Posted by Partlycloudy on September 10, 2008, at 11:17:38
In today's session we covered a lot of ground. I've been going every week lately due to the extra pressures at home. I've also been seeing an acupuncture and chiropractor practioner for my chronic back pain, which has become pretty severe.
Talking in session, it became as clear as day, when we would touch on an issue that was a core truth, and something that was being brought into focus, that my back pain would correspondingly lessen. When we would speak of things that I currently find distressing, my back would spasm. OK, classic psychosomatic back pain (which you don't see many doctors talk about these days). My practioner has talked to me about my job currently being better stress management. My therapist says that I've been stuffing my feelings about a lot of issues at home (my step daughter, my sick father in law, and how my husband is or isn't dealing with these problems) rather than airing them out - and this rings true to me, because when we talked about it, my back wouldn't hurt as much.
I have a similar routine with my headaches these days. The pain is very physical and very real - but I can feel an immediate correspondence between talking about stressful issues that are still causing me to feel distressed, and me feeling pain.
She wants me to try to journal my way through some of this stuff - to get the venom and poison, as it were, out of my head and so out of my body.
At the same time, I'm so uncomfortable that I've isolated myself pretty severely. Not leaving the house at all if I can avoid it, running out of groceries, not doing the things for myself like I say I'm going to (like yoga) and then feeling a whopping load of guilt on top of feeling full of pain.
I don't see this lovely little cycle I've created being broken. I have an appointment with my pdoc this afternoon, and I guess I will mention the chronic pain to him - I know that while I was on Cymbalta, I had no problems with pain at all, and coincidentally, it's prescribed for people with fibromyalgia. And when I withdrew from that medication, body aches were my main symptom.
This is all tied together somehow. I don't know what the resolution is. I wish I felt that writing about my complaints was going to make me feel better - but this keeps coming up (like many, many times in a day! How much can I write??!!).
I'm distressed.
poster:Partlycloudy
thread:851329
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20080906/msgs/851329.html