Gaining independence after overcoming fear

Listen to the article

Barbara had been suffering from back pain for years.

She was a young woman when she first came to see me, but she had been experiencing that pain for quite some time. Not constantly, but repeatedly: seemingly for no reason, she would find herself with a stiff lower back, leading to the need for significant medical treatment.

The first time we met at my practice, what often happens in the early sessions occurred: she asked me, ‘Why does it hurt? I haven’t done anything out of the ordinary.’
She was searching for a meaning behind her pain, a direct and causal link to a trauma that had never actually happened.
For example, if I fall and graze my knee, I know that the pain in my knee is due to that fall. In some way, mentally, I associate the meaning of that pain with that injured part of the body.

In Barbara’s case, no, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t possible to associate a meaning with those symptoms, or rather, I wasn’t the one who could give her the answer she was looking for.

I gave Barbara a few sessions and worked on her body, addressing the immediate symptoms but also focusing on parts of her body she hadn’t expected me to work on. I taught her to breathe deeply into every part of her body that I treated, because the blockage in her back was causing other blockages she hadn’t realised were there.

I explained to her how important it was to perceive the body in its entirety, because we are not made up of distinct, unconnected sections: if she clenched her jaw, this affected her stomach; the way she tensed her abdominal muscles simultaneously affected her lower back.

And then came the fear. 

The fear of facing those sensations that took her back to dense, complicated and twisted emotional states. A labyrinth in which she lost her way, where every turn led her to a dead end without knowing which direction to take. 
Experiencing deep sensations in her body led her to activate defence mechanisms against pain and thus a tendency not to want to feel.

But I helped her understand that she could trust what she was feeling, that nothing irreparable would happen; her body was simply giving her the answer it could give: not that she was in pain, but how.

And how did Barbara feel when she experienced certain emotions? 
How did she react when faced with the obstacles that stood in her way in her daily life?
Barbara discovered that the tightening of certain muscles was not a consequence of her back pain, but the cause of it! 

The reasons behind certain blocks within her emerged spontaneously; Barbara recognised them and was also able to identify the situations in her life where she would tense up.
So she began to do something different: she stopped fighting the pain and started to notice what her body did automatically and spontaneously when she experienced strong emotions in her everyday life.

And by recognising herself, she began to heal.

Her back pain didn’t disappear overnight, but it stopped being a sudden and incomprehensible enemy. It became a signal, a language, a gateway to something deeper.

*Barbara’s story is a true story that I have been authorised to tell, using a pseudonym.