Anger and Stress Management Tips for Satisfying
Relationships by Dr. Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D.
Starting the day with fibromyalgia pain made Vera angry
Fibromyalgia made it hard for 46 year old Vera to get her legs
out of bed in the morning. As she moved toward the bathroom and began her
toilette the pangs of pain moved to her hands, head and neck. It brought tears
to her eyes. It made her angry to think that Kurt hadn’t even thought of
organizing things around the house to make life a little easier for her. Vera
remembered the arguments about accompanying her on doctors appointments and got
even more angry. But she never said anything to him. She turned her mind to the
support group she would attend later that day, although it wasn’t successful in
easing her physical discomfort.
Vera
found it easier to focus on the fibromyalgia pain than her scary emotions
As she ate breakfast, flashbacks of her early family file
flooded Vera’s vision. She relived the tension she used to feel coming home from
school wondering if her parents would fight out loud or give each other the
cold shoulder. Her mother would take out her frustration on Vera the
oldest and quietest of her kids. Her muscles tightened up as she recalled the
fear of uncertainty and not knowing how to speak about her worries. It was the
same thing now. She didn’t know how to talk about the anxiety of not being able
to take care of herself. Vera had no words for the anger at her father for not
making her mother happy, and at Kurt for being equally insensitive and
uncaring. What she did have was body pain that ranged from dull aches
to excruciating pain for which no specific organic cause had been found.
Fibromyalgia was the diagnosis. It came with fatigue, slowing down of
actions and restricting her life. It was making Vera dependent on pain
medication and on a husband who let her down, repeating the cycle of her
childhood.
Stuffing
her anger made Vera’s fibromyalgia more acute and distressing
Vera’s struggles in
talking about her anger and stress as a child and now as an adult make it more
likely that her experience of pain when the fibromyalgia flares up will be more
intense and debilitating. The European Journal of Pain, 2010 reported a study
comparing female fibromyalgic sufferers who expressed versus those that
repressed their anger. The greater the inhibition of
anger the greater the experience of pain in women with fibromyalgia. Those who got angry and
expressed it in the situation in which it was aroused experienced the least
amount of pain.
No amount of positive thinking eased her excruciating
fibromyalgic pain
When compared to
healthy women, those who avoid strong negative emotions like anger
and let it fester unprocessed are more likely to suffer fibromyalgia. In
addition focusing on positive emotions does not appear to be a sufficient
buffer. According to a report in the 2008 Journal of Psychosomatic
Research, it
is the lack of processing of negative emotions that precipitates the cycle of
pain in fibromyalgic sufferers irrespective of the amount or duration of
positive thoughts. Vera wasn’t more sensitive than most women to negative
emotions like anger, but she experienced them more often and never learned to
express them in a healthy way. It compromised her neuroendocrine functioning,
lowering her pain threshold both physically and psychologically, suggests a study
on women with fibromyalgia published in Arthritis Care and
Research, 2010.
Fibromyalgia is linked to chronic childhood stress and conflict
with parents
Vera was typical of
most adult women with fibromyalgia that have had stressful childhoods as reported
by the Journal Stress and Health in 2009. Vera’s experience of
verbal and emotional abuse from her mother, and the uncaring attitude of her
father is another common thread in the life histories of women with
fibromyalgia. Vera’s struggles with her mother and now her husband made her
view life through a more negative lens. Conflict with parents and later with
partners adds to the stress and contributes to the more negative perceptions of
life by women with fibromyalgia as indicated by the journal European Psychiatry in 2000.
Chronic
childhood stress deregulates Vera’s neuroendocrine system making her more prone
to fibromyalgia
Long term stress
that is continuous and chronic affects the neuroendocrine system making it less
effective over time. Vera’s childhood trauma created a permanent sense of
uncertainty and unpredictability that impaired her ability to develop and use
healthy stress management strategies. So with each new stress her
neuroendocrine system got weaker and began functioning in an abnormal way. She
lived in a constant state of stress such that her levels of stress hormone such
as cortisol were elevated years after the stress of living with her
parents was removed. Despite the struggle of living with a man who was
argumentative and unsupportive, it was nothing compared to her previous
stressful experiences. The early chronic experience of stress appears to exert
a much larger influence in contributing to the pain of fibromyalgia than any
current stressful life event, as a 2006 study reported in the journalPsychoneuroendocrinolgy.
Please continue this article here: http://medicalhealthnews.info/fibromyalgia-linked-childhood-stress-unprocessed-negative-emotions-2/
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