practice feeling emotionally what calmness feels like as you say it and feel what relaxed feels like as you say it and patience and confidence. You can do this, think of a time that you were confident and what it felt like, then imagine your there and feeling that same confidence. Do this for the other 3 emotions too ok and you should have great success.
Now onto the visualizations -- Here you can practice visualizing all going well and being great while your in a calm , relaxed and patient state ok. Actually see yourself having a great time with your family members or relatives about an hour before they arrive and then see it in your mind while they are around and practice this too daily so you can become very good at all you do. Now this wisdom will come in hand for all your endeavors ok so don't limit yourself to only the family, actually use it for all you wish to be calm, relaxed, patient and confident in ok.

Bless you.

PS. The book by Dale Carnegie " How to win friends and influence people" will be a helpful hand in this area of wisdom too, it helped me a lot.