The Paradox of Pain: Feel It More to Feel It Less

Ann Weiser Cornell
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

I’m kind of a clumsy person. I bang into things a lot. My head and my toes tend to get the worst of it.

So I have had plenty of chances to practice my revolutionary method for shifting pain. And when the big thing happened — in 2014 I got hit by a car and fractured my pelvis in two places — I was ready.

Let me tell you what I did.

It all started 45 years ago, when I first learned Focusing, a mind-body awareness process. We learned how to bring a simple, non-judging awareness to whatever we were feeling in the body.

It was supposed to be a method for shifting emotional reactions, like tightness in the throat about public speaking. We weren’t taught to use it for actual physical pain.

But I like to stretch boundaries… so the next time my clumsiness brought me that big “Ow,” I gave it a try.

I was taking a shower in my grandmother’s bathroom and I managed to dislodge a towel bar, bringing it down on my foot. Pain! Immediately, as I stood there, I brought attention to the sensation in my foot. “Let’s just feel this as it is.”

Right away I noticed two reactions. Number one, the pain got worse.

Number two, I had the thought, “Don’t do that, you’ll break it!”

Something in me actually thought that by feeling the pain I could make the injury literally, physically worse.

So I noticed both those reactions, and I also kept sensing the pain itself. In a minute it began to lessen. In two or three minutes, it was completely gone.

And that surprised me. It was the kind of injury that ordinarily I would have kept on feeling for about half an hour. To have the pain completely disappear in three minutes was an amazing result.

So of course, I kept trying it. And as I say, since I’m sort of a clumsy person, there were plenty of chances to practice.

It Gets Worse and Then It Gets Better

My shifting-pain method has two parts, both important.

Number One: bring a simple non-judging awareness to the sensation itself. (Even the label “pain” may get in the way, so I let it go.) Expect the sensation to get stronger at first, and ride through that. Stay with it.

Number Two: acknowledge the anxious parts of me that get stirred up by doing this. I like to use the phrase “something in me” — as in “something in me is scared this will never get better.”

The more I practiced the process, the easier Number One got, and the less I had to deal with Number Two. The anxious voices got quieter.

Amazing things happened, like the time I burned my arm late at night, fell asleep after twenty minutes of simple sensing, and woke in the morning free of pain… even though the burn itself took three weeks to heal.

Pain is a Communication We Can Receive

From experiences like this I have come to believe that pain is a communication and that when we receive the communication, it may not need to keep sending.

(I am speaking now of the pain of injuries. Chronic pain presents a more complex picture and although the methods I’m describing here are worth trying, other methods will probably be needed as well.)

For more serious injuries I have not found that pain goes away completely from just bringing awareness to the injury — but I have found that this non-struggling, simple awareness speeds up healing and reduces the emotional strain and energy drain.

So when I got hit by a car that day in 2014, and was thrown through the air, hitting my head and landing on my hands and knees 20 feet away from the impact site, my automatic first reaction was to simply feel my body.

I didn’t move, I just stayed there, sensing inwardly.

As it turned out, I couldn’t have gotten up… as I found out when the ambulance arrived. But I didn’t even try.

I scanned through my body, finding the severe scrapes on my hands and knees, and the lump above my left eye. When my inner scanning got to my right hip, I paused. Something was seriously wrong there. That wasn’t an anxious thought, it was an honest assessment. Later in the ER, the x-ray showed two fractures in the right pelvic bone. But I could feel… something wasn’t right. So I stayed still, and kept on sensing.

I kept on doing that inner sensing in the ambulance, and in the ER, and when I got home. Of course I took the pain meds I was prescribed. But I had much less pain than anyone expected, and my injuries healed completely in less time than anyone thought they would.

(For some reason, people seemed to think it would be helpful to say to me, “This might never completely heal.” I simply acknowledged that just as I would an anxious voice inside of me.)

Today, at age 67, I am stronger, with more energy and flexibility, than before the accident. I travel the world teaching and have a wonderful time.

And when I bang my head or my toe, I pause and sense. The pain gets worse for a minute… and then it goes away.

Need more support for working with pain?

Get our Free e-Course: Shifting Your Struggle with Pain

Ann Weiser Cornell is a teacher of Inner Relationship Focusing, a method for working compassionately with parts while cultivating wholeness. Her books include: The Radical Acceptance of Everything and Presence: A Guide to Transforming Your Most Challenging Emotions. Her latest project, Shifting Your Struggle with Pain, is available now. ​You can get started empowering your life here.

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Ann Weiser Cornell

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Ann Weiser Cornell is life-long explorer of emotional healing. She is the author of The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing.

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