Early Trauma Can Change Your Brain's Response to Pain
Have chronic pain & also had a rough childhood? They could be linked.
New research is uncovering the connection of trauma in childhood to chronic pain. When stress gets internalized and emotions get stuffed there seems to be a connection to developing chronic pain for a significant proportion of people.
Here's the gist - when a child grows up there are a set of core needs that they need to be met by their caregivers.
- the opportunity to form a secure attachments (this includes safety, stability, nurturance,
and acceptance) - autonomy, competence, and sense of identity
- freedom to express their needs and emotions
- spontaneity and play
- boundaries and structure to learn realistic limits and self-control
When these are missing then children can respond in a number of ways. They can 'surrender' to the stress of it all and begin to believe it is something wrong with them. The self-blame can take hold and never let go, shaping the rest of their adult life.
They can also react in the opposite manner and 'over-compensate'. In this the child forms an armor to cover over the emotional wounds and can even stuff the pain so far down that it is out of their awareness (repression). Either of these approaches usually are adaptive at the time they first develop to help the child get by and survive their childhood as best as possible.
Unfortunately problems come later in life when these strategies no longer fit their life and their relationships. They cause pain and suffering rather than protecting against it. The combination of experiencing trauma, not having core needs met (safety, support, etc.) and being too young to have mature coping skills developed to handle the stress can significantly limit someone's ability to access their emotions in a healthy and flexible way.
For those people who have experienced trauma in childhood and then also develop a chronic pain condition (like Fibromyalgia) the theory is that networks in the brain that serve as regulators or buffers get worn down over time from the strain of keeping these old emotional control strategies up. The depression or anxiety interferes with the healthy ability to dampen pain.
We have known for quite awhile now that the ability to tune into your emotional experience and to express it seems to help change how this emotional stuffing & pain worsening cycle behaves. Thankfully we are also starting to see that this process is getting empirical proof as well.
Further reading/listening:
NPR had a recent story on this topic - Can You Reshape Your Brain's Response To Pain?