That certainty comes from the way the pain has been responding to the enormous amount of psychological work I've been doing (It's pretty much my full-time job now).
I've had a number of good pain days as a direct consequence of psychological revelations, or in response to things I've tried, like mantras or affirmations.
It's obviously a good thing that I now know this, and it means I'm doing entirely the right thing concentrating on therapy. But it gives me an idea of how hard it's going to be to rid myself of the pain (and the therapist told me today she doesn't think it will ever stop, which really upset me, but I'm choosing not to accept or believe that).
I'm already finding this process incredibly hard. It's the shift from a good day, back to a bad one that undoes me.
When you get a good day, you have to commit to it, or you just 'think' yourself into pain. But with 'committing' to the day - getting on and doing things, trying to enjoy the respite - comes the inevitable hope-slash-expectation that things are going to stay better. Then when they don't - when the next day is crap again - you crash again. And the disappointment hits you harder each time.
Yesterday it was so bad, I was on the verge of quitting therapy. It would be so much less distressing to go back to pain-every-day, then to have to cope with this constant hope-disappointment-hope-disappointment cycle. I desperately want the pain to stop, but this mid-way point is unbearable.
Luckily, so far I've always managed to pick myself back up again after the disappointments, but I don't know how long I'll be able to do that.
The other development in the field of pain-as-physical-manifestation-of-emotional-pain, is that I'm increasingly seeing the pain as something separate to myself, something almost parasitic in nature.
This is because of the way I've watched it shift, over and over. Every time I start to get a handle on the pain, it starts to fight back. It's like it knows I'm trying to oust it, and it wants to protect itself, and it does that by attacking me.
Looking back, I can see endless examples of this before I was aware of it. Like the way the pain has always ramped up to match the amount of medication I take, however much that is. Or the way it got worse again as soon as I started doing more, like swimming and so on, a couple of years ago.
What I need to do, is to make the pain redundant by addressing the issues that it's trying to mask from me (see the previous post). I have to make it so that my brain doesn't have any need to hide from scary, awful, difficult feelings, because I've already dealt with them head-on.
That's my 'job' at the moment, and it's taking every once of concentration and energy I can find.
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