If It's True About Emotions, It's True About Sensations

Jul 24, 2023

Dear friends,

This article is from my newsletter archives, but it deserves to be published here on Substack. If you’ve been with me a while, this might be a familiar read; and if you’re new here, this is one of the most important concepts I have to share about how to find freedom if you’re stuck in chronic pain.

Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section!

"The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain."

Gabor Maté

When I was six years old, I begged my mom to let me do gymnastics.

She was worried I would get injured, so it took a bit of convincing for her to find a gym and sign me up for my first class. I knew before I ever stepped on a mat that I would love it. And I did.

I relished the tough physical drills. The thrill of taking risks with my body felt exhilarating and addictive. Swinging around on bars, balancing on a tiny beam, learning how to bend my body backwards and flip all the way over...it was so fun!

Then, about a year later, I fell off the balance beam and injured my left arm. I don't remember the physical pain at all. What I do remember is sitting on the sidelines watching the other kids have fun, as I waited for my mom to pick me up.

I did NOT like the feeling of being sidelined and left out.

When my mom arrived, she looked scared and worried. She took me to a doctor who pronounced my injury to be a light sprain.

Those initial fears were coming true: gymnastics is dangerous!

So she pulled me out.

That was my first real life lesson about pain: when you get injured, you stop the activity that caused it.

Years later, when my knees started hurting while trail running...I just stopped running - for 8 years! When I couldn't hike without knife-like stabbing pain, I stopped hiking - for 6 years!

This pattern was now fully automated.

My mom taught me (unconsciously, and not at all maliciously) that it's best to avoid any activity that causes injury. Except...being alive might cause injury!

Pain happens to all of us.

Yet almost none of us were taught how to develop a healthy relationship to these uncomfortable physical experiences.

When we're infants and young children, physical pain is typically experienced as purely physical.

But at some point we learn (either by direct communication, experience or by observing our parents and peers) that pain and injury is scary or shameful; a sign of weakness or defect; something to endure if you don't want to be left out; or the reason to shrink your world and stop doing activities you love.

Through these experiences we begin to entangle our emotional body (and sense of self identity) with our physical body. Pretty soon, every painful physical experience will trigger a familiar emotional reaction followed by a subsequent coping behavior, like my decision to stop running and hiking.

Until we learn how to untangle our emotions from our sensations, and distinguish between the two, we will not know how to meet our own needs.

"The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows. Numb the dark and you numb the light."
Brené Brown

This idea that trying to escape from pain creates more pain is shared widely by the world's foremost experts on mental and emotional health.

People such as Gabor Maté, Brené Brown, Susan David, Caroline Leaf, Bessel Van Der Kolk and many others all seem to agree that our ability to bear emotional pain without running away is the key to mental, emotional and social wellness.

Yet...there is no mention of, nor any kind of expert consensus, that this agreed upon truth about being human is equally true about physical sensations.

Even in Bessel Van der Kolk's seminal book "The Body Keeps The Score" (which I do recommend, despite what I'm about to say) his conclusion seems to be that the price we pay for suppressed emotional pain is physical pain and disease; a kind of torture inflicted upon us by our bodies. Essentially, we transition from being victims of traumatic events, to victims of our own body.

We're only a victim (of anything) if we choose to be.

There is another way.

My long held position is that if it's true about emotions, it's true about sensations.

We can't selectively numb. Feelings, after all, refer to the body. We feel everything through the body - not the mind.

Our fear of physical pain (including injury, disease and death) casts our physical joy and vitality into the shadows. The attempt to escape from painful sensations creates more of them. ALL OF THEM. Every single unpleasant, uncomfortable, terrifying, agonizing sensation.

When we try to numb, suppress, escape from or "fix" what is unpleasant because it's unpleasant...we will get more of it.

I invite you to really think about this.

Why is it that we all seem to agree that emotional wellness requires being able to be with, feel and share our full range of emotions (without needing to "fix" them); yet we routinely dismiss the idea that uncomfortable sensations such as joint pain, gut pain, headaches, sore throat, runny nose, cough, fever, muscle aches etc, are ALSO there to be felt, experienced and learned from (without needing to be "fixed")?

Unfortunately, very few "experts" out there are willing to take the position that any attempt to escape from physical pain will cause more physical pain.

Despite our advances in embracing our full range of emotions, we have a long way to go in embracing our full range of SENSATIONS.

If we really believed that ALL sensations are wise and right and meant to be learned from without needing to be "fixed"...

...how would the world change?

How would YOUR world change?

Right now the world is rife with deeply rooted fears about all kinds of physical sensations and what we're told they mean.

Remember: the brain (nervous system) is a meaning making machine.

That brain of ours is always hard at work to make meanings of everything, and until we break free of its hold on our psyche, we are so easily manipulated by fear: our own fears, and the collective fears of our fellow human beings.

How would it feel to inhabit your body if you had no more fear of physical sensations and embraced them all as a direct path to self knowledge?

I am not suggesting that you succumb to pain, surrender to the suffering and give up trying to feel better. I'm certainly not suggesting that you enter some kind of meditative Buddhist-like state where pain is inevitable and suffering is optional.

The truth is apparent for those who are ready to think with reality, instead of through the lens of the meaning making machine.

Only by embracing our full range of physical sensations can we learn the truth about them.

Just like with our emotions, if we suppress and numb sensations...they can't tell us anything useful. We can't learn anything about their origins, what they mean and what they're trying to tell us about how to live well and thrive.

When we learn to feel our full range of sensations, we learn how to interpret our body's needs.

In order to have a healthy mental and EMOTIONAL life, we need to be able to:

1) Feel our emotions
2) Name our emotions
3) Identify our emotional needs
4) Learn how to take care of our emotional needs (on our own, and within our relationships)

I think we can all agree on the above, right?

The same is true of sensations.

In order to have a healthy physical life, we need to be able to:

1) Feel our sensations distinct from our emotional reaction to them
2) Name our sensations
3) Identify our physical needs
4) Learn how to take care of our physical needs

It's really that simple!

If you can't get past your emotional reactions to painful physical sensations...then you'll have to do the emotional work first until it's no longer in the way of your ability to feel sensations in their pure form.

The Human Freedom Project

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