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The summed effect of these costs can very well be emotional distress. Some of these costs are rather unavoidable. If your disease requires you to be wary of activity, to focus on internal signals, you must comply. Other aspects require a different perspective on life, and prolonged pain seems to promote a different perspective. This book is offered with the hope that new understandings of yourself and of other people may help.
Depression is an understandable reaction in a healthy, vigorous person who develops severe arthritis, neuralgic pain or one of the many other kinds of debilitating chronic pain. The person is confronted with severe physical and social limitations because of the pain, in addition to any disability produced by injury. Whe....
Melzack, R. and Wall, P. D., "The Challenge of Pain (Reprint of 1988 edition)", Penguin Books, 2008, 208
We reported that, in contrast to age, sex, and education matched healthy controls, chronic back pain and CRPS patients are significantly impaired on an emotional decision-making task (Apkarian et al., 2004a). Moreover, the performance of chronic back pain patients was highly correlated with their verbal report of pain a....
Apkarian, A. V., Baliki, M. N., and Geha, P. Y., "Towards a theory of chronic pain", PMC: 2008 (Towards a theory of chronic pain.html)
Common categories of self-deception include the illusion of control. “Humans (and many other animals) need predictability and control. Experiments show that occasionally administering shocks at random creates much more anxiety (profuse sweating, high art rate) than regular and predictable punishment. Certainty of risk i....
Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 22
Common categories of self-deception include false personal narratives. “When people are asked to supply autobiographical accounts of being angered (victim) or angering someone else (perpetrator), a series of sharp differences emerges. The perpetrator usually describes angering someone else as meaningful and comprehensib....
Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 25
“Within a student’s year, high optimism was associated with high immune function, but when comparing students, there was no effect; that is, optimistic students were not more likely to have stronger immune systems. Although psychologists almost uniformly assume that mood affects immune system, the reverse is at once pla....
Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 137
“If they applied their saliva to a strip of material and it changed color, this indivated vulnerability [to a bad medical condition] or not (depending on experimental group). People led to believe that a color change was good looked at the strip 60 percent longer than did those who thought it would be bad (actually the....
Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 141
“In one experiment, people were convinced that they were likely—or highly unlikely—to be chosen for a prospective date. If yes, they spent slightly more time studying the positive rather than negative aspects of the prospective date, but if no,they spent more time looking at the negative, as if already rationalizing the....
Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 141
A good yoga teacher will encourage you to just notice any tension while timing what you feel with the flow of your breath: "We'll be holding this position for ten breaths.” This helps you anticipate the end of discomfort and strengthens your capacity to deal with physical and emotional distress. Awareness that all exper....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 276
Steve Porges helped me realize that the natural state of mammals is to be some what on guard. However, in order to feel emotionally close to another human being, ourjdefensive system must temporarily shut down. In order to play, mate, and nurture our young, the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance. [Probably a....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 86
the most common response to distress is to seek out people we like and trust to help us and give us the courage to go on. We may also calm down by engaging in a physical activity, like biking or going to the gym. We start learning these ways of regulating our feelings from the first moment someone feeds us when we’re hu....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 90
The most striking difference between normal controls and survivors of chronic trauma was in activation of the prefrontal cortex in response to a direct eye gaze. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) normally helps us to assess the person coming toward us, and our mirror neurons help to pick up his intentions. However, the subjec....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 104
Why can’t we just be reasonable? And can understanding help? The rational, executive brain is good at helping us understand where feelings come from (as in: "I get scared when I get close to a guy because my father molested me" or “I have trouble expressing my love toward my son because I feel guilty about having killed....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 207
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness, i.e. by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we’re feeling. (The tech....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 208
Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 210
Death, destruction, and sorrow need to be constantly justified in the absence of some overarching meaning for the suffering. Lack of this overarching meaning encourages making things up, lying, to fill the gap in meaning. [Perhaps "just world" beliefs provide this meaning?]
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 235
I have a family photograph of myself as a five-year-old, perched between my older (obviously wiser) and younger (obviously more dependent) siblings. In the picture I proudly hold up a wooden toy boat, grinning from ear to ear “See what a wonderful kid I am and see what an incredible boat I have! Wouldn’t you love to com....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 352
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Social Costs of Pain (Last updated: Thu, Jul 13, 2017)