The Cause of Your Pain
Courtney Cable
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Courtney Cable Coaching
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So many of us in the HD community are in pain. This can be physical pain, but I am not a doctor so I can’t help with that. Today we will be addressing EMOTIONAL pain
What is emotional pain? We all know what it is, but it can be hard to describe.
Where does it come from? What specifically is hurting?
Feelings are just vibrations in our bodies caused by the release of certain chemicals. These chemicals and vibrations can create physical sensations like tightness in the chest, weight in the limbs, sinking feeling in the gut, as well as an overwhelming mental anguish or distress. Doesn’t sound fun, does it?
So let's figure out how to stop it.
The first step is going to be understanding better where the pain is coming from. Like a leaking pipe we have to go straight to the source if we want to create a lasting solution.
In the previous episode I described the CTFAR model developed by Brooke Castillo which breaks up our experience of the world into five categories: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feeling, Actions, and Results. It says that circumstances just exist in the world, then we have a thought about them which creates a feeling in our body. This feeling drives our actions which ultimately give us our results.
We know the symptom of emotional pain is our feelings, right in the middle of our model. Because the model follows a sequence, it flows like a river. The actions and results are “downstream”, which means they can’t be responsible. “Upstream” from the feelings are our thoughts and our circumstance.
In the last episode we talked about these two - stories vs facts. As a brief recap, facts are circumstances that are provable and inherently neutral. Stories are our observations about the facts. It is the meaning and drama we add to the neutral circumstances. Stories are our thoughts.
The one aspect of circumstances I didn’t cover in depth in that episode is how circumstances can’t hurt us. They can’t MAKE us feel anything. Let me tell you more. Because this is the key to living freed from feeling controlled by the outside world.
If you feel hurt by something someone SAID, it is so easy to think that the words that came out of their mouth or over text or whatever MADE you feel a certain way. But that can’t possibly be true.
What if they said it but you didn’t hear it? If they said what they said 3 miles out of earshot, it would not have affected you. The words themselves have no power.
It is the same if you feel hurt because of something someone DID. You aren't hurt until you find out about it. Just like the old saying "What they don't know can't hurt them". You don’t feel hurt by it until you have a thought about it.
Everything that happens in our life has the ability to exist in the world without us feeling ANYTHING. We have to be made aware of a circumstance for us to feel anything.
So if our emotional pain isn’t coming from the outside world, where is it coming from?
Your brain takes in the stimulus, registers it, categorizes, labels, and processes it, and then offers you its analysis of the situation. This analysis comes in the form of our thoughts.
Your thoughts, the sentences in your brain, the physical neural connections happening is what sends the signal to the appropriate gland in your body that releases a specific chemical. That chemical produces our feelings. Without all of this mental processing, the words are just sound waves floating into your ears with no inherent meaning!
This all happens in much less than a second and is almost ALWAYS happening on autopilot. We have a higher, logical brain and a lower, primitive brain. Whenever possible our higher brain will delegate tasks to the lower brain which requires less energy. That is usually what is happening here.
So I don’t want you to start feeling tons of guilt about the way you have been feeling now that you know that those feelings came from yourself.
Imagine you go into the doctor because of some pain on your face. After explaining your pain the doctor says “Well the whole time we’ve been talking, you have been repeatedly slapping yourself in the face. It is reasonable to assume that this is the cause of your pain”
How do you feel? Relieved? Or ashamed? The doctor just handed you the key to not being in pain anymore! But the natural human reaction is to be upset.
It is so important to me to emphasize that our minds do all of this on default because when I was first introduced to this concept, I used it to beat myself up. I wasn’t enjoying my life, and then someone taught me this, and for a while, I actually felt worse.
My thought process went something like this: “I feel like trash, and now I know that I feel like trash because I am thinking trash thoughts, so I must be a trash person because non-trash people wouldn’t be choosing to think trash thoughts.”
I don’t want that for you.
The way to avoid that is by having compassion on your autopilot mind. I was missing the whole point.
Yes our thoughts cause our feelings, but there is NO progress to be made by judging what we do unconsciously. The ONLY way forward is to learn how to become more aware, to make the unconscious conscious.
If we use what our brain does on autopilot to criticize ourselves, we will be miserable forever.
Remember that our lower, primitive brains are running the show most of the time, and that's a GOOD thing. It is a wonderful thing that our conscious, logical brain can offload most of the daily tasks to autopilot so that we have time and energy to deal with more complicated matters.
So our circumstances don’t cause our emotional pain, our thoughts do, and you promise not to use that as a reason to be upset with yourselves, right? Let’s get into why this is great news!
Remember the story about the patient finding out that their face hurt because they were hitting themselves? Let’s celebrate that we know where our pain comes from because that means we are that much closer to doing something about it!
When we are presented with a problem we are trying to solve, we look for the best solution that requires the least effort. Circumstances are out of our control, and what I mean by this is that by the time you have had a thought and feeling about a circumstance, that circumstance has become part of the past. We can’t go extract it somehow, it has already happened or is happening.
I don’t mean that we don’t have power to change our future circumstances. We do, but most of the time it requires MASSIVE action (which needs to be driven by positive feelings) and other times it truly might be impossible to change.
So the path of least resistance here that will create sustainable results is to figure out how to change our thoughts. Remember that it’s not about thoughts being more or less important or valid than facts, it’s that distinguishing between facts vs thoughts shows us a clearer view of what we're dealing with and what our options are if we want to change something. It unlock what feels like a superpower!
Let’s pause here and think about some thoughts you might have around HD that are causing you pain. In the last episode we were discussing the circumstance “I have 41 CAG repeats”. We talked about why this wasn’t inherently negative, and now we understand why circumstances can’t cause our feelings.
In this instance, the number of CAG repeats CANNOT MAKE you feel anything until you have a thought about it. Those repeats are not directly connected to the organs in our bodies that release the emotion-causing chemicals. Everything passes through our minds first and gets a label, evaluation, or judgment of some kind.
An easy way to prove this to yourself is that the number of repeats you have has been constant since you were born, but your thoughts, feelings and overall experience related to this number has most likely changed significantly as you learned more about the disease, found out your genetic status or your parent's genetic status, started thinking abut family planning, etc.
So if your feelings about a circumstance can change for the worse without the circumstances changing, then surely your feelings can change in a positive way without the circumstances!
So when your brain is given the fact of “I have 41 CAG repeats” it evaluates that and offer you thoughts like “this is terrible”, “I can never be happy”, “my life is over”, “I am going to be such a burden to my family and loved ones”. Those THOUGHTS are what create the FEELINGS of hopelessness, grief, fear, and depression.
And I want to be very clear here, I am NOT referring to the clinical depression and other mental health challenges that can be symptoms of HD, or just come as part of our life journeys. So if you have HD and your doctor has diagnosed you with depression and says that HD is the cause of that, I am not fighting with that.
And that isn’t just me being warm and fuzzy, finding a loophole, or throwing you a bone. These seemingly contradictory ideas actually coexist very well.
The way HD affects our mental health is multifactorial. Depression and other conditions can be situational, chemical, or both and we see that in HD. It is very natural for negative thought patterns to accompany the diagnosis and propel us into a depressive state. At the same time, science is uncovering ways that the disease itself alters our brain chemistry, and that chemistry is what controls our lower brains.
So combine those situational depressive thoughts with the chemical alterations of the diseases, and the strength of those depressive thoughts offered to us by our lower brain becomes so much that it is entirely unreasonable to expect a person to be able to think their way out of it. Medication and therapy are the best interventions at that point.
I’m super passionate about mental health and and have thought a lot about how to understand our level of control in those situations because I have lived it. This topic deserves more dedicated attention, but for now, please just hear me loud and clear that I am not telling ANYONE with clinical levels of depressive thinking that they are supposed to be able to pull themselves out of that pit purely through willpower and a couple quick thinking tips.
I want to pull some things together here that may be feeling contradictory
Our thoughts create our feelings, which is good because we can control our thoughts
But I also said that most of our thoughts are running on autopilot
being fed to us by our lower, animal brain
So are we or are we not in control of our thoughts? And if so, how much control do we have?
Have you heard the phrase “like water running off a ducks back”?
Or been in an anxiety class where they talked about watching your thoughts like leaves floating down a river and just letting them pass?
If you’re anything like me, you hated these ideas and rolled your eyes, ears, fingers, and toes at them whenever they came up
And I’ll tell you why that wasn't working for me and why it doesn’t work for so many of us
It’s because these thoughts that you are trying to “roll off your back” or “watch float by” still feel true to you
We can’t keep ideas from “sinking in” or “landing” just through visualization because those neural pathways are set up SO well
In the first episode I listed 2 reasons that thoughts feel so true to us: we think the thought often, and we collect evidence
I’m a visual learner so I’m going to continue with this idea of a pathway
Every time we think a thought, it’s like trodding down the weeds along the way, we clear the path
The evidence we find for it is like setting up pavers on the road that make it easier and easier to cross quickly
Pretty soon we have this nice, wide open, paved road
But it didn’t get that way all at once, so we can’t expect it to become overgrown and impassable all at once either
Unlearning these thoughts is a process, and it takes more than picturing ducks and rivers
So if things become true the more we think them and the more evidence we collect for it
If want to stop believing something, we need to reverse engineer that process
We can’t control what our brain offers us on autopilot, that is the nature of it being autopilot
So we focus our efforts on the evidence part
It’s ok if that thought comes up, and it’s also ok if it still feels a little bit true
We just get better at answering the thoughts when they do come
I picture the wheel teetering on the edge of the well-worn rut in the path
Let’s say our lower brain frequently offers us the thought “I’m not enough”
That is an amazingly common thought, so there is zero shame if this one comes up for you
That’s ok, lower brain. Now let’s put our higher, logical brain to the task of finding some counter evidence.
When we find it, it’s like putting a rock in that path
Each reason we can find that this thought isn’t true puts more and more rock in the way
“I’m not enough” “oh but remember these 3 ways I decided I was enough?”
As we do this more and more, and it really does take conscious effort, those problem thoughts start to run into the rocks and get stuck. They stop flowing as easily
The less easily they flow, the less you lower brain will offer them to you because it is no longer easy
Jody Moore used a metaphor I really loved if this whole “thought pathway” thing isn’t really working for you
If your mind is a corporate business, your higher brain is the CEO and your lower brain is an intern
The CEO makes some decision, and it’s like the intern is screaming in the hallway about their concerns with this decision
As the CEO, we have to recognize that it is natural for them to have those concerns because they weren’t in the meeting where all those concerns were resolved
What most people do naturally is have their CEO brain cower to the intern
They say, their are really loud and passionate about what they are saying so they must be right
Whatever we talked about in that meeting must have been bogus
And they give up any progress their rational minds might have made at disproving these painful thoughts or beliefs
Don’t do that! Have your CEO’s back!
Thanks lower brain, but we actually discussed this and here are the reasons why what you’re worried about isn’t actually an issue
Do that long enough, and that intern will start politely raising their hand to ask questions instead of yelling at you down the hallway and calling you names!
Some CEOs just power through and ignore the lower brain
Those are the people who can picture water rolling off a duck's back, leaves floating down streams, and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
I’m happy for them, I just recognize that they are a minority
So let's wrap this back around by looking again at some of the thoughts that might be causing you some pain
Maybe you have HD: “this is terrible”, “I can never be happy”, “my life is over”, “I am going to be such a burden to my family and loved ones”
Or maybe someone you love has HD: “I can’t deal with this” “I hate seeing them suffer” “this disease is taking over my life”
Or maybe you are at risk for HD: “I will always live in fear” “if I have it, I will be miserable”
We have to put our conscious, logical brains to the task of finding evidence against these thoughts if we are going to be free from the pain they cause
This might be difficult at first, so start with just one reason
Pick a painful thought that comes up frequently for you and find just ONE reason why you might be wrong about that
This isn’t something most of us do on a daily basis so let me show you how you might find one of these thoughts
It looks like this: when you are feeling a painful emotion, ask yourself why.
The answer to that question is most likely going to be the thought we want to go after
So you have this conversation with yourself: “I’m just so mad” “Why?” “Because this is so unfair”
Bingo, there is our thought “this is so unfair”
Now go find ONE reason you might be wrong about that.
One piece of evidence that shows you that this thought that you lower brain that is offering you might not be totally true
And you have to MEAN it
Don’t just list off those nice phrase that people embroider onto throw pillow
Find real, concrete reasons that apply to you, that you have seen your life
As you do this more and more, you will get better at it
Maybe next time, you try listing 2 reasons
So there you have it
Our experience of taking in and evaluating what happens day to day is made up of outside circumstances, our thoughts about those circumstances, and how those thoughts make us feel
So it’s important to know the difference between the facts and our stories because it is our stories that create the downstream results, including out feelings, not the circumstances
I talked about how much control we have over our thoughts and what that looks like
And I also gave you some ways to start chipping away at the truthfulness of any thoughts that are causing you pain
