The Pain Event—how allowing ourselves to hurt can help us heal

This morning I woke up with a stabbing pain under my shoulder blade. Since I’m currently  tumbling down the hill of middle age, these kinds of random kinks aren’t surprising. Maybe I slept on it wrong. Maybe I dreamed I was an underwater arm wrestling champion. Or maybe just maybe, I tweaked the muscle a few days ago, ignored it, and now it’s returned with a knife in its teeth.

How should I manage this newfound pain? I could take an Advil, go about my day and hope it magically disappears. Or I could roll it out with a lacrosse ball, do a few rounds of physical therapy, pay attention to my posture and pressure-test any new activity with my ailing shoulder in mind. If this was a choose your own adventure book, and picking the right path thwarted certain death, I think my ten-year old self would choose the proactive path all the time. 

Ah, but life isn’t a YA paperback is it?

Like Boxes in the Attic

There’s a prevalent theory that’s been around for some time that understands pain not as a nuisance to be managed but as a saboteur to the body and mind. Books like The Body Keeps the Score, posit that pain and trauma can be stored in the body and manifest as other symptoms much later in life. While the scientists among us may be rolling their eyes, it makes a lot of sense. If I ignore my shoulder pain, might it exacerbate soreness in my glutes, and if I refuse to acknowledge its disruption, could it turn into a chronic condition that becomes a part of who I am and affects how I respond to a whole smattering of stimuli.

But of course, my shoulder is just a simple example to illustrate the theory. When it comes to chronic, visceral, acute, permanent pain, the simple routes to relief tend to disappear and we’re left with little recourse but to absorb the agony as part of who we’ve always been. The older the pain, the harder to reconcile too. We’ve spent decades refusing to look at it and evolving in spite of it, and to strip back the layers and face it might feel like starting all over again. The fear of reliving trauma actively prevents us from peeking too far into our pasts and the mere reminder can awaken all kinds of self-destructive behaviors. 

What our spirit may require to rewrite our own stories is a mechanism that evokes the original source of our injury. One that eviscerates the protective shell we’ve sheltered under our whole lives and asks us to sit with that pain and feel it. Mushrooms are one of the things that do this. They seem to deregulate our brains enough, so we can once again access emotions and memories we generally suppress, and in doing so, allow us to grieve.  

Case Studies: Motherhood, Depression, Loss

Okay, let’s dust off those petri dishes and dive into a few case studies. A client of mine recently sought out my services because she was approaching her 40th birthday and craved a kind of spiritual reset. She’d had a host of surgeries in her 30s, been relegated to disability and had developed depression and anxiety disorder to boot. Her intentions revolved around reclaiming her sense of self and becoming a more viable member of her communities.

The mushrooms arrived and quickly ushered her to a place of real unexpected pain. It wasn’t the physical toll of her surgeries or the collateral damage of losing her job that remained unresolved. It was the 18-year old emotional pain of being physically unable to actively care for her infant daughter. This was something she carried with her and never allowed herself to fully process. A few hours and tissue boxes later, my client was feeling catharsis and relief. 

Oscar (fake name, obvs) found himself talking to me about psilocybin therapy to combat a once dormant depression and because he felt creatively stuck (he was an artist). We spent most of the time during our preparation wading through various traumas he’d experienced during a difficult childhood. Though he’s already worked hard processing that pain, he was sure it would come up again. 

Once again, the mushrooms directed us elsewhere to a newer more visceral pain. They spotlighted his most recent romantic relationship that ended prematurely. During preparation, he barely mentioned it, but soon he’d come to realize just how much that relationship wounded him. That rejection helped his depressive symptoms manifest and refused to tolerate artistic expression that might be a means of grief. There, in the healing center, with the help of magic mushrooms, he was allowed to fully experience and acknowledge that awful breakup and understand how it affected his total self. 

Then there’s me because why not. I’m a tough kid, the youngest of 3 brothers, raised on a dairy farm etc. etc. That said, if you read my diary from 1992, you’d find a kid struggling with depression and yearning for community beyond the confines of the heifer shed. While I struggled with depression throughout high school, it really came back in full force in the form of panic attacks when I turned 27.

A few years ago when I was doing mushrooms, I was—you guessed it—ambushed by a pain that I thought had long ago disappeared. I felt it viscerally and clear as day, and validating that acute distress not only ushered in an era of relief, but brought wave upon wave of empathy and self-love too.

I Cried for 5 Hours—What’s Next?

So what? We felt unresolved pain and sobbed wildly while under the influence of a hallucinogenic. It may have felt good to cry it out, but how does this experience actually resonate? Hey, great friggin question.

It resonates because we’re no longer carrying this big scary thing with us. By allowing ourselves to sit within the pain, we were able to grieve it. We’ve excised this chapter from the story of our body and we no longer have to live our lives in fear that it will ambush us again. 

Of course, sometimes concrete integrative steps make sense as well. For my client above, he ended up writing a letter to his ex, which helped him fully express himself and gain a sense of closure. I used my peephole into my past to connect the dots to the high-octane anxiety that emerged during my 20s, and since then, irrational bouts of panic barely blip on my radar. 

Make it Hurt So Good

That said, there’s something about pain in of itself that makes us more whole. Once we confront that forever kind of fear, we are, in a small way, liberated. More often than not, we’ll feel immediate catharsis and lo and behold, other pressures begin to release.

Our bodies that have for so long been corrupted by this injury are relieved of this burden, and other chronic conditions start to fade to the periphery. That depression? Well, now that we’re lighter, it seems less of a distinguishing characteristic of who I am. Oscar’s stuckness? Now that he’s acknowledged the severity of his loss, he’s painting more than he’s ever had. My client’s anxiety and chronic pain? They’ve both retreated to the background as she moves forward without the baggage of unresolved trauma. 

Are we forever healed? Of course not. Did we tend to wounds that had festered for years? And are we happier, healthier and more complete because of it? Hell yeah, we are.