How Pain Becomes Chronic

But how does the pain become chronic?

Although emotional repression or unacknowledged stress may be sources/triggers of pain, neuroscience has now shown that it is not what actually causes pain to become chronic. Chronic pain is almost always due to a process called conditioning, which means that it is always part of a program that our mind/body has learnt to run. Think of TMS as a cause and effect:

Emotional repression or unacknowledged stress causes a buildup of anger and frustration. When this reaches a certain point (the boiling point in the images), it needs an outlet. The outlet can either be in the form of chronic pain or illness, if we don’t want to acknowledge our emotions. But pain causes fear, and even more anger and frustration (the stress response is kept alive). The only consequence is therefore more pain, as the person starts to anticipate the pain outcome in his/her thinking patterns, repressing the original emotions (the actual trigger) further.