How Your Pain is Just Like Your Need to Poop
Quite a few years ago when I was teaching at a massage school, I was asked to give a short commencement address during graduation. I remember hearing from those in attendance, a mixture of surprise and amusement about the reference I made to the importance of …bowel movements.
Yes, I brought up the topic of poop at a commencement address. At the time, I was just looking for an easy laugh which I got, but I do bring up the topic of pooping at every opportunity because of how taboo it still is in “polite company”. It’s one of the most important basic physical needs that we humans have and yet we all shy away from talking about it which just contributes to our dysfunction around it.
The nuances around the elimination of solid waste, have real ramifications to our overall health and wellbeing in more ways than many of us realize. Not only is denying yourself the need to empty your colon unhealthy in and of itself, the simple act of delaying solid elimination has been shown to contribute to chronic pain![1]
Any one of our basic body signals, like fatigue, hunger, thirst or the urge to eliminate, are essential to our survival. Now I want you to consider the possibility that not paying attention to your pain is just like ignoring any of these other basic body signals. We can ignore and delay them but there is always a cost. Our biological needs are inescapable and will catch up to us eventually.
Take the pooping signal for example. What happens when the urge hits during an inconvenient time? Luckily we do have control over it to some degree and we can wait until we find a bathroom. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that by the time we find that bathroom or that quiet moment, we might have lost the urge altogether. At that point, we effectively have turned off the signal telling us we need to poop.
But what happens if this continues for hours or even days? The poop doesn’t disappear. It still needs to get out but the longer we wait, the more our body learns to cope with the situation and sometimes this means we develop difficulty noticing the signals at all. For some of us that means our body has to yell more loudly for attention by creating urgency which we then have very little control over. Or on the other extreme, some of us might instead develop great difficulty and the need for stool softeners.
(Of course there are mechanically traumatic situations like childbirth that complicate matters and have nothing to do with ignoring signals over time.)
Now consider pain as a basic body signal just like the need to poop. Your body is telling you about something it needs. You can ignore it and teach your nervous system to cope, but the reason for that signal is not going away. When it comes back to your awareness, it will likely be more urgent or confusing and the solution will be more complicated, which is why many people need help at that point.
Some of our earliest experiences in life teach us to ignore pain. There’s an appropriate way to learn that not all pain is an emergency, but because those early lessons are steeped in social expectations, some of us learn to be ashamed and embarrassed about our pain signals, in the same way that we might learn to feel shame about physical urges to eliminate, sleep, eat and drink. Shame and embarrassment lead to a disconnect from healthy selfcare and a denial of our basic biology. This disconnect is all too common and is in my opinion a major driving force behind chronic pain.
When our society at large finally learns to view earliest signs of pain just as any other valid biological need, then and only then will we start to get a handle on the chronic pain epidemic.
