Chronic Pain and Acceptance
Inflammation creeps into the tissue and I know I’m in trouble. My nervous system clenches in panic, and my brain screams, “I’m scared.” The pain is intense and nothing numbs it. Fear has urgent questions: What will I do? Who will help me? Will the pain climb and climb past my limit? What is my limit? I seem to have only two options: panic, or distract. I’m working on a third one: radical acceptance of the pain.
The café I’m in is bustling, and I stare at the tea that I can’t even drink. The morning sun feels warm on my face, and I notice an antique vase filled with delicate, pink flowers. I close my eyes and drop into my body in an attempt to connect with the pain. It feels counterintuitive. An image of someone pouring acid over my tongue pops ups. I see red. I feel fire. I remember my brother and me play fighting in our living room. We are giving each other snake bites until our arms are swollen and pink. The pain is like that - something being squeezed and twisted. I want to scream UNCLE! I surrender, but to whom?
Accepting this pain does not mean just tolerating it. I can’t tolerate this for the rest of the day, never mind the rest of my life. Accepting does mean being with the pain here, now, as it is. Accepting the pain means asking, where do we go from here? I whisper to myself that pain is not wrong. It holds information for me.
When I first heard the term radical acceptance of pain from Tara Brach, I dismissed it as a type of toxic positivity. It sounded like a suggestion that someone with no actual lived experience of pain would ever suggest. I learned that Brach herself has lived with chronic pain and knows how debilitating, hopeless and scary it can be. So, I yielded to this strategy.
I visualize the fiery pain and I wrap it in something cooling. I see ripples of turquoise water soothing the burn. The pink flowers on the table have multiplied and surround it with their bloom. I take a breath. This beauty and freedom are fleeting. It’s too exhausting to think positively. My brain rebels and now I envision a knife cutting the pain. I’m seething at my body for being this way, again! But I keep trying, so I cradle the pain and try to repair from my sudden outburst. You’re here, you’re not wrong. I’m sorry. My body relaxes and loses its grip.
I hear Tara Brach’s gentle suggestion to “relax our resistance to unpleasant sensations and meet them with a non-reactive awareness.” As I meet my pain, I release it to the openness of an ocean. I let it drift up into the sky outside this window. Words like surrender, release, let go, allow, help my body soften. I feel my breath travel deeper into my belly. I realize there is no contradiction between having contact with my pain and allowing it to float away from me. When I release my storylines of fear and hold them with curiosity the pain shifts a bit, and the space around it gets bigger. I am less imprisoned by it.
Instead of thinking of the term pain, I frame my experience as an “unpleasant constellation of sensations.” I try to attend to these sensations as they change moment-to-moment. Thinking in these temporal terms helps me discover moments that hold less agony. The solid block of pain starts to thaw. One moment is a glimmer, and I if I can collect a few of them, hope emerges.
Surrendering feels weird and useless, and my automatic reaction is to fight and protect from something so threatening. But I am only fighting myself. Radical acceptance takes repetition, so I go through my steps and mantras over and over again. Remember to surrender. Remember to do it again, and again. In the grips of pain, it is challenging to remember anything. But when I do, I suffer less.
