In my last post, I shared my secrets for injury-free drawing related to an ergonomic work space. And while I clearly think it’s important to set-up your body for success, I’ve still experienced excruciating chronic pain despite having a very ergonomic work space.
When I was working on my Gatsby adaptation, my shoulder pain was so bad that I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish the book. I was trying to do all sorts of physical fixes to my shoulder pain—physical therapy, rolfing, yoga, etc. My physical therapist even came to my house to see if there was anything to be fixed with my work set-up (there wasn’t).
What solved the problem was discovering the work of Dr. John Sarno whose books and research are all about how repressed emotions can cause physical pain. The basic idea is if you allow yourself to feel repressed emotions, the physical pain will often disappear.1
This is a good summary of it:
[Sarno] discovered that tension (stress), both conscious and unconscious, is often the DIRECT cause of your symptoms - and not a physical flaw in your body - and that is why most patients do not recover using traditional and alternative methods. This is also NOT to say the pain is "in your head" or to just "think positive." That is a common misconception of this work. Instead, Dr. Sarno states tension creates the physical changes in your muscles, soft tissue, and nerves which gives rise to a long list of pain and disorders that are otherwise diagnosed as purely physical maladies. - From the website Simply Sarno
When I was working on Gatsby, I was dealing with some pretty intense emotional conflicts so it made sense that the pain represented itself physically, and it explained why none of the treatments worked.
To combat it, every day I would do “pain journalling” where I’d write about what feelings I thought I was repressing and try to feel them. At times the emotional pain was so intense that I’d be wracked with sobs or even scream in fury (thank goodness our neighbors didn’t hear).2 But it worked and bit-by-bit the pain went away and I was able to finish the book with almost no pain.
Now when I feel physical pain, I try to stop what I’m doing and think about what emotions I’m trying to suppress. And when I let those emotions in, the physical symptoms will often just disappear. It’s pretty wild how effective this is for me. So while I give a bunch of physical advice, the truth is, often I have to dig into the emotional things to get rid of physical pain.