Chronic Pain & Your Role in Healing Yourself

Be careful of labels and how they can limit your healing.

I am writing this blog from my 20-year perspective of dealing with the dangers of labels in medicine. That experience also brought forward my understanding of the Body Within connection to healing.

So let’s start at the beginning: what is a diagnosis? A diagnosis is “the process of identifying a disease, condition, or injury from its signs and symptoms.  A health history, physical exam, and tests, such as blood tests, imaging tests, and biopsies, may be used to help make a diagnosis.”

There are many kinds of diagnoses, so what each one can mean to an individual also varies. For the sake of this article, however, let’s consider a diagnosis as a label by which to define an illness.

Of course, there are many things that you can be labeled with:

• A genetic illness in which the genes that are responsible have been identified. This helps science know a lot more information to help with your treatment and healing.

• Your label could be an acute illness that came on quickly. Most of these can be identified and defined for a treatment to be given.

• It could be a cancer diagnosis specific to lifestyle or genes. The majority of these have some scientific treatment path that can yield very positive outcomes.

• Many types of injuries, illnesses and dysfunctions can also be tracked to a specific reason or origin in the body. This helps with a level of understanding on how to manage it.

In a “league of its own,” however, there is chronic pain and illness. This seems to baffle science. Both western and alternative medicine struggle to provide healing for these diagnoses.

Over time, both modalities have put together a menu of symptoms and tests and tagged the results with a label. Sometimes, the medicine and supplements can help, but too often, you’re given your label and sent home to try to manage it yourself with little direction.

Let’s use chronic Lyme Disease as an example. The symptoms for this condition are the same as many other chronic illnesses. The symptoms may even resemble the side effects of the meds you take for the illness!

If you look at many of the chronic pain and illness labels, the symptoms often intersect with one another. The label you end up getting is usually just the one your practitioner has done more of their research on, which also explains why many people receive several different labels from different doctors.

So is your label a definitive answer?

I can’t say for sure. All I can say is that if this rings true for you, sit with that and see what comes up.

What I do know is that this process can become not only dangerous, but crippling to those who are already suffering.

Over time, I have worked with many people diagnosed with chronic Lyme and many other chronic illnesses. Through working with their bodies, helping them realign old injury patterns that fatigue their bodies, and addressing work/lifestyle, it turns out that things are not as they seem.

For example, one client had an old concussion and tailbone injury that were still causing pain and dysfunction, producing Lyme-like symptoms. Once the misalignments from those injuries were alleviated, this client began to get her life back. 

Then, she experienced an especially bad day, and the memory of the Lyme diagnosis reappeared. This felt like an answer because it fit more into this client’s belief system which was based in western medicine.

Before you know it, she was back on antibiotics and living in fear of the story behind Lyme disease.

We had a chat, and she realized that she did something physical to aggravate her old injuries. We took some steps to resolve that aggravation, and now she’s feeling better again!

I’m not saying that this is what Lyme disease is for everyone. In fact, I don’t believe that there is ever a one-size-fits-all answer, especially for chronic Lyme and other chronic illnesses I have treated.

Sometimes, however, there is a pattern of dysfunction that should be taken into consideration when no other answers have yielded healing.

Think of it this way: your body has a specific nervous system firing pattern that propels you forward when you walk.

Your feet push off and make your tailbone area bounce. That creates movement all the way up your spine to your skull.

Along that pathway, from your feet to your skull, there are thousands of intricate movements and messages happening at once. And that’s what keeps you upright and stable. (Isn’t your body amazing!)

When this pathway gets disturbed, which is very common in life (especially where injuries are involved), it becomes harder to move in a fluid, freeing way. The more disruptions, the harder it is for your body to find the easiest way to get you out of a chair, for example. Now your body is stiffer, more rigid, in pain, and fatigued.

What symptoms does that produce? It depends on the person, the lifestyle, past injuries, diet, stress levels, the way the individual sees his/her body, how they see exercise, how they view medicine, etc.

The medical approach, however, is oftentimes simply, “something is not right, but all we can do is make a list of symptoms and give it a name until we know more.”

I, myself, was a victim of this approach, and I realized that I didn’t want that to be my future.

As I started to learn more about the body from my Exercise Science education, I started seeing these patterns and how to correct them.

I believe that we need to go within and learn that we can know more than medicine and life has led us to believe. I not only recognized the dysfunction, but I also started to see ways to correct it myself. Over time, I have taken this approach with myself and my clients. Now, I am educating others on how to Go Within and start to heal themselves.

Did it happen overnight? No, but over time, I have reversed a lifetime of injury and illness damage. And I can help you do the same.

Here’s the catch: you have to be willing to listen to your body, not the label.

I’ve seen people start listening and getting better and stronger. Then, the anxiety takes over.

These people have been in turmoil for so long that the label gives them peace. When you have chronic pain and illness, no one can see it. When the doctors tell you that nothing is wrong, your support system starts to fade away because they believe what the doctor says instead of believing in your lived experience. 

Once you get the label, it’s like being validated. Your family starts to act differently, friends are concerned, work is more flexible and other doctors start listening.

When you have a bad day after you’ve ditched the label and started to feel better, it can be catastrophic. Your support system may not understand that your symptoms are an accumulation of the toll that life has taken on your body because they’ve never had that experience. I’ve had clients stop trying to heal themselves because they were too afraid of losing the support system they gained via their label. It was too hard to do it alone, and they didn't want to go back there.

Holding onto the label, however, keeps you from understanding that you are so much more than that, and you have an internal power waiting for you to step up and reclaim your life.

In this world, we have a name or a label for everything, which stops us from seeing what really is. 

Is a tree any less real if we don’t call it a tree? Of course not. Neither is your Lyme disease any less real if we detach it from its label and preconceived notions.

There’s a lot to unpack here, which is why I’ve created a library full of resources to show you the way. To get started, check out my short course, “Tapping Into the Body Within.” Click here to learn more.