Reframing Your Relationship with Pain

Summary

In this episode of the Catapult Effect podcast, Katie Wrigley explores the complex relationship individuals have with pain and the implications of receiving a diagnosis. She discusses how pain can become intertwined with one's identity and the importance of recognizing and reframing this relationship.

Katie emphasizes the dual nature of diagnoses, which can provide validation but also limit personal growth. The episode encourages listeners to envision a future free from pain and to take actionable steps towards healing and self-discovery.

Takeaways

Pain can permeate your identity.
Your nervous system prefers familiarity over change.
Unlearning pain patterns takes practice.
A diagnosis is often a symptom of something deeper.
It's important to challenge limiting beliefs about diagnoses.
Taking small steps can lead to significant change.

Resources:
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Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:00.516)
Welcome back to the Catapult Effect podcast. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. This week we're gonna be talking about your relationship with pain and what a diagnosis is actually telling you and that impact that diagnosis may have on you. So stay tuned, that's coming right up. Thank you so much for joining me today. As the election gets further into the rearview mirror, one thing I'm noticing is more conversations.

pain. Even though it is getting further into the past it does seem to have been a catalyst this election in the US to have people starting to discuss things that hurt them, things that bother them, things that are creating pain. So I thought this would be a great time to have an episode around your experience and your relationship with pain. So what is your current relationship with pain? And now pain is a tricky bitch. We've talked about this before.

One of the things that pain does after you have been in pain for a while is it permeates your identity. And this is important because you wind up having an odd attachment to it. And let me give you a couple of examples of other people, not me, and I will give my own example as well. But there's two examples where I really saw this and it fascinated me. So one was someone who has been diagnosed with something called spasmodic dysphonia.

which is a neurological condition that impacts the voice. And the way that he described it, and this is not someone that I met as a client, this is someone I met out in the business world, but the way that he described it was that it felt like as he tried to talk, like someone was choking him with a belt. Sounds pretty painful, right? Well, this person also happened to have written a book and he's a really big businessman in...

not physically big, but he's very well known in the state of Maine and beyond and he's very, very well respected and he wrote an absolutely incredible book. And in reading this book, I realized that he has figured out how to live with this condition. So even though it's painful, this has become a part of who he is. And because of this condition, he drastically changed his leadership style with amazing

Katie Wrigley (02:23.564)
amazing outcomes and he's not interested in reducing that pain. And if you want to read more about him his name is Kevin Hancock and he wrote a book, let me see, I have it right here, called The Seventh Power and it's all about dispersing leadership power from one source and enabling employees, not enabling, that's a negative word, empowering employees to step into their own power as leaders and

I'm really excited. I'm going to meet with him again in the spring. And he had given a keynote at an entrepreneurial summit I went to. And the Cognitive Movement team has been looking for someone who has spasmodic dysphonia. And so that really connected me to him a little bit deeper. And we had offered him a session. I wasn't sure why he had said no. And then I understood, my gosh, well, he's learned how to navigate this. And there is now a belief in there that

He's learned how to work with us and this has given him so much and he talks about it very clearly in the book and I have a lot of respect for how he is viewing that. And now the other person that I noticed I was talking about chronic pain in his book Love Life is Matthew Hussey. So he talks about his journey of latinitus and how much pain it's had and how he's shifted his relationship with pain so that he is able to live with it and he is also

not interested in finding a solution because he had so many times we had hope and it was dashed and nothing worked that it's better for him now to live with pain. And while I can understand both of those men's perspective, my experience and perspective with pain is very different. The pain levels that I had, I really wasn't willing to become friends with them.

Now I did have it linked into my identity and that was a huge shift to make. There's a point in time and this makes me giggle where I thought I would be a better coach if I was in pain. It's so not reasonable because pain is constantly draining your batteries. So how could I possibly be as good of a coach when I had high pain levels versus when I am firing on all cylinders, my batteries are fully charged and not being drained.

Katie Wrigley (04:49.326)
by negative patterns running in my body or pain patterns that are running in my body. One in the same sometimes. So that relationship with pain, notice what your relationship is now. And if you are in a place of acceptance, awesome. Congratulations and I hope that you stay there. If you are struggling to accept and I want you to keep listening because you may be like me and you are not willing to live with that pain for the rest of your life and you

may not have to. I can never guarantee what's going to happen to your pain levels. However, what I can guarantee is that if you do the work, your relationship with pain will change. And I am proof of this and I have multiple clients who are proof of this as well. I don't have pain anymore. I have a couple of sore spots that I work on sometimes, but there's no pain. Nothing that keeps me up.

That was really important for my own journey and my relationship with pain. I wanted to distance myself from it. It's easier for me to talk about pain if I'm not feeling it. But Kevin and Matthew, they've made different choices for themselves and those choices work for them. Again, this distinction is going to be, can you honestly be at peace with whatever pain you have in your body? And if so, awesome. You're doing great. If not, stay with me because we're going to want to help you get at peace.

with whatever pain is happening in your body right now. So this also leads me into a couple of points. One of the things that's really important here is that your nervous system is always going to choose familiarity over something new. It doesn't matter if the familiar is hell. Familiar is going to be less disruptive to your nervous system than something new. This piece can be part of the challenge in breaking out of pain.

because not being in pain, if you've been in pain for a long time, that's now the new thing. Your brain, your body, your nervous system may not feel safe to have a lower pain level yet. Everybody is gonna differ in that. And what I've seen and what the science supports is that even after you've broken through pain, it takes repetition and practice to continue to unlearn.

Katie Wrigley (07:13.54)
those pain patterns. We can never actually fully unlearn a pain pattern. Actually, that's incorrect. We can never actually fully forget a pain level, but we can absolutely unlearn the pain pattern. That is correct. We never forget the pain level. Your mind is always going to remember how high the pain got, but you can unlearn those signals and get your body into a more resourceful state, get your nervous system.

into a more resourceful state. And now the diagnosis, this is where the diagnosis comes in and it's a double-edged sword to me. Because on the one hand, the diagnosis is validating that you have a reason to feel the way that you feel. That validation itself is the double-edged sword because now you've got this validation that you should, quote unquote, should have something wrong with you. You, quote unquote, should be feeling the way you are. And what I've noticed when it's a diagnosis that includes pain,

doesn't matter what the awareness does, you will hurt more when it is confirmed that you have a reason to hurt, period. I haven't seen anybody else have any different reaction today. If you have, please write in, let me know. I would love to hear how you did that. Because I have yet been able to keep myself from really exploring that when I've been given a diagnosis. Now it doesn't mean that I accept it.

It doesn't mean that I make it mine, but it absolutely impacts me. The diagnosis is the best guess of what is going on with you given the set of symptoms at that point in time. And now here's a couple of places where the diagnosis can work against you. This is the other side of the sword. So you get that validation. But the other thing that it's doing is it's starting to become deeper into that.

identity and it can start to become yours. And I hear people making it mine. My anxiety, my post-traumatic stress, my pain, my fibromyalgia, my arthritis.

Katie Wrigley (09:29.41)
It's understandable why you want to make it yours, but I want you to watch what you're saying as you're referring to yourself and you're touching on a diagnosis. Because you may go further and further and get more connected into that diagnosis, which may or may not be correct, by the way. I have been diagnosed with so much more that I have dismissed is not applicable to me than I have with things that I say still apply to me now.

And that has been a big mindset shift that was really empowering to take. And that's something that's available to you too. If you are similar to me and you have been getting a ton of diagnoses and they're starting to exhaust you, go back through them again. Do they apply? Yeah or no? And if they don't, let them go. You don't have to hold on to them. It's not saying anything about you. And the other piece is we often think the diagnosis is the end game. But what if the diagnosis...

is actually a symptom of something deeper. And I was listening to one of Mel Robbins podcast episodes and she interviewed Dr. Gabor Mate, who's one of the leading researchers in the world around addiction and recovery. He's phenomenal if you've never heard him talk before. It's one of my dreams to be able to interview myself. I have so much respect for this man and everything he's doing to help us understand addiction and the science behind addiction at a much deeper level.

And he was mentioning how ADHD and depression and anxiety are often coming from, and addiction too are often symptoms of a deeper trauma, but they are the diagnosis.

So just think about that for a moment. If we're actually saying that a diagnosis is what is quote unquote wrong with you at that moment in time, but the diagnosis is actually just a symptom of something deeper, what is that preventing you from doing? It's gonna prevent you from going in to the roots, finding what's causing it and releasing it so that you have deeper healing. So the diagnosis itself can be really limiting.

Katie Wrigley (11:41.264)
Some of the best advice that I got around this that I want to share with you now is get the diagnosis because it is important to have that validation and then I want you to do your best to let it go. Yep, that's something that you've been told applies to you. Maybe you agree with it now, maybe you don't, but that is completely up to you and really ask yourself what is this diagnosis giving me?

Like I had a call with someone a few weeks ago and their thyroid is off. And for her she's like, my gosh, this is such a relief because now I have a reason that I know I've been tired. That's a diagnosis that's serving her. And she's doing stuff to help boost the thyroid level to get it back up into a regular state. That's a great example of a helpful diagnosis. Now, an example of an unhelpful one is a few years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD.

And at the time it validated, okay, yeah, my brain thinks differently. I have a different way of approaching things and doing things. And one of my mentors, Liz Larson, God love her. Thank you, Liz, if you're listening. But she asked me, she's like, you have been diagnosed with so much, Katie. What is this diagnosis giving you? And I really looked at it, was like, you know what? It doesn't give me anything. I don't wanna take the meds.

that go with it. I'm already doing stuff to help boost my focus and help keep me centered. So it doesn't help me or serve me at all to hold on to that. So don't talk about it much. Same thing with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress in 2018 or 2019. I don't even remember what year it was now. I was diagnosed with severe complex post-traumatic stress.

I don't talk about that too much other than as a way to relate to someone of, yeah, I know how hard it is to have severe post-traumatic stress. I am very familiar with how uncomfortable it is to live inside of a body that has experienced high levels of trauma. Holding on to that diagnosis at this point, five, six years after diagnosis, that does nothing for me. And I have so much evidence of how much of these traumas have been healed.

Katie Wrigley (14:05.454)
because my health has improved, because my mindset has improved, it literally gives me nothing to continue to hold on to that. But what it does give me is a point in time where that was accurate and now it's not. So another way that you can use a diagnosis is as a measuring stick for your progress. So you may have been diagnosed with something four or five, six years ago, whatever it may be. Look at that diagnosis. Does it still apply to you now? Yes or no?

And just notice that. And notice what happens in your body as you're exploring these different ideas for yourself. The key here, we're not trying to get you to lie to yourself. That's not at all what I'm trying to do. What I want you to do is to challenge some of these limiting beliefs and challenge some of these diagnoses that are limiting you and challenge how you feel about them. Then I want you to find a diagnosis

or reframe or a perspective that makes it easier to have that diagnosis apply to you. Or it makes it easier to live with the pain. Whatever you need to do. Like one of the things that helped me break through the pain patterns was clearly seeing how many other people I was gonna be able to help who had pain. And then that just continues to expand and grow from there. But the clarity and part of the gift

was I started to immediately when I still had high pain, I was turning it into purpose. And for me, that's what I'm here to do. Your journey is different. Your journey is yours. So that may not be what you're here for. But can you find a purpose in the pain for yourself? Can you see something that it is giving you? Now, not to a point where you want to hold on to it and not let go of it, but can you see something that's giving?

that it's giving you. And just being able to see that, a lot of times that can lower pain levels. Just seeing that there's something in it for you. It's amazing what that can do. All right. Just want to wrap everything up. So your takeaway, your call to action, should you choose to take something with this episode, because I want to give you something to integrate. So looking at your future self. Here's the exercise I have. I want you to look at your future self in five years.

Katie Wrigley (16:35.642)
Who is that person? What are you doing? Who are you? Who's in your life?

And I want you to juxtapose that vision yourself. Get detailed journal. Are you still going to be in the same job? Are you going to be different? Will you have retired by then? Are you going to have a kid by then? Wherever you are, whatever phase in life, where do you see yourself in five years? I just want you to know five years, 10 years can get a little hazy. Five is challenging enough to look into, but I just want you to put it out there. Who do you want to be in five years? And then take that very detailed vision of future you.

juxtapose it to those diagnoses and these pain patterns that you have going now and is that future version of yourself in alignment with these current diagnoses? If not, what is the first best thing you can do to start to separate that from your identity and to get more in alignment with the future identity that you see for yourself?

All you need to do is find the first best thing and then the next best thing and you keep doing that. So maybe your first best thing is to say, hey, yep, I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. No wonder I can't sleep. No wonder I act the way I act. And what can I do to start to get this out of my body? Because I don't want to walk around with post-traumatic stress in my body for the rest of my life. I don't want the disease that comes with it.

I don't want my nervous system on fire. I don't want to continue waking up in the middle of the night. I want to have peace. I want to have a good night's sleep. And I want to be able to really connect with people. And if that's part of your vision, you're going to want to start to take steps to heal that trauma out of your body. I trust that this was a helpful episode for you. And I also want to invite you that if you are struggling with this yourself and you're feeling a little lost and you're like, yeah, that sounds great, but I don't know how to do it, Katie. I know how to do it.

Katie Wrigley (18:43.918)
I have a systematic approach that has been repeatable that I've had many people already repeat to help you move away from these identities holding you in pain, holding you in the trauma, holding you in the diagnoses. And we help you walk away and really lean into that future vision of you. So if you feel like you are ready to start to do that, I want you to grab some time on my calendar. I will make sure that I link to it in the show notes here.

Reach out. It's a free 30 minute call. And if you decide that you're not ready after we talk, then you decide you're not ready. But if you want 2025 to be the year that you finally start to stop limiting yourself, I'm ready for you and I'm here. I hope you reach out. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know you have so many choices of what to listen to on the internet and I appreciate you taking the time to do something you can actually put into action in your life that is going to help you improve your life.

And thank you so much for being here with me. And until next time, please be well.