Pain is NOT Suffering

"Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or ayear,
but eventually it will subside and something else will take it's place. If I
quit, however, it will last forever."
Lance Armstrong
Cancer survivor and cyclist

Suffering is the avoidance of pain. So many of us avoid pain like it is the plague. This is why I have a job and deal with clients on a daily basis who say they want therapy but them become resistant and guarded. It is why our society is so full of anger and hostility. Most of us mask our hurt and pain with anger because it doesn't hurt as much. At least on the outside. Ultimately, this is what causes so much suffering and misery in the world and why I have a job! I try to tell my clients that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional and that they can move forward in life if they can find a way to grasp and hold on and experience the pain they are feeling fully and embrace it, but more often than not, they refuse. They are young (although many adults still have this level of emotional maturity as well) and can't see the growth that could come from their grief and hurt in the long run.

I went to this workshop yeterday on a new (well, it's been around for 20 years but only been out of the experimental zone for health insurances for 5) technique used with trauma patients, people with depression, grief, and other ailments of the sort called EMDR. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It has been proven to have long lasting effects on the abovementioned disorders longer than any other other treatment out there! It's so effective you have to be specially trained and certified (which is not cheap!) to use it and bill insurance for it because they don't want every clinican out there that isn't trained using it incorrectly and bringing the stats down.

So the way this works has to do with rewiring the brain to store the traumatic or depressing thoughts they have in a different way so that it is not so sad or traumatic or anxiety provoking for them. The person watches your fingers or a light move back and forth very quickly (there are also tones that you can hear back and forth through headphones or vibrating mechanisms you hold in either hand) while you think of a specific memory and the relaxing chemicals that are released when your eyes move back and forth helps restore the memories in a different place. There was a lot of talk about the amygdala and the hippocampus and the corpus callosum (which is the band of nerve fibers that connects both sides of the brain) and how they work in all this but I can't remember all the details.

A person might hear this and think it sounds all hokey but I just think about what we know about sleep and REM (rapid eye movement) and how that is the most resting part of the sleep where the brain rejuvenates and it makes sense that something that makes your eyes move back and forth (just like they do under your eyelids during this cycle of sleep) would relax you and rewire the brain! Just think of hypnosis. Same kind of concept yet not as deep of a mind state.

I am excited to learn more about this and possibly get certified in it. With all of the people coming back from Iraq and the insurance companies eating this therapy up (including the Department of Defense), it's a sure way to help those coming back with PTSD and for me to have a big clientele base. :)