Let’s talk about responding to pain. We all have pain, unless you’re one of those rare people in the world whose pain receptors did not develop, who go through life without pain (which is actually very dangerous). But all the rest of us end up having some amount of pain in our life, mediated by some mechanism in our nervous system that makes us feel uncomfortable, that we don’t like.
Pain Is More Than a Physical Sensation
More than just a physical sensation, pain is actually a mental-emotional experience where we’re like, “Oh, I really don’t like that.” And you probably don’t need me to tell you that because if you’ve ever had pain, which just about all of you have, you didn’t like it.
Pain, however, isn’t just something we don’t like. Even if we think, “No pain, no gain,” that some gym pain means we’re exercising and can expect to get in better shape, ultimately, we really don’t like the pain itself. Knowing that, we at Sanctuary do a lot to help people overcome their pain, to get rid of their pain, to get rid of that thing they don’t like very much. But to do that, we have to know what’s causing it, and to know what’s causing it, we have to listen to your body.
We Help You Listen
So we start doing a lot of that listening, alongside listening to what you’re telling us in your story, listening to the clues that reveal how that pain started. But along the way, we’re also trying to demonstrate to you that there’s ways you, yourself, the one having the pain, can learn to listen and understand.
Since most of the patients that come to us have had these symptoms for months, years, or sometimes decades, the pain will not leave super quick. We wish it could be super quick. We wish there was a magic, a ‘Take once, and it all gets better’ solution. That’s called heaven. But until that happens, we are dealing with ongoing pain in different amounts, some that interfere with life constantly, some that do less than that. But we want you to understand for yourself, to listen to your pain to know how to respond so you can minimize it—and sometimes resolve it, at least for a time or for a season.
By helping you to listen to it like we do (without the need to go to medical school), at least enough to get the gist, we can help you learn to hear when your body is saying, ‘This pain will leave in five minutes,’ versus when it’s yelling that something dangerous is happening. You can learn the difference between, ‘Wait five minutes,’ and ‘You’ve got 10 minutes or an hour or a few days or even a few weeks before this really gets bad,’ or whatever it may be.
This Is an Important Skill
This skill is important because sometimes we get warning signs that are a few minutes ahead, and sometimes we get warning signs that are days, weeks, or months ahead of the real harm. While I can’t explain every detail because there’s so many different types of pain experiences and so many causes of it, I can say that we want you to pay attention to how we’re approaching your pain, to understand how to approach it yourself.
Then you can know how to discern the difference between OK pain that’s going to go away (not that any pain is really okay, I get it) and pain that you need to get checked out, to get treated, which it’s a really bad idea to ignore or tough out. So learn to listen to your body and let us help you, and then put those things into application in your day-to-day life as you’re learning how to listen to your body and the pain-messages it sends you.
Apply that, and you’ll find out that you have to deal with less anxiety once you understand the pain messages that your body is sending. Why? Because you can tell yourself, ‘I’m not going to be anxious about that,’ because you know it’s going to be okay. And then even when it is something dangerous, the momentary anxiety can be answered by knowing what you need to do, and knowing you know the right thing to do. You know that this really is something you need to check out. More, you can have confidence that you are catching this probably-a-problem early, before it can develop into something bigger.
Going to Bed With Confidence That You Understand Your Body
And then you go to sleep at night knowing that you’re doing the right thing either way. That’s how we want you to grow at Sanctuary as we care for you: not just getting rid of symptoms, but also giving you the power and ability to care for yourself. Check out our whole ‘Listen to Your Body’ series. And let us guide you to a healthier, more abundant life.
Listen to the PRIOR Session of Listening to Your Body
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Dr. Eric Potter graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School and then went on to specialize in internal medicine (adult) and pediatric care, spending significant time and effort in growing his medical understanding while caring for patients from all walks of life.
