To End the Suffering of Pain
Polyvagal, Vos Economos, Autobiographical Memory, Salience and Suicide
Pain and suffering have no place for play. No place for a practice of breathing and taking one’s time. It can be maddening to the point of suicide.
One of my very first chronic pain patients was a Vietnam War hero, decorated with three purple hearts, a rod in his back and metal in his legs some of it shrapnel placed unexpectedly in wars way and the other by surgeons to keep him together.
His back was stone up and down, His face grimacing and yet trying to smile underneath the scourge and writhe of pain, a long struggle of pain.
He came to see me post electrode implant into his spine to inhibit the sensation of pain. It didn’t work, in fact just made it worse.
He lost all hope of ever recovering. I would sit in long breaths listening to him cry out with every movement or twitch that set off rampages of lightning bolts up and down his back.
He was a Master Sgt, and in civilian life a civil engineer now retired. He fell off his ladder as he was coming down from the roof. He landed flat dead like a pancake on his lawn… He was knocked out and when he awoke he was in the back of an ambulance. He had three lumbar fractures, an ankle dislocation, concussion and whiplash. He was 65 and vital, with the stature and strength of Jack Palance, the gunslinging actor of many westerns.
In my very limited capacity and my abject inexperience I was out of my comfort zone because it was not just a physical malady. It was holistic experiencing and I was not prepared to work in these domains. I was fresh out of Grad School and what I knew was the Australian methods to manipulation and basic therapeutic exercises. My ignorance and lacking failed him of any comfort. On our last visit together he told me he was going to take his life. He had had it and could not go on with another sleepless night or the constant constipation and headaches the meds offered him…no relief whatsoever.
I consulted with my elders in care. I asked that he see our psychologist who was a very well spoken and gentle man. He refused. I watched him leave the clinic and that was the last time I saw him.
I do not know if he went through with it. He has to this day never left me and his spirit and struggle to survive followed by letting go and moving on to a safer painless place.
That terrible experience of inadequacy set me on a path of new discoveries.
From the sage wisdom of Carl Rogers to Fritz Perls and Carl Jung my communications teacher in Grad school artfully crafted these humans intellects and heart for the unconditional positive and genuine regard for another. This from Carl Rogers:
“To be with another in this empathic way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another's world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish.
Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, and strong - yet subtle and gentle - way of being.
The capacity and wisdom to know when to listen and how is as much a lesson to understand how the universe works sometimes, yet it is available to us all in care of others would we understand that some of the pain and suffering in their experience is ours as well.
Some Neurosciences Please
It is the Mirror Neurons (Vos Economos) reception, Autobiographical Memories capture through the robust Index ( hold the repeated similar experiences as evidence that we are distinguishable from others) and Time neurons ( our effective time stamp of experiences of relevance) that flow into the Hippocampus and Denticulate Gyrus and eventually to the Neocortex that are the neuro-physiologic mechanisms and receipt caregivers of the information we feed into this vast repository-receptacle of experiencing into you electro-chemical formulations.
With our capacity to Love others in this manner genuinely, a grounded Presence will fortify these salient pathways to not only demonstrate individuality of our selves to others, also our connection to another with empathic ritual. We are One as they say and without the polyvagal apparati in place we would not be able to socially mind the cues of feelings in others that creates the emotional body and in return respond in a kind and compassionate manner.
The subtle articulations and postures of the neck on trunk and this avenue of expression in us all that moves us in orders and magnitude of understanding, is this wordless communication felt in the body by all. It is our energy expressed as emotion out into the world. We feel another and we respond in kind-manner.
Salience is constructed through repeated felt concurrence of experiences that cement into our index neurons that is time stamped. It teaches us how to self reference and individuate into semi-similar experiences and away from dissonant signals of others whether they be in word or action.
Simply said we are able to know right from wrong, what is truthful and what is not and have the capacity to know the differences. Individual means asking questions and making comparable signs that repeat and register in the files of our index neurons. We then are able to pick up on the cues of our patients and clients with immediacy with practice. We will see the disorder within that creates the disorder in the external world.
Wise practice connotes connection beyond any textbook or rubric of health. It is experience of oneself in a deep suffering pain with unclear ending. Learning to self reference creates empathic experiences to stand under another as they traverse the rocky, slippery landscape of a painful life.
Wise practice brings to the end of a session some lightness, levity and softening of that hours experience. The brain learns vastly to novelty and the non verbal expression of Joyful movements anchors the pathways for healing and reconnecting to one’s essence and true nature.
Thus begins the end of suffering.