Fibromyalgia is linked to child stress and unprocessed negative emotions.

Fibromyalgia made it difficult for Vera, 46, to get her legs out of bed in the morning. As he moved toward the bathroom and began to work, the twinges of pain moved to his hands, head, and neck. It brought tears to her eyes. It made her mad 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 discussions about accompanying her to the doctor’s appointments and became even angrier. But she never said anything to him. She turned her mind to the support group she was going to join later that day, although she was not successful in alleviating her physical discomfort.

Vera found it easier to focus on the pain of fibromyalgia than her frightening emotions.

As she ate breakfast, flashbacks of her family’s family record flooded Vera’s vision. She relived the tension she used to feel coming home from school wondering if her parents would fight aloud or give each other cold shoulders. Her mother would take her frustration on Vera, the oldest and quietest of her children. Her muscles tightened as she remembered the fear of uncertainty and couldn’t speak about her concerns. It was the same thing now. She couldn’t talk about the anxiety of not being able to take care of herself. Vera had no words for her father’s anger at not making her mother happy, and for Kurt for being equally insensitive and indifferent. What she had was body pain that ranged from uncomfortable pain to excruciating pain for which no specific organic cause had been found. Fibromyalgia was the diagnosis. It came with fatigue, diminishing actions and restricting your life. This made Vera dependent on pain medication and a husband who let her down, repeating the cycle of her childhood.

Filling his anger made Vera’s fibromyalgia more acute and distressing

Vera’s difficulties 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 fibromyalgia gets worse is more intense and debilitating. The 2010  European Journal of Pain reported a study comparing female fibromyalgic sufferers who expressed versus those who suppressed 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 they were awakened had the least amount of pain.

No Amount of Positive Thinking Relieved Your Excruciating Fibromyalgia Pain

When compared to healthy women, those who avoid strong negative emotions, such as anger, and let it not be processed, are more likely to suffer from fibromyalgia. Also, focusing on positive emotions does not seem to be a sufficient buffer. According to a report in the 2008  Journal of Psychosomatic ResearchIt is the lack of processing of negative emotions that precipitates the pain cycle in people with fibromyalgia, regardless of the amount or duration of positive thoughts. Vera was no 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. She has compromised her neuroendocrine functioning by lowering her pain threshold physically and psychologically, suggests a study of women with fibromyalgia published in  Arthritis Care and Research, 2010.

Fibromyalgia is linked to chronic childhood stress and parental conflict

Vera was typical of most adult women with fibromyalgia who had a stressful childhood, as reported by the Journal  Stress and Health  in 2009. Vera’s experience of her mother’s verbal and emotional abuse, and her father’s indifferent attitude is another common trait. in life. stories of women with fibromyalgia. Vera’s struggles with her mother and now her husband made her see life through a more negative lens. Conflict with parents and later partners increases stress and contributes to more negative perceptions of life for women with fibromyalgia, as indicated by the European Psychiatry  magazine  in 2000.

Chronic stress in childhood disrupts Vera’s neuroendocrine system, making it 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 undermined her ability to develop and use healthy stress management strategies. Thus, with each new stress, his neuroendocrine system weakened and began to function abnormally. She lived in a constant state of stress, such that her stress hormone levels, such as cortisol, were elevated years after the stress of living with her parents was removed. Despite the struggle to live with a man who was argumentative and unsupportive, it was nothing compared to his previous stressful experiences. Psychoneuroendocrinolgy.

Processing negative emotions can reduce Vera fibromyalgia pain

Vera may not be able to change her story or her husband. But she can begin to process her emotions in her support group and complement it with psychotherapy.She may share her anger about her early life as well as her fear of being powerless and alone in pain. She can take the pressure off her already overloaded neuroendocrine system by recognizing, naming, and expressing her feelings at the moment. A study in  Arthritis Care and Research , 2010 suggests that Vera can expect between 50% -70% improvement in functioning and feel less pain if she does.

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