Tolerating Pain is Living in the Past
Awareness of our adaptations can set us on the path to change.
What if I said that you have learned to love your pain.
“I have a high pain tolerance.”
We will do whatever we can to mask our pain to keep up with our lifestyles. But, it comes at a price.
Maintaining your pain tolerance is maintaining your relationship to your lifestyle, which keeps you in the past. And since we love the familiar, we can learn to love the pain.
Everything comes at a price. There is only so much we can take before that window of tolerance begins to narrow. We may get used to adapting, moving differently, changing paths, or popping that extra pain pill to keep up with our lifestyle. We may even stop living our lives at our greatest potential all together.
We are smart. And by we, I mean our mind and nervous system collectively. As living-breathing-beings we are wired to consistently meet the demands and threats in our lives. Trauma is an event or experience that threatens the survival of the individual. In other words, a threat is trauma and trauma is a threat. So anything that threatens the individual will force an adaptation.
A stress response or an adaptation can look very different for many individuals.
You’ve heard it before: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Which trauma response and pattern are you in today, this year, yesterday, or your entire life?
We live in our strengthened patterns. Whether it’s your preferred driving hand, kicking foot or preferred side of sleeping, chronic toxic relationships, you have learned and strengthened that pattern. Similarly, we strengthen our patterns of love, sadness and pain. This phenomenon is directly related to the interconnectedness between the pain and reward systems in our brain. We learn to believe the false impressions of ourselves.
“The more I paint the more I like everything.” ~ Basquiat
Research has shown that the brain's reward and pain systems are interconnected and can interact with each other. For example, studies have shown that the brain's pain system can modulate the activity of the reward system, leading to changes in how we perceive and respond to rewarding stimuli.
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