Why You Hurt – The Energy Of Pain Insights Sept 2006

It’s hard to imagine that your subconscious mind would consider pain an asset in your body.  Obviously the logical, cognitive part of your mind thinks that’s crazy.  To understand why your subconscious mind would consider pain an asset to be maintained requires understanding something about tribal programming that is ancient, out-of-date and primitive; programming that is designed for your survival in a caveman world without fridges, a world where predators are a real threat to your survival.  Fortunately subconscious programs can be updated, which means you can learn to control whether or not you are in pain by learning to reprogram your subconscious mind.

The fact is, your subconscious brain controls the condition of your body.  It controls your body chemistry in all its complexity of hormones, proteins and electrical systems, and therefore all your physical functions.  Everything from digestion, to muscle and joint function, to thinking processes.  If you stopped on that last one, wondering how I can label thinking processes a physical function, let me give you an example:  cytokines, a part of the inflammation program, cause cloudy thinking and other depression symptoms.  In fact, your subconscious will hang onto emotional pain, too.

No wonder chronic pain is so enervating, with all that going on.  No wonder any pain can feel so debilitating, inhibiting your very ability to do things that would help you.  Everything becomes a horrendous effort because you have to overcome the agenda of your subconscious brain, and it’s got all the physical system controls.  The deck is definitely stacked against you, and unless you can learn how to change how that deck is stacked you’re in a very difficult position.  And you hurt.     

Let me explain how your body becomes a war zone for your subconscious, sustaining battle damage that affects you physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

For the primitive brain, your tribes are essential to your survival.  You’ve got lots of tribes, everything from your family of origin to your gender.  Any label you can put on yourself, from race to age to employment to education, forms a tribe in your subconscious mind.  It’s a group that you are part of, intentionally or otherwise.  And, since your subconscious doesn’t recognize time or circumstances, it will hang onto obsolete tribes like your sports team from high school, or the family religious orientation. 

For instance, if you’re a post-menopausal, married female, with adult children, raised Christian, of Anglo-Saxon decent, employed in civil service, who enjoys yoga and Dr. Phil, that’s about a dozen tribes right there. 

If you’re a mid-thirties divorced male of Italian decent, raised Catholic, employed in high tech sales, who likes Discovery Channel, action flicks, soccer, and old cars, that’s a dozen tribes for you. 

I think you get the drift.  Anyone can make a list of a dozen tribes without any effort.  If you tried, you could add a dozen more.

Every tribe in your life has rules and requirements.  Whether you consider yourself subject to those rules is really irrelevant, because your subconscious mind believes that your survival depends on your good status in your tribes, and therefore your survival depends on your conformance to those tribes.  To make sense of that you have to remember that back in the cave it was true – you needed everyone in your tribe to contribute for the whole tribe to survive.  You needed your tribe to survive.  That isn’t true today, but at the primitive brain level your mind doesn’t know that. 

In case that wasn’t enough, your primitive brain believes you must conform to all your tribes, all the time.  If you give that some thought, you’ll quickly realize it’s impossible.  At the simplest level, satisfying the requirements of your employment tribe is going to conflict with family tribe requirements and friend tribe requirements.  Sometimes, family of origin requirements conflict with immediate family requirements.  Sometimes that’s a problem your cognitive brain must struggle with, but most of the time you just figure out what you’re going to do and how to juggle it all, and carry on.  You cope.  That’s life.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple in your subconscious.  In your subconscious, there is a battle going on between your tribal selves, the elements of yourself who have all these loyalties and requirements that your cognitive brain has resolved, or at least managed.  Sometimes, you can hear fragments of those arguments as stress thoughts in your mind, though typically you’d dismiss them as useless and annoying worry.  That’s like when you figure out who you’re going to spend Christmas dinner with, but continue to worry about it after the plans are resolved.  It’s when you organize your schedule to cope with your family obligations, and your work, and still feel conflicted about your choices even though you’ve made your decision.  It’s any time you doubt your choices, your competence, your value, or your worth.

Depending on how aware you are of your worries, it may be hard to imagine this internal battle happening below your conscious awareness, but the evidence is in your body.  In fact, the location or nature of your pains and damage are often blatant keys to revealing your internal conflicts. 

The challenge is to bring your internal conflicts to conscious awareness, so you know what’s going on.  Then, to find a win-win resolution so the battle can stop, and your damage can end.  Your subconscious has the means to heal you, just as it has the means to hurt you. 

I have to admit, sometimes those win-win resolutions require some creativity that can be surprising.  Learning to look past the voices of those internal battles to determine what’s really required is interesting, and revealing, and can make things a lot simpler in many areas of your life. 

Here’s how you can get started helping yourself.  Make a list of your various tribes, as many as you can think of.  It can be useful to note some of the requirements of those tribes, to sort that out in your head.   Then, start paying attention to the negative self-talk you usually dismiss or try to ignore.  Start matching up the chatter with the tribal sources, identifying their tribal origins.  When you make those connections, you can start thinking of resolutions.  This does not mean you have to give them what they’re asking for, it means you ponder what the real need is behind their chatter. 

Usually, the basic need is to feel safe.  Remember, this is not rational, it’s primitive.  An easy example is the demands of your family of origin religion tribe, if you’ve left that belief system.  Since you’ve chosen a different lifestyle, your subconscious may feel that your position in your tribe is now in danger, so you are in danger.  Literally, your subconscious needs to feel that you are spiritually safe.  The easiest way to appease it is to create a little ritual that suits your current self, and put it in place of the old ways.  Rituals are very soothing for the subconscious brain.  This could be as simple as lighting some incense once a week.  Smells are very significant to the primitive brain. 

Obviously this one step is not going to heal all your physical ailments, but it will help.  And, as you resolve more internal conflicts, you release the battles inside you, reduce your damage, and free your subconscious to heal you.  Since your subconscious has control of all that amazing chemistry, including lovely endorphins that relieve pain, you’d be amazed how effective this process is. 

There’s a lot you can do to help yourself when you understand why you hurt, and how to stop it.  Self-Mastery is the process of learning the role of your inner selves, your subconscious, and gaining mastery of all that you are.  Self-Mastery is the process of overcoming your own limitations, returning you to a position of choice. 

Having recovered from chronic pain myself, and helped many others through this process, I can state without reservation that it is worth it.  Incredibly, joyfully worth it. 

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