Can Resolving Emotional Trauma Ease Chronic Pain?
A new therapy teaches people to process their trauma as a way to treat chronic pain. Does it work?
Human beings have long sought to understand the basis of pain. Until the late 17th century, pain and disease were considered a byproduct of sin, or something a person endured to test their faith. But after philosopher René Descartes first theorized that pain was a physical sensation interpreted by the brain, doctors started looking to the body for answers.
Today, chronic pain — which affects 50 million people in the United States alone — is still widely understood as a phenomenon that always originates in the body. But a small and influential group of physicians is putting forward a very different hypothesis: Some chronic physical pain, they say, could be a byproduct of unresolved emotional trauma.
This concept can be controversial among people seeking treatment, who might bristle at the idea that their physical pain may not have a physical origin. Implying that there’s an emotional aspect to pain may be mistaken for saying it’s all in a person’s head. But ongoing research shows that chronic physical pain, at least for some people, may really have an emotional and psychological underpinning.
