Understanding Pain.
We know that chronic pain is awful, and don’t think you should have to live with it. When pain becomes ‘chronic’ it means your pain has continued for more than 3-6 months, and it’s different from acute pain. Acute pain is very important, because it tells us how to behave so that we can protect our tissues while they repair. If you break your leg, the pain tells you not to put weight on it until it’s ready.
Chronic pain is real, and sore - but it’s a faulty signal
But chronic pain doesn’t have a purpose and it’s important to understand what is happening in the body in order to heal from it. After 3-6 months the body is able to fully heal from an injury. So chronic pain means your body hasn’t switched off the alarm system after your tissues repaired - the pain is real, and sore - but it’s a faulty signal, that is telling your body something is dangerous when it isn’t. Traditional medicine often looks for a problem in the tissues when looking at chronic pain - fixating on a bulging disc or torn tissue, when in fact, the problem is not in the tissues, it is in the nervous system.
Your brain might not have caught up with your body - it is sending alarm signals as if tissues were still damaged or the body is in danger. That’s why learning to feel the sensations in your actual body can be enormously helpful for retraining your brain to recognise how safe you are, and turn the volume down on the alarm systems, and in so doing, turn the volume down on your pain.
Turning the dial down
Craniosacral therapy is extremely useful for chronic pain, because a therapist can help facilitate you to feel safe in your body, to notice sensations without judging them as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ and retrain the nervous system to turn the alarm systems off. Chronic pain is so much more than problems in the tissues - it is a sensitised nervous system, and nervous systems love to heal in relation to other, calm people. Just like your friendly Craniosacral therapist.