With headaches, you’re alienated from yourself because your pain is so bad, and you don’t want to be there. At the same time, you’re alienated from everybody else because you have headaches: “I don’t want to go and be with people.” If I’m on meds, then I’m kind of spacey and can’t quite communicate my […]

Thernstrom described chronic pain as “a pathology of the nervous system that produces abnormal changes in the brain and spinal cord,” meanwhile basically sucking up feel-good seratonin and leading to chemically induced depression and anxiety. From All in My Head

“I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wanted to die.” Dying sounded fine, just for a little while at least, to get some relief – but suicide was too drastic. After all, the desire for self destruction and the desire of wanting pain to end can be two different things. From All in My […]

“I am having a bad day,” she wrote me. “I realize that the past three years have been totally lost and the past ten years have been straight from hell. It seems like the smallest things throw me into disequilibrium. I am very depressed and exhausted.” From All in My Head

“The idea that I can make my body do anything I really want it to do, such as making the pain go away completely, is a form of the myth of control, a childish belief in the omnipotence of what I want…” …. In reality, there are limits to how the mind can influence pain, […]

I was thrilled and scared at the same time. I marveled at how everything in life was now so incredibly easy with this relief: returning phone calls, doing errands, cleaning up. I remember stopping in the middle of the aisle at the Jewel grocery store and feeling as if I would float away to the […]

If I went out, I was drained. If I canceled plans, I felt detached and guilty. When you’re in pain, hell is other people, and hell is also the absence of other people. The stark reality is that you basically have to suffer your pain alone and in silence. In the beginning, you can talk […]