More about working with pain

In an earlier posting I dealt with pain, and I'd like to revisit the subject here. I'll discuss it in terms of what Scott Kiloby calls the velcro effect (1, 2), where something takes on the appearance of a permanent object because thoughts (in the forms of words and pictures) have become commingled with body sensations. The thoughts claim the body sensations as proof that the thoughts must be taken seriously. If we notice that body sensations don't prove anything (the notion of "proof" exists only in thought and language), then the claim made by the thoughts can be ignored.

I've worked with several of the people Scott has trained to facilitate the inquiries he's developed. Yesterday was the first session where I've been facilitated by Scott himself. We worked on some chronic pain in my left calf.

One can easily imagine working with thoughts-as-words. That's what people do in therapy, and we've all seen therapy sessions on TV and in the movies if we haven't been in therapy ourselves. The inquiries carefully skirt the question of whether verbal thoughts are true or false, since that can lead to an endless morasse of analysis piled on top of analysis, and indeed, people sometimes spend years (and fortunes) in therapy doing exactly that. For pain, verbal thoughts (this shouldn't be happening, this is unbearable, this will get worse) are worth noticing for the purposes of distinguishing them from the body sensations they claim to describe. Those thoughts and body sensations are distinct.

But what was really useful in my session with Scott was working with thoughts-as-pictures. When I experience pain, usually it is associated with an idea of where the pain resides in my body. For me this generally takes the form of a 3D anatomical drawing, usually colorless like a model done in transparent plastic. I don't have medical training so it's not very detailed. The pictures do not include tissues or blood vessels or nerve ganglia. Nor do they include bones except in those instances where I have a good idea of the shapes of the bones in the region.

Scott asked me to look at the shape and color of the picture of pain in my calf. The shape resembled a bent thin strip of wood that a sailor might call a batten. The color seemed to be yellow. Scott was using the Anxiety Inquiry so he asked whether either that picture, or the raw sensation, represented a threat or danger of any kind. That question guided the process. I studied that picture apart from the direct sensation for a few minutes, and then I studied the direct sensation apart from the picture for a few minutes. I went back and forth. As I did, both the picture and the direct sensation changed over time. The picture would fade from my imagination and be replaced by a different shape and different color. The sensation seemed to move and change in intensity. After going back and forth about four times, I found the sensation had diminished to the point where I just didn't care about it any more.