Psychogenic Pain

Psychogenic pain is a metaphor for human existence.

The impact of the human communication system on the human nutrient system, the impact of the human nervous system on the alimentary canal and its outliers (i.e., its waste management system, system of oxygenation and electron transfer, its central pumping station, fat storage system, reproductive system, etc.). Everything is connected to everything else. All of this is represented in the brain, one of the nodal points of nerves and nervous activity, the others being the jaw and the gut. The brain has dual points of reference for most things including pain and desire, humiliation, and laughter.

The communication system – the nerves, the nervous system, the neural pathways, and loops connect everything to do with the alimentary canal and its outliers to the brain, jaw, and gut.

That’s how come we grind our teeth, clench our jaw. That is how come we get gut related problems and other somatic issues that are not organic. This is the way we are as humans. Sometimes these things are organic and sometimes they are not. Sometimes we trick ourselves and sometimes we are tricked. That is also in the nature of being human.

Pain that is not organic is often more intense and painful than organic pain – often more all-consuming and less differentiated than organic pain. Most of this, if it is not an organic lesion or disease or complication of some kind, will be related to trauma or abnormalities in the developmental process.

Trauma is relatively easy to identify and way over-stated as an explanation for these matters – it is now a cash cow and the more you bankroll something the more you find it.

Developmental abnormalities commonly occur in childhood as unusual or corrupt features of the attachment process, patterns of incompleteness in that process, patterns of exploitation and abuse in the process.

Differentiation is designed to translate childhood attachment into a fully-fledged adult identity. If the attachment process has been compromised or flawed for whatever reason, then you will require a differentiation process of an extraordinary kind to remediate that corrupted attachment process. This is not easy.

Differentiation mediates the relationship between attachment and adult identity. Differentiation should offer up multiple pathways between attachment and adult identity. It has not always been that way. Nomads would have had serious constraints on the differentiation process – it could have been no other way.  Attachment and adult identity are largely similar across cultures – they are always constrained, predictable and limited, and largely involve the same structures and arrangements. That is clearly evident for childbirth and attachment. Is less clear around adult identity construction. Simply adult identity is largely formed around production and a person’s engagement in the processes of productivity – earning and learning in this culture which might have its transform in another culture. Failures of adult identity formation can be tracked back into corruptions of the attachment process or failures in the differentiation process. Most people focus on corruptions of the attachment process, and in particular trauma and its impact upon that attachment process.

Symmetry and complementarity can describe everything. Human development is no different. Attachment and Adult Identity are designed to be symmetrically arranged and mirror each other.

Differentiation offers up the complementary pathway between these two points of symmetry. This is the heartland of culture – the maelstrom through which cultural characteristics are exchanged. This is where there is massive cultural variation.

Attachment is like the village of the world you come from. Merlin Donald talks about this. The village will prescribe your identity unless there is a more compelling identity available that suits the village. Attachment is oppressive in this regard. Corruptions to attachment may limit the available pathways toward an adult identity. This is how symmetry works. For a person to change their adult identity the conventional route is to remediate the corruptions in the attachment process, remediate the trauma that impacted upon that attachment process, or to revise the differentiation process. All of these are extremely difficult to do and require considerable lengths of time.

The task here is to take symmetry extremely seriously as something that cannot be messed around with or changed. We need to take the symmetrical relationship between attachment and adult identity, respect that symmetry and create an alternative symmetry for adult identity to remediate itself. That symmetry does not belong in the past. It is a point in the future. For a person to remediate their adult identity they need to locate the next attachment process, the attachment process of their own children, invent an attachment process for their own children that becomes the point of symmetry for their own identity construction. In that way future children and the adult identity of those children becomes a symmetrical mirror for the identity of that person in the present. The way to invent such mirrors into the future is through cessation not action. It is what these mirrors of future attachment and adult identity do not include that is more important than what they do include.

The human soma is like that. It is a tricky business. Two parallel systems. The communication system and the alimentary canal criss-crossing into each other, and looping into the brain, jaw, and gut, then looping across into other bodies and back again through our hard wiring for sociability, empathy, and compassion. This is how psychogenic pain works.