Why Understanding Your Pain Isn't Enough to Make It Stop

You've researched and tried everything to find an answer to why you're still in pain.

The frustration can come from the fact that you are highly capable, successful and solution focused. You understand problems very well and you tend to fix them.

But this one keeps evading you. You may even think you're not doing enough.Or that you must be doing something wrong. Or this is just the way it's going to be now.

"If I just understand it more".... I used to think that too.

But your understanding it isn't the issue here. You're trying to solve something from the wrong floor.

That is to say- your understanding lives on the top floor whilst the pain, the tension, the pattern, lives on the bottom floor.

The place where the pattern lives is in the oldest parts of the brain in the subcortical parts that are responsible for threat predcition and response. They don't take orders from upstairs. So it doesn't matter how much you know or how well you understand the pain, the tension, the struggle, it won't change the pattern prediction running underneath them.

The nervous system learns to guard, brace and protect as a response to anything that is perceived as threat. So to keep you safe it stores it as a file and runs it automatically. This makes the system respond before conscious thought. Precisely to be fast and powerful. It's necessary as a potentially life saving system. It must predict instantly to be efficient and effective.

However, these patterns can become outdated. What was once needed as a response in order to protect is no longer necessary. If the program keeps running it responds the same way. Every time. But knowing this doesn't change it. Nor does thinking about it or analysing it. This is why understanding your pain isn't enough to make it stop. You can't think your way out of an automatic response. That's not an insight problem - it's an access problem.

So we have to gain access by reaching it in the laguage the subcortical structures recognise, where the pattern actually lives. Not through cognition or more understanding.

This is a different kind of access altogether.

So the question is not why you're still in pain. It's how do you reach it.

If that question feels relevant to you, Shift the Field was built for this.

Anne-Martine Dicke