The Body Doesn't Lie (7 page)

All those years, those decades in between, Amy had been running from that pain. She
ate
her grief about her dad’s death, putting on the extra weight to hide her sadness from the world. She worked hard at her job to prove to her mom that she didn’t have to worry about her—but the hours toiling at a job she secretly resented took a huge toll.

When her kids were born, she poured all her repressed creative energy into them. She ran them to every artistic club and class possible, determined to give them the outlet she’d denied herself. She poured herself into them, fiercely protecting
their
creative expression—and all the while, the pain of her own forgotten dreams lived on in her tissues, coming out through her aching back, her extra pounds, her shingles sores.

But now, here she stood before me, a new woman, free and whole.

She twirled around, at least ten pounds off her frame, her hair shining, her body seeming to levitate. The very picture of Positive Feedback!

When I see her now, she tells me about her latest painting or collaborative art project. She and her husband downscaled their life to create space and time and financial wherewithal for her art. Despite a big shift in their income, she doesn’t miss the old lifestyle; she feels as if she’s finally
living
instead of simply
existing.

Amy still occasionally has that tension in her neck—things get too hectic, the kids’ rehearsals are time-consuming, her own art school projects are due. “But I’m listening, Vicky,” she’ll say. Her Negative Feedback breakdown left her with a handy pain signal: Whenever she gets stressed or doesn’t sleep enough, or has too much sugar, or isn’t doing enough to nurture her art, she’ll feel a little tingle on her face where the shingles came out, just a little tickle at her hairline:
I’m here
, her pain says.
Don’t forget about me.
But Amy knows that, even when she tips into Negative Feedback temporarily, the road back to Positive Feedback is just one step away.

Amy’s shingles pain is a clear signal that she’ll carry with her for life: a little warning bell that she’s approaching Negative Feedback again. In week 1 of the Positive Feedback program, outlined in detail in part 2 of this book, we’ll go through two exercises, the Body Map and the Body Timeline, that enable you to recognize the patterns that
your
pain follows—the physical outlines, the what and when and where of the pain.

Unresolved painful issues may be in your tissues, but they can be released. When I manipulate patients’ muscles and connective tissues, I often help unlock the blocked bloodflow to those areas of the brain that are holding on to old, “forgotten” memories. Sometimes one adjustment and—poof!—that sad memory is released. But more often, you’ll need to do more work to release the pain. I could massage those points all day long, but if you’re not ready to face the pain and release it, no amount of physical manipulation is going to help. Reflecting on your own body’s history will give you a place to start.

Once you know where your pain is, and the emotions that may have helped put it there, you can start to make other connections as well—such as the impact that your pain may be having on your organs or other body systems. Our bodies are full of trigger points that link to our heart, lungs, liver, thyroid, and other organs and glands—trigger points you’ll learn about in our discussion of the Release phase and in chapter 9, so you can stop pain in its tracks and point your body in a different direction.

Remember: A pain in the neck is never
simply
a pain in the neck. Let’s take a moment to help see how I key into my patient’s pain and learn where it’s coming from.

Let’s say you have a pain in your lower back. That pain may indeed be due to muscle injury or spinal trauma. Alternatively, it could be “referred pain”—that is, nerve impulses triggered by an inflammatory condition, a bone disorder, a problem with your adrenal glands or kidney function, or even a disruption in your ovaries or uterus. If you came to me for help, I would go through a whole range of questions to find out if the pain was indeed coming from elsewhere. I would ask, for example, if along with the neck pain you’ve been experiencing any other discomforts, such as diarrhea, fever, nausea, or recent unexplained weight loss. (You can get a sense of the range of questions I ask in appendix A, “The Positive Feedback Questionnaire.”)

My questions and observations of a patient help me trace his or her pain through the neurological, endocrine, and immune systems—and to see how those linkages come back to the central nervous system. Osteopathic medicine teaches us, for example, that the sympathetic nervous system’s connection to the kidneys is from the thoracic vertebra T10 to the lumbar vertebra L1. These codes refer to the areas of the spine that, as noted earlier, Caroline Stone said we osteopaths “play” like a keyboard. Don’t worry—I don’t expect you to already know or to remember these technical terms. Though they might seem like secret codes to you, these codes point to direct links with interior organs and tissues, almost like a treasure map that helps me get closer to the truth:
Where is the pain really coming from?
As figure 2 reminds us, the source may not be physical. Consider the common areas of pain and their potential physical and emotional causes.

Figure 2.
The Location of Pain and Its Possible Causes

You may find that your pain presents itself every time you experience a particular emotion or reaction—for example, every time you feel anxious or receive bad news. That’s because your dawning realization of that anxiety or bad news can link to an emotional memory that triggers certain receptors in the body. Because you experience emotion through the two-thirds of your body mass that’s your musculoskeletal system, the trace memories of all those original and repeated emotions remain with you, in several regions of your brain as well as throughout your nervous system.

Every person’s body is unique, and every person’s pain is unique. Every person experiences pain in his or her own way. Yet as unique as pain can feel to the individual, I’ve also seen patterns emerge. Most of my patients—sometimes up to 90 percent—fall into one of two broad categories: lower back pain type and upper back pain type. Many have additional health concerns, but most come to me suffering from one of these two types of back pain as well.

Over the years of treating people, I’ve found that people with each of these profiles often share similar physical, emotional, and spiritual symptoms. Read through the descriptions and stories that follow to see if they resonate with you.

Lower back pain is often caused by muscle strain, too much sitting, or a disc problem. It can also indicate a problem with the ovaries or other reproductive parts, or the kidneys. Surprisingly often, lower back pain is food-related: When people have an intolerance to certain foods, eating those foods can cause inflammation in the gut, which shows up as lower back pain.

Think about how you’ve been treating your body lately. Have you had a diagnostic smear, swab, or scan recently? When was the last time you went to see your gynecologist or your general practitioner? Upon reflection, you may remember that you had an appointment just last year—oh,
but
you had to miss it to catch a flight and never had the time to reschedule.

Regardless of how the pain was triggered—whether by any of these causes or something else—you’re now in an inflammatory state. Your muscles and tissue are crying out for help.

And maybe it’s not just your back that hurts. A woman with the lower back pain profile might experience a host of really unpleasant symptoms—everything from smelly stool, to diarrhea or constipation, hemorrhoids, cystitis, and other unpleasant vaginal conditions. Often when I examine a woman with this pain profile, I realize that there’s a connection to her fertility. Perhaps she had a difficult experience giving birth; a tissue-memory from this experience then connects her kidneys, ovaries, and uterus to the current site of her pain.

While any of the above-noted physical causes can play a role, I’ve come to understand that many people suffering from lower back pain tend to be repressing an emotional hurt from long ago. Their body remembers the trigger event both physically and emotionally, and thus their back pain may stem from that unhealed earlier trauma. If a person never deals with that deep-seated trauma, her lower back pain will return—and, eventually, may even get worse.

One of my patients, Sarah, had been struggling for years with fear and depression. During times of extreme stress, she would develop herpes sores on her lips. Recently, Sarah fell into a rough patch. She was so upset and emotional that she developed cystitis and bladder infections.

She told me she had lower back pain and tingling in one foot. After spending some time with her, I couldn’t shake the feeling that her problems were related to the IUD birth control device she had inside her. At my recommendation, she went to a gynecologist. He tested her blood, did a scan and an ultrasound—and reported back that everything looked fine. We did a blood test and checked her C-reactive proteins to see if she had inflammation in the body. All those tests also came back normal. Then the issues start to worsen and spread to her bowels as well. She was in tremendous discomfort, and yet further tests
still
revealed nothing wrong.

We sat down together to reflect. “Sarah,” I said, “we’ve got to figure this out. What is it? Why is your body bringing you back to that inflammatory condition over and over?”

“I’m not sure,” she said quietly. “The doctor says this is all in my head, but it’s
real.
Do you believe me?” I nodded, and I rubbed her back. After a few minutes of silence, she started crying.

Together, we retraced her Body Timeline. We talked about the fact that she had two kids, and she’d had a very traumatic experience after the second baby was born early, at twenty-nine weeks. She’d had to stay in the hospital for a time and nearly died.

When I touched her wrist, I could feel that her nerves were like soccer balls—they were banging everywhere. We did a Reflect visualization, and when we were done, she said, “Vicky, I think what’s happening is that I want another baby. But I’m scared of what might happen, and I’m also scared we can’t afford it.” Her husband had just lost his job, but she couldn’t get it out of her head: She was craving a baby. And she thought that her pain might be her body’s rejection of the birth control device, the only thing that was standing in her way.

Over her gynecologist’s protests, she made an appointment and had her IUD removed. The next week, she came in for a treatment. She said she still had a little pain in the vaginal area, but she felt safe—no panic.

Earlier, while we were creating her Body Timeline, she had confessed that she’d been sexually abused when she was young, and she talked about how that experience had devastated her sense of self-trust. When she was at the height of her pain, her doctor’s words—“The IUD coil is fine”—reverberated through her, banging up against her own intuition. Once she decided to trust herself and had the coil removed, the pain, along with the stored-up trauma, was released. The morning after the procedure, she went to the bathroom and, after using the toilet, saw a large black pool of blood. Rather than alarm, she felt a tremendous sense of release and relief—as well as a restored faith in her own instincts. Another doctor later confirmed that all was well.

Sarah had a classic lower back pain type: a chronic pain in her lower body, especially her lower back, with some muscle strain—paired with long-standing depression. Many patients with lower back pain have deep-seated, long-standing fears, often from childhood. As they dig deeper and reflect, they can recall those issues from the past. If they’re able to name them and face them, they can release them—and with those memories, the pain will often be released as well. Sarah’s lower back pain had been taking her back to the past. She’d needed to face her pain to release it.

And following that release, Sarah’s story quickly turned around: She and her husband agreed that they both wanted to have another baby, no matter what their financial situation looked like. Then, as if the universe had been waiting for her to release her fear, her husband’s search for work suddenly bore fruit, and they were once again financially secure.