Links Between Money, Trauma and Chronic Pain

Survival in the modern world revolves around money, and our complex relationship to money has profound impacts on our physiology.

Have you ever gotten into a fight with someone you loved over money?

(Who hasn’t?)

Have you ever felt your body contract and contort with the tension of survival stress? Or felt guilty for something you did to make (or keep) money that went against your conscience?

I’m guessing yes, and yes.

Money is part of our lives whether we like it or not; understanding how our relationship to money impacts our physiology, psychology and personal relationships is a superpower. To gain this knowledge, we have to peer into the darker recesses of our mind - and life; the places we’ve been avoiding at all costs.

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Dave* was an engineer in the booming tech industry in Colorado, where I worked in private practice from 2011 to 2018. By the time he came to see me, he had “tried everything” for the carpal tunnel syndrome and gut pain that plagued him every day.

The carpal tunnel pain was so bad it was waking him up most nights with an electrical storm in his arms that shot barbed wire sensations up into his neck and shoulder blade. By comparison, the crohn’s disease was tolerable because it was known; he had been dealing with it for a long time. While he could “manage” the gut pain with diet and supplements, the arm pain was making it almost impossible for him to work, play with his children, or help his wife with the daily chores at home. Miserable and increasingly angry, this pain was causing him to become someone he didn’t recognize. Searching for novel methods he hadn’t tried yet, he found me.

We began working together at a time when I was starting to experiment with mapping the body for nervous system patterns related to trauma and survival. Like all new clients, however, we started where I always did: by mapping his fascia using Kinetix, and releasing all the stuck, gummed up, dense tissues. Tension, tightness and knots permeated his body.

Since he worked on the computer every day, the carpal tunnel made sense. Repetitive motions like typing and mousing can definitely cause fascial restrictions, which in turn can strangle blood vessels and irritate nerves. At first glance, this seemed like a pretty straightforward case: we would release all the fascia in his forearms, biceps, triceps, chest and neck, which would support healthy blood circulation and free any trapped nerves.

Having helped dozens of people before him completely eliminate their carpal tunnel pain in just a few sessions, I was confident we could do the same for him.

He and his body were about to teach me some very important lessons.

Every time Dave worked with me, his carpal tunnel all but disappeared. He loved the cathartic feeling of getting stepped on, and we always had great conversations. Sharing an interest in online entrepreneurship, it was common for us to nerd out about marketing strategies, or how cool it was that the internet allowed us to connect with people all over the world. One day he confessed to me that he had a secret longing to start his own podcast; he’d been thinking about it for years.

Unfortunately, the arm pain would return like clockwork a few days after every session - as bad as ever; and by the time he came back the following week, his fascia appeared to have returned to the unhealthy state it was in when he first came to see me. This went on for a few months.

Cases like this, which made up about 20% of my clients, helped me understand that fascia won’t change just because we want it to, or perform certain techniques; this is how I learned that the laws of physiology are fairly simple, but that physiology exists within - is permeated by - certain spiritual laws that have superiority. This client, and others like him, helped me understand that the nervous system is the Gatekeeper to the world of fascia.

When I work with clients, my goal is complete resolution. While I’m happy to manage optimization with clients who choose to work with me regularly, I don’t do pain management.

Clearly, we had failed to intercept the message hidden in the pain that his body was committed to communicating. It was time to try something new.

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Before I tell you the rest of this story, I hope you’re asking yourself:

Why did his pain disappear during the Kinetix sessions?

Pain that disappears for even 5 minutes obviously isn’t permanent - and whatever is happening when the pain disappears is very good data about the true root cause.

His body was responding very favorably during the sessions. It just didn’t hold.

What was happening in my office that was NOT happening in the rest of his life?

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Mapping The Nervous System

Dave was open minded and ready to try anything, so when I invited him to experiment with me in mapping his nervous system, he said yes.

Like me, and so many people stuck in chronic pain, we discovered that one of his primary survival patterns was “being good.” Fear of conflict learned in childhood had shaped him into an adult who ignored his own emotional needs in order to secure “belonging” with the people in his life. (While this is a false sense of belonging, it’s preferable to most of us than not belonging at all). Behaving in ways that he believed (subconsciously) would please the people that loved him, he chronically rejected and abandoned himself.

During this mapping process, which is collaborative and requires that someone is truly ready to see what has been keeping them stuck, he shared that he was incredibly unhappy at work; most of his time there was spent in barely contained rage and resentment, and he constantly fantasized about quitting.

The obvious question - that I’m sure you’re wondering now - is one that I asked immediately:

“If you hate your job so much, why don’t you quit?”

Full of confusing emotions that I could tell he didn’t know how to articulate, he replied:

“I can’t quit my job because I have two kids at home, and a wife who depends on me for this money; I make really good money at this job, and it affords us a certain lifestyle.”

Beginning to understand the real pain that this man’s body was carrying, my next question was asked with a great deal of care:

“Have you talked to your wife? Does she know how unhappy you are, and what your real dreams are?”

(It’s always easier to see these patterns in other people, and the solutions seem so simple looking from the outside in! The truth is, most solutions to our pains and problems are actually quite simple; but they are also the most difficult for us to implement!)

The floodgates of truth were opening.

“I don’t know how to talk to my wife about my job, because I’m even more unhappy in my marriage. I want to leave her, but I don’t want to hurt her or my kids. She thinks I’m angry and irritable all the time because I’m in so much pain, and I let her believe that because I don’t know how to tell her that our marriage is the reason I’m so unhappy.”

People pleasing, emotional suppression and conflict avoidance; that’s a great recipe for resentment, blame and rage. Or self hatred.

Here was a man who was using his body - sitting at a computer, typing on a keyboard - doing work he hated just to make money for a family that he didn’t even trust with the deeper longings of his soul. The truth is, he was in so much conflict with himself internally that his body was practically exploding from trying so hard to hold it all in.

To heal, he would need to take radical responsibility for the pain he was causing himself; and begin to align his external actions and behaviors with the internal truths of his heart.

Unwilling to take the risk of emotional exposure and potential rejection of his true self, Dave was caught in a battle of fears:

Fear of conflict with his wife was entangled with the fear of quitting his job; fear of hurting his children stopped him from leaving his wife; fear of rejection at home was caught up in fear of failure if he followed his heart and started a business of his own; fear of emotional pain was showing up as chronic physical pain…because, actually, the only thing he wasn’t afraid of was physical pain!

In fact, the physical pain was helping him avoid his real fears: as long as he was hurting physically, he could focus on fixing his body and continue to put off the painfully hard work of fixing his miserable life.

Freedom, for Dave, would necessitate that he be honest with his wife; that he risk rejection and reveal his true self to the people he loved; that he give himself permission to follow the longings of his soul, even if it meant risking his marriage and triggering all of his own latent survival patterns tied to money.

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Our Relationship To Money Has Profound Impacts

When I was ten years old, my mom picked me up from school one day and told me that she would be dropping me off at a friend’s house; that my brother would be living with my dad, and that I would be living with my friend’s family for a while. Overwhelmed by her own survival fears after leaving my dad again, she sought refuge in a communal living society high up in the mountains, far away from my school and my friends; she figured this was the best thing for me. I would spend weekends with her, while my friend’s parents would take care of me during the week.

My mom and dad, like so many couples, were struggling financially and fought a lot about money. The money, of course, wasn’t the real issue; it’s just the perfect trigger for the land mines lying in all of our nervous systems. Since money means survival in the modern world, it is often a very real scapegoat embedded in our deeper relationship wounds.

Believing (not at all consciously, but somewhere deep inside) that my dad chose my brother, and that my mom must not want me, my own body’s survival mechanisms kicked in that day.

Emotions were now unavailable to me, and I didn’t cry again until age 24. I became hypervigilant to my surroundings, alert and always on guard. And, retreating deep inside my body, I got very, very quiet (which was mistaken for shyness).

My new family was not at all like my own.

They had different house rules; they ate very different foods that my body wasn’t used to; and they were practicing Jews (whereas my family was not religious at all). My whole world felt terribly, terribly wrong.

Constantly overwhelmed by the feeling that I didn’t belong (because I didn’t) but unable to go home (where was home anyway?), I became a brilliant chameleon. Sensing whatever these proxy parents wanted me to be in any given moment, I became that; to do otherwise might mean losing the roof over my head, and the food on my plate.

Rumblings of gut disturbances began during this time that morphed into excruciating pain by age 13, when an adult male neighbor groomed me for 6 months before violating me in every imaginable way. Gut pain is closely linked, via the vagus nerve, to our sense of social belonging - a sign that it is under threat.

The primary weapon this man used against me (against my entire family) was his awareness that my parents were struggling financially. Though they had gotten back together, their marriage was still very stressful. When he heard my dad brag about my painting skills (I went to a Waldorf school, and my dad was so proud of my artistic abilities), the neighbor told my dad that he needed a bunch of signs made for his parent’s antique store and suggested that I paint them; he had money to pay.

Without any recollection of how I got there, I soon found myself at his house every day after school diligently painting black words onto white wooden planks. Once again, I found myself performing for survival; this time, with actual money involved.

While I was there, he got to work turning me against my parents. He bought me things, fed me, and complimented me; all the while criticizing my parents, pointing out every shortcoming of theirs that was impacting me personally. It worked. Within a few months, he had convinced me that my parents cared more about making money (because they had none) than they did about me. In particular, he succeeded in rupturing whatever connection was hanging by a thread between my father and I, who was my whole world when I was little.

This psychopathic neighbor was an alcoholic and drug addict, and after successfully confusing my psyche to the extent that I didn’t trust my parents or myself, he unleashed his pent up rage and revealed his true intentions. It took me two and a half years to break free of his hold over me, but that experience shaped the rest of my life.

I am who I am today not in spite of these events, but because of them.

My healing journey has been one of allowing my hurts to hurt; of turning towards pain as a request for protection; of embracing the gifts hidden in the wounds of these traumas, and choosing to use them for good.

During my 15+ years in private practice, I have seen repeatedly that our relationship to money impacts our physiology, creating deeply ingrained survival patterns that are usually entangled with our other primary survival strategy: belonging. That’s why these patterns are so painful.

Chronic pain can occur as a “safe prison” to keep us from venturing into the terrifying unknown of entrepreneurship; it can also occur as a consequence of suppressing the true longings of our soul; often, it occurs as both simultaneously.

The survival habit of putting on a performance to make money has been one of the most difficult survival patterns for me to break completely. I’ve hurt people I care about in the process. I’m pretty sure we all have.

I look back now with immense compassion for my parents, who were very young when they had children and were genuinely doing their best under difficult circumstances (and my dad, with invisible deficits that none of us were aware of).

With The Human Freedom Project, I am allowing myself to come out of hiding and apply myself to a life purpose that is deeply meaningful to my soul and spirit. If making money was my priority, this project would not be my first choice. Instead, I’m taking some big risks.

I’d love to sit here and tell you that as a result of this decision, my body feels liberated and my soul feels free because “I am following my purpose.” But that’s not how survival biology works!

Every new level of freedom I’ve achieved in my own life, going back to age 24 when I began consciously pursuing “the freedom to” vs deliverance from suffering, comes at a cost. In the end, it is always worth it; but the adventure is full of toil and hardship.

My nervous system has been in full on revolt for months.

Chronic fatigue, resistance to working out, the compulsion to overeat, relational conflicts and daily gut pain have all done their best to stop me. The closer I’ve come to launching this new project in full, the more intense these forces of resistance become.

The only thing that feels truly free is my spirit; in my conscience, I am at peace. This peace allows me to tolerate whatever is happening in my body as the pains I simply have to bear while I push forward.

If you want a comfortable life; a life of ease and tranquility; a life devoid of pain and conflict…don’t follow me. Don’t go where I go.

If, however, you want a life of expanding spiritual freedom; of purposeful hard work that gives meaning to the pain of life; of growing beyond the familiar confines of your survival biology in order to become that which your soul and spirit long to become…this path, I know well.

This, we can do together.

This is the mission of The Human Freedom Project.

With love,
Elisha

P.S. The new membership will be opening soon. I know…it’s taking longer than you want, if you’ve been waiting to learn Kinetix! It’s taking longer than we want, but we’ve had to solve a lot of surprising technical challenges the past month. We can’t wait to welcome you when we open!

P.P.S. The name in this story was changed to protect identity, but he was a real client that I thoroughly enjoyed working with and think of fondly. When I left Boulder in 2018, he was taking some tentative but meaningful steps towards the freedom he longed for. I hope he found the courage to go for it.