Many people have suffered far worse chronic pain than I have, but I’ve experienced enough to know that one of its most debilitating aspects is its ability to evoke a sense of hopelessness.
In the mid-1990s, when I was in my late 20s, I had a series of episodes of lower back pain, each one worse than the last, culminating in a week in 1996 where I could barely get out of bed. Then in 2013 I had an episode of acute pain in my upper back that persisted for months. It hurt to lift a coffee cup; it hurt to drive; it hurt to lay down. During both of these periods I experienced a low point at which I wondered if I’d ever be pain-free again, and the prospect of spending the rest of my life in that condition drove me to despair.
But I learned so much from those terrible times. I discovered the work of New York University's Dr. John Sarno, which taught me about the relationship between stress and pain, and I was able to eliminate my lower back pain entirely by being more deliberate about stress management. [1] I recognized the importance of taking a holistic approach to self-care, and in the seven years since that episode of upper back pain I’ve prioritized exercise and mindfulness. And I realized that it’s essential for me to do work that I find absorbing and meaningful, because under those circumstances I can be highly effective even when in pain.
And perhaps most significantly I came to understand the importance of hope. As bad as the pain was during my lowest points, the sense of hopelessness that I experienced had a greater impact on my resilience. In the absence of hope even modest amounts of pain could be overwhelming—but when I felt hopeful I could tolerate much more.
This lesson has proven immensely valuable in recent months. In mid-August I experienced a reoccurrence of the upper back pain that first appeared in 2013, and it was a nearly constant companion for two months, finally ebbing away over the past few weeks. The timing is no accident, of course. Despite the many privileges I enjoy that have insulated me from the worst effects of the current environment, 2020 has been profoundly stressful. Clients and family members have had their lives upended and their businesses severely impacted. It's been hard to stay physically active, and in my mid-50s I'm finding that even minor setbacks have long-term consequences. And Amy and I left San Francisco, our home of 30 years, and moved to a farm in the midst of wildfire season, which proved to be an intensely demanding process, both physically and emotionally.
As a result there have been some dark times over the last few months. I’ve laid in bed counting breaths because it hurt too much to meditate, and I’ve sobbed with frustration on a few occasions. But I never lost hope, largely because the lessons learned from my past experiences enabled me to keep this latest episode in perspective. I knew that stress was playing a significant role in my pain—and while I couldn’t eliminate my stress, I could mitigate it, in part merely by acknowledging it. I couldn’t work out or meditate with much consistency—but I did what I could, and rather than admonish myself for falling down, I took pride in getting back up, over and over again. And I worked, and I’m so grateful to my clients—coaching hasn’t just been an opportunity to be of service; it’s also been an opportunity to immerse myself in a conversation with a client so thoroughly that I could forget my pain for an hour.
The cumulative effect is that I’ve been able to take the long view. I trusted that time would allow me to heal, and even when I wondered if the pain would persist I knew that I was capable of living with it. While I certainly wasn’t in denial about the difficulties I might have to face, I knew that I had the capacity to face them. In short, I never lost hope, and not because I told myself a fairy tale that everything would be fine, but because I believed that no matter what happened I could cope with it. We sometimes confuse hope with unfounded optimism, but that's just a form of magical thinking, a sandcastle waiting for the tide to turn. True hope is more robust, rooted not in a wish that things will go our way, but in a confidence that we'll adapt even when they don't.
At last you cry out in anguish: "Why me?" God answers: "Why not?"
You can so stand it.
After all, it's only pain.
What makes it seem unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
~Sheldon Kopp [2]
Footnotes
[1] Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection (Dr. John Sarno, 1991)
[2] What Took You So Long? (Sheldon Kopp, 1979)
This was first published in the November issue of my monthly newsletter. I usually reserve the essays I share there for newsletter subscribers, but I was encourage to post this one here.
Photo by Di Chap.
