Beyond the Pain

Unemployment Soars! Another Canadian Soldier Dies In Afganistan! 7-Year Old Girl Sexually Assaulted!

Crud, I so love listening to the news on my radio — NOT!

It’s not like I wasn’t already feeling mucho stressed — which I KNOW because my Fibro pain has returned … and with a vengance!

So, on my walk this morning I got to thinking about what was stressing me. I was just ‘delighted’ to identify SIX separate stressors. Then it occured to me after I got back from my walk, that it would be useful for me to share my approach to reducing the stress that’s escalating my pain.

So, over the next few days I’m going to write about how I’m dealing with those 6 stressors: in the hope that my tactics will help you.

What’s the FIRST step to Reducing Stress?

Step 1: Know When (and how much) You Are Stressed

How could it be possible that YOU might not know you are stressed?

Well, ya see, each of us manifests our stress in different ways and sometimes we exhibit stress differently at different times.

For example, when I first experienced significant stress — which, ironically, was during the last huge, mofo economic recession in 1982 — I reacted to the stressors in my life by becoming Clinically Depressed.

Up until then, I’d never been really sick. Sure, I’d had the flu, some colds, but I’d never experienced a major work outage. Suddenly, work sucked big time! I could barely drag my butt into work. In fact, the new position I had just started — which I had created — I was starting to HATE.

It wasn’t till I met with a psychologist that I began to understand that my depression was due to stress. So, I began to do extensive research into stress and stress management techniques.

Little did I know at the time, that I would spend years learning how to better deal with stress. And, that my work would evolve into a coaching practice that involves, among other things, helping creative professionals deal more effectively with stress.

So, HOW do you KNOW when you are stressed?

Get the hell out of your head and into your body!

Yes, I know your body hurts! Mine sure as hell does. I know the last thing you want to do is FEEL THE PAIN MORE!

Trust me. Feeling INTO the pain will: a) give you some important clues about WHAT is stressing you and b) will actually reduce the pain — eventually.

When I finally SURRENDERED to the massive pain I was feeling in my hips and shoulders I then began to connect to the actual stressors that were contributing to the pain. Ya see, I had thought that there were only 2 things stressing me. As I felt the pain, and listened to it, it told me about ALL the things that were pressuring me.

So, the first step to reducing your stress is to know WHAT is stressing you and HOW MANY things are stressing you. And, you do that by moving into your body, into the pain, taking a breath or six, and listening to what the pain has to say.

NEXT — Step 2: Prioritize Your Stressors

I am in a dark, dreary, place soaking in melancholy.

And, I LOVE it!

The part of my brain that has an ounce of intellect left recognizes this “feeling”. My old FAMILIAR: the “dark side” of my Muse.

In her ground breaking work, “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and The Artistic Temperament“, author and manic-depressive, Kay Redfield Jamison suggests the artist who suffers from mood swings needs her depressions to ground, to make real, to solidify her ideas and creations.

And, what artist, what writer, what sculptor, what painter: in fact what anyone who creates DOES NOT suffer swings of mood?

Just yesterday I was coaching a 20-something asipiring muscian/song writer who conjectured, “maybe I’m bipolar?”

I do have Biploar Affective Disorder: specifically Bipolar II. I have extremely labile moods. I can zip from “feeling groovy” to “soaking in sadness” in under 2 minutes!

But, hey that’s me.

Yet, I hear many of my creative clients questioning whether they too have BPD. Almost as often as they ponder whether they have ADD or ADHD.

I’m not a psychiatrist, and I don’t play one on TV, but I do know moods and what it’ s like to have a scattered mind.

I believe that many, maybe even any one, whose reason for being is the expression of ideas will suffer from symptoms that mimic BPD, ADD, OCD, and ADHD.

I believe the ‘artistic or creative’ brain is wired differently.

Years ago, a friend and colleague, suggested that her brain was like a “tangled ball of string.”

I think the creative brain, the artistic brain does indeed resemble a ball of string. But, I think it’s much more like a huge network. In fact, in her memoirs, Jamison described her brain as dendritic.

I LIKE that term!

When I picture my brain as dendritic I see that massive collective of interconnected neurons, ideas zipping from place to place, briefly lighting the pathways, stirring the soul, firing the emotions!

As I said the other day to my wife when she asked “why are you so emotional, so down? Why are you so bothered by (what to her are unconnected) events?”

I spontaneously replied, “Because everything is connected to everything else!”

As I’ve pondered that idea, I have come to realize that in fact, EVERY IDEA, every memory, every ‘feeling’ in my brain does seem to be connected to every other entity — past, present, or future.

So, when as now, I am subjected to demands, to stressors, when 1 part of my brain is pinged, the rest thrums!

When events lead me to ponder, to muse about a past event, a former emotion, why then the rest of my neural net takes up that ‘feeling’.

So, as I ponder, and try to make sense of the shit that happened to me as a child, the whys and wherefors of child abuse, and fucked up families, it makes complete sense that those old, reeking, negative emotions would percolate and enfuse the entire network. And, as they do my being would move from lightness into the dark.

The dark is a familiar sanctuary. A place I reatreat into to hide and heal.

And, to play with the notion of ending it all, of taking those sharpened blades and ripping open my flesh so that my body could experience the depths of pain my mind and soul feel.

But, I will not act. For in reality I do not yet wish to pass on. I do not wish to die. It just feels that way.

And, so metaphorically, I take out the razor blades and imagine their caress.

(Crud. Is this dark or what?)