Help with Fibromyalgia and chronic pain

Fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue, even migraine headaches all share similar patterns and habits. There is a sense of emotional blockage, that emotions are not being digested – the person has emotional indigestion.

This emotional indigestion manifests as symptoms such as constipation, and pain.

Perhaps because, on some level, they recognise that they can’t digest difficult emotions (a difficult ‘truth’) they keep themselves away from feeling, particularly away from the strong, more uncontrollable emotions, such as anger.

So, at some level, people with fibromyalgia have a truth that they are hiding from. The Illness is an attempt by the system to make the truth more evident. The louder the pain shouts, the harder it is to ignore.

People hide from their ‘truth’ by doing too much, shallow breathing, holding the breath, speeding up and getting out of control.

This truth, or difficult emotion, may be a result of some traumatic event in their past (and the ‘traumatic event’ is not always obvious). This event has not been properly registered and dealt with by the conscious mind so it has become ‘locked down’ in the body – a neuromuscular lock.

Often you will find that their body has taken on a somatic anatomy of rigid/density: the body has hardened inside against the ‘assault’ it has received. The muscles – such as the gluteals, thighs, hips, abdomen – have tightened to protect against the onslaught. And in that tightened have held onto the emotion behind the assault.

Over time this has led to chronic passive tension which prevents feeling and leads to respiratory and/ or metabolic acidosis.

Breathing affects pH balance of body, by affecting the level of CO2 in the system. Poor breathing habits ( chest breathing, frozen breathing, breath holding etc etc) reduce the ventilation rate which increases CO2 levels and therefore reduces pH [here the lungs control CO2 levels], result being respiratory acidosis.

Metabolic acidosis refers to anaerobic respiration of muscles, hypoxia and release of lactic acid. This deep muscular and resulting myofascial tension persists even during sleep. The tension and perhaps the lactic acid/acidosis perhaps causes the pain. The muscles need to be retrained to change the muscle memory (and the associated emotional memory needs to be released) – this retraining will restore resting length of muscle (rather than contraction) and proper alignment.

Essentially the system is toxic – the pain is a physical pain because the system is toxic.

Having this understanding we can see that physical pain is of course a manifestation of emotional pain that is not being heard, that has been ignored for many years. And now the body is having to shout very loud indeed to try to be heard!

Breath retraining goes a long way to reduce the pain. You can help them breathe using the following –
• hand on rib cage/other on solar plexus and pump
• hand raised above belly – ask her to breathe in a touch it
• use sandbag breathing – weight on abdomen – or crocodile breathing (both train the diaphragm and strengthen it)
• use the pulling prana exercise – only once they have truly got the hang of abdominal breathing
• (plus other ideas from yoga)

Nevertheless, in most cases, the only way of dealing with the physical pain is to deal with the emotional pain and release it in a safe supportive way through psychotherapy.