Will Baum, LCSW

Sometimes chronic pain and illness, wrestled with over months and years, are finally found to be rooted in stress and tension.  For some, just considering that idea can help bring relief.

Here’s Dr. David Clarke’s list of common stress-related symptoms, taken from his book, They Can’t Find Anything Wrong!: 7 Keys to Understanding, Treating, and Healing Stress Illness.

• Pain such as headache, back pain, neck pain, chest pain, muscle or joint pain, and abdominal pain
• Abnormal swallowing, digestion, or bowel function including constipation, diarrhea, and bloating
• Nausea or vomiting
• Discomfort in the bladder or during urination.
• Respiratory symptom, including difficulty breathing and cough
• Voice changes
• Heart palpitations
• Pelvic and vaginal irritation, premensrual or menstrual pain
• Fatigue
• Abnormal sleeping or eating
• Symptoms related to nerve function such as blurred vision, dizziness, ringing in the ears, itching of the skin, sweating, numbness, or tingling

Sound like you?  As with any medical problem, the first step is to talk with your doctor.

For more on the topic try Dr. Clarke’s site, stressillness.com or Dr. David Schechter’s MindBodyMedicine.com.  On this site, go to  Stress-Related Pain and Illness.

Once you begin considering that many physical symptoms may be stress related, not only do you react to your own aches and pains differently, the news starts to take on a different meaning.  That’s why Dr. David Schechter repeatedly asks in his  MindBody Workbook what kind of messages you’ve been getting in the media about pain symptoms.  Here, a couple of those very stories:

Fibromyalgia Affects Mental Health of Those Diagnosed and Their Spouses, Study Finds

Use of Alternative Therapy for Pain Treatment Increases With Age and Wealth

The message?  Different from Dr. Schechter’s.

For more about mind-body medicine, try Dr. Schecter’s website, this interview I did with therapist Alan Gordon, and/or the stress illness section of this site.

A study looks at how a depression and stress combo can trigger asthma symptoms in children.

If your child has asthma and is experiencing symptoms of depression, you may want to reconsider buying advanced tickets to the Twilight’s Eclipse. New research shows asthmatic children with depression are 50 percent more likely to have an attack when placed in stressful environments, and this includes the box-office hits, too.

Take a look at the Workaholics Anonymous Brief Guide (pdf). In addition to the 12-steps (pretty much the same as A.A.’s, with “work” replacing “alcohol”) and a quiz (“How Do I Know if I’m a Workaholic?”), there’s Tools of Recovery list.  What’s especially striking about them to this reader is how completely they sync up with suggested approaches to undoing stress-related chronic pain.  Here’s a sampling:

Substituting We do not add a new activity without eliminating from our schedule one that demands equivalent time and energy.

Underscheduling We allow more time than we think we need for a task or trip, allowing a comfortable margin to accommodate the unexpected.

Playing We schedule time for play, refusing to let ourselves work non-stop. We do not make our play into a work project.

Concentrating We try to do one thing at a time.

Pacing We work at a comfortable pace and rest before we get tired. To remind ourselves, we check our level of energy before proceeding to our next activity.We do not get “wound up” in our work, so we don’t have to unwind.

Relaxing We do not yield to pressure from others or attempt to pressure others. We remain alert to the people and situations that trigger feelings of pressure in us. We become aware of our own actions, words, body sensations and feelings that tell us we are responding with pressure. When we feel energy building up, we stop; we reconnect with our Higher Power and others around us.

Accepting We accept the outcomes of our endeavors, whatever the results, whatever the timing. We know that impatience, rushing and insisting on perfect results only slow down our recovery. We are gentle with our efforts, knowing that our new way of living requires much practice.

Balancing We balance our involvement in work with our efforts to develop personal relationships, spiritual growth, creativity and playful attitudes.

A pretty good set of principles–workaholic, chronic pain-sufferer, or not.

My report from the first day of the L.A. Mind-Body Conference is up at the Huffington Post.

Psychologist Dr. Eric Sherman talks about treating chronic pain with talk therapy at Where the Client Is:

I have received photos from former patients in which they are break dancing, sky diving, or performing yoga contortions worthy of Cirque du Soleil. All of them had been advised to undergo surgery to correct disc herniations, the presumptive cause of their incapacitating pain. At the time of these photos, all of their scans would be unchanged, yet they are engaged in activities that are impossible for anyone who suffers from back pain.

A new post at my PsychologyToday.com blog, Crisis Knocks–an interview with Alan Gordon, LCSW, pain psychotherapist, regarding Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS):

Anyone who’s ever had a headache or stomachache as the result of stress has experienced TMS. For most, the pain goes away within a day or two, but for some it becomes a chronic condition. Chronic back pain, neck pain, fibromyagia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and many other conditions that are commonly thought of as having structural causes are often TMS.

Many of my clients bounced around from doctor to doctor for years, unable to find relief for their chronic pain. Usually they come upon the TMS diagnosis as a last resort, having exhausted every treatment from physical therapy to magnets to South American shamanism…

Back at Where the Client Is, a new interview with psychoanalyst Frances Sommer Anderson, PhD about treating pain the Dr. John Sarno way: By getting at underlying, unfelt emotion. Not mainstream at the moment, but look out. (The interview is intended for therapists, but is still readable.) Key:

For people who have great difficulty being aware of what they are feeling about what they are saying, I work intensively on this in each session. I recommend that they take a “feeling inventory” several times during the day and evening: Ask yourself, “What am I feeling about the events that happened during the past hour? How did I feel when my supervisee didn’t meet the deadline and casually brought the work into my office without acknowledging that it was late? How did I feel when our nanny called to say that she had an emergency and had to leave immediately, possibly indefinitely? How did I feel when our 16 year-old son showed up two hours past his curfew, undeniably drunk?” At the beginning of therapy, some people need to take this inventory once every hour.

As we are doing this “emotion detection” work inside and outside the sessions, we are also tracking pain levels as well as presence and absence of pain. This strategy is aimed at making links between emotions and pain symptoms.

The rest of the interview is here.