Education
Healing Pain and Major League Baseball
Learning skills to feel safe is at the core of healing.
Posted March 5, 2023 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Healing from chronic illness occurs by attaining skills to move towards health and not by "fixing" yourself.
- An analogy can be made to becoming a professional baseball player. The goal is to be "safe" as often as possible.
- Your skills will improve with ongoing learning and practice. Focusing on your problems only reinforces them.
- Healing is a dynamic daily process, and you make outs frequently. That is life. Keep moving forward.
If you suffer from pain, consider your healing journey in terms of becoming a major league baseball player. You are the hitter and life is the pitcher. Your goal is to get on base safely.
"You are not here to get rid of your mental or physical pain," I often told patients. This is true because "your attention is on the pain, and it is continuing to run the show." So, my patients frequently asked, “Why am I talking to you?” My reply was, “You are here to learn how to live the life that you want. You can move away from these unpleasant but necessary pain circuits.” This is the opposite of “fixing.” How to accomplish this?
Chronic Disease
Chronic symptoms, illness, and disease all have a common cause – time spent in threat physiology. Physiology is the term that refers to how the body functions. A common term for threat physiology is the state of flight or fight. If such a state is sustained, the body will eventually break down. The answer for healing lies in minimizing the time in threat physiology and optimizing time in safety, where the body gets to rest and regenerate.
Anytime your circumstances, stresses, or threats exceed your coping skills, you’ll be in a state of flight or fight. By viewing your journey as learning how to become a “professional” in processing your stresses and increasing the resiliency of your nervous system, you can accomplish this goal.
Major League Baseball
There are many ways to get on base safely. You might make it with a walk, being hit by a pitch, an error, balk, dropped third strike by the catcher, or a base hit. It requires years of repetition to develop a disciplined eye for “your pitch”, have the patience to walk (especially with two strikes), have a reproducible consistent swing, and be in excellent physical shape.
Life throws us any type of pitch at any speed—fastball, curve, slider, sinker, and changeup. It may be delivered overhand, sidearm, or even be a submarine. It is almost miraculous that a human ever hits the ball. Some pitchers “cheat” with spitballs, which increase the movement of the ball and are illegal.
Years of coaching and practice are required to make it to the majors. You must develop a wide range of skills and engage in tens of thousands of hours of repetition to make it to the top. There are different levels of skill, from little league, to the major league farm system, and then majors. A nickname for the highest level is the “circus”— not a subtle analogy to life.
Creating Safety
With regards to chronic mental and physical pain, we are generally focused on fixing the problem—but that presents a problem. Healing occurs through your brain physically adapting (neuroplasticity) to what you want. If you are working on what you don’t want (the pain), your pain circuits are reinforced. You must learn to separate from what you don’t want and “get on base,” by creating safety physiology. In this state, your body heals. The more time you can spend in safety, the better.
Keep in mind that the best players make an out a high percent of the time. Life keeps coming at us and sometimes we do well and often we don’t. That is not failure; it is just life.
The key to healing is learning and developing your own set of strategies to create safety physiology. The approaches are in two different arenas. One is efficiently processing adversity and the other is nurturing joy. Each person is unique and will attain his or her own best set in each realm. If you are waiting for a medical provider, course, or book to fix you, how is that going to work?
It is also critical to always treat yourself with kindness. Your skills will be limited in the beginning. You have to attain a minimum level of expertise to play the game, including just learning the rules and then strategies.
As you work your way through the system, beginning with little league, high school, and then Single A ball to the top, you’ll begin to feel better. The good news with pain is that it doesn’t require years as much as it does require repetition. Most people already know many of the healing concepts but must learn to create a more cohesive whole. Each person moves at his or her own speed.
“I don’t want any pain.”
One common trap in dealing with pain, is that people want it gone forever. If they heal and then relapse, they'll become upset and self-critical. Even worse, they might blame someone for their pain. Staying alive is a challenge and there will always be pain at some level every day. It may be minimal. But some days your stresses may be overwhelming or your nervous system may be hyper-reactive and you’ll go into threat physiology. But you’ll come out more quickly and eventually you’ll learn better ways to avoid it as you become more proficient.
Staying focused on fixing your pain will take you in the wrong direction. You must learn the skills to feel safe, attain the life you want, and move away from the pain. We all begin somewhere, and you don’t have to be in the majors to experience a lot of relief. Even in little league, you’ll experience a lot of success. Remember, the highest-level players continue to hone their skills and practice even harder.
You might feel that you can’t put in the time or effort to learn the skills to heal. Really? This is your one chance at life. It requires much more energy to flail away in The Abyss than to be out of it and thrive. What is more important than you? Become a professional at living your life.
