Why Overcoming Hidden Emotional Pain Is Your Best Chronic Back Pain Treatment
January 2nd, 2009This article was provided by the Sedona.com website. Commentary by Utah Injury Attorney Rex Bush.
Webmaster’s note: I have personally used this method to release negative emotions and have found it very helpful when dealing with nearly any aspect of life. Negative emotions tend to block our progress everywhere in our lives and they make us sick. Knowing how to spot and release these feelings is one of the most important skills a persona can have.
At some point in their lives, 80 percent of Americans — and some estimates say up to 90 percent — will experience back pain. It may be a dull ache, a sharp pain or a constant throbbing, and it can seriously interfere with your ability to function normally.
Not surprisingly, one nationwide phone survey of over 1,200 Americans, sponsored by Stanford University Medical Center, ABC News and USA Today, found that back pain was the most common type of pain reported (followed by knee and shoulder pain, joint pain and headaches.
While most back pain goes away in a few days, if your back pain lasts more than three months, a condition thought to impact about 10 percent of back-pain sufferers, it’s considered chronic. Treatments for such pain are estimated to cost about $26 billion a year.
What are the treatments? Well, typically they involve things like anti-inflammatory drugs, surgery, strengthening exercises, ice packs and heating pads. But it turns out that these treatments may be way off the mark because there is a major factor that’s been overlooked when it comes to chronic back pain: your mind.
“Most chronic back pain has a strong emotional component,” says Hale Dwoskin, CEO and director of training of Sedona Training Associates. “It is either emotionally driven or emotionally aggravated — or there is simply a lot of emotion because of having this pain in your back for so long.”
In fact, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes calls back pain “the second most common neurological ailment in the United States — only headache is more common.”
Further, numerous scientists and experts are regarding back pain as a disease of the nervous system, not of the spine. What is required to cure back pain, they say, is to overcome the negative emotions that are causing it.
Healing Back Pain: The Emotional Component
Quite simply, when people are given methods to deal with their negative emotions (which may rise due to the pain, or exist already), they often improve physically as well.
Take, for instance, a study published in Health Psychology and led by Robert Kerns, Ph.D., of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. Researchers analyzed data from 22 trials of adults with chronic low back pain (who had been in pain for an average of 7.5 years), and found that psychological interventions improved pain better than standard treatments. Psychological interventions also improved:
- Health-related quality of life
- Work-related disability
- Interference of pain with daily living
- Depression
“Many patients with chronic back pain develop a sense of hopelessness,” says Kerns in Best Life magazine. “These [psychological] therapies show them that they can develop everyday strategies that make them feel better. I think one of the things that modern medicine has forgotten is that it’s important to treat the whole person, and this means addressing both the physical and psychological aspects of the pain. When it comes to back pain, just fixing a ‘broken’ body part often isn’t enough.”
Get Rid of Your Chronic Back Pain With The Sedona Method
The Sedona Method, a tool that teaches you how to release negative emotions, including those associated with physical pain, works to relieve back pain in two ways:
1. It reduces your underlying tension, stress and negative emotions
2. It helps you to naturally dissolve the feeling of back pain
Whenever you feel pain, you simply ask yourself the easy-to-learn questions that make up The Method. As you do so, you will begin to accept the pain, which is a crucial step toward ultimately releasing it.
This is because the more you dread, expect, or fear back pain, the more you will tend to manifest more of it. On the other hand, if you release these negative feelings, your body will be free to finally heal.
To read the story of one woman, Susan Benson, who overcame chronic back pain using The Sedona Method http://www.sedona.com/html/beyond-pain-management.aspx, be sure to read the inspiring article featured in Woman’s World magazine earlier this year.
Even though we make no claims to diagnose, treat or cure any specific ailment, over the last 25 years many of our graduates, such as Susan Benson, have reported back to us decided improvements in their pain levels — sometimes even miraculous improvement.
“When you release the stress and tension that is either causing your back pain or simply magnifying it, even long-standing pain in your back can easily dissolve,” Dwoskin says. “Either way you will feel a lot better emotionally, which usually translates to profound physical relief as well.”
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