Episode # 114- Personality Traits and Chronic Pain

Did you know your personality traits are a predictor for whether you will have chronic pain or mindbody symptoms?

Traits like perfectionism, people pleasing, and wanting to be liked keep the nervous system in dysregulated states and wreak havoc on the body.

 

For me, my personality traits were the biggest thing keeping me dysregulated and in a state of dis-ease before I found this work.

 

Listen to find out more!

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, Episode 114, Personality Traits and Chronic Pain. In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind. Hello, my loves. Today, I wanted to talk to you about common personality traits that are associated with chronic pain.
Now, this is definitely something that I was not taught in physical therapy school. My knowledge of chronic pain was basically you just treat all pain the same way. As if it's damage in the body and you try to perfect the body and prevent further damage.
And when I say chronic pain, it could be, you know, a bad back that flares up every few times a year, or it could be other symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome is a common one, digestive issues like reflux, issues like migraines and fibromyalgia, as well as things like brain fog or tinnitus or fatigue, those can all be signs of neuroplastic symptoms, basically mind-body symptoms, meaning that the thoughts, the emotions, the nervous system, are the things that are giving the brain the information to produce pain, rather than that it's an injury that needs to be taken care of medically. So most people that are coming to this work have already tried the medical procedures. Their pain has lasted longer than three to six months, and it's resistant to medical care.
So that is kind of how we describe chronic pain. And what we find is that there are some common personality traits that we see with people who tend to have symptoms display in their bodies. These personality traits are things like perfectionism, people pleasing, wanting to be seen as good, wanting people to like you, a strong sense of duty.
They're often things that are not bad in themselves. They're actually usually very nice people, kind people, empathetic people that end up having chronic pain or mind-body type symptoms. As children, we develop these survival states and did not have any tools to know how to regulate.
And so over lifetimes, patterns can form of giving of yourself at your own expense, making sure everyone is happy before you can feel happy, or never letting yourself rest when you have achievements and you've achieved them, still criticizing yourself, thinking you should have done it faster or with less help, or as soon as you achieve something, you're on to the next thing because it's not fulfilling for you. For me, I think the personality traits were the biggest thing keeping me dysregulated, because I had a pretty great childhood, caring parents, attentive parents, and no big T traumas. But I developed this sense of trying to be very good.
I was raised in a religious setting, so wanting to be good, wanting to not make mistakes, worried that if I made mistakes, it would have eternal consequences. I was very scared. It promoted a lot of fear in my young developing nervous system around getting things wrong, about what other people thought of me.
And so that kept me dysregulated. When I got married and had kids and was a working mom, I felt like I was never doing enough. I couldn't be good enough by the fact that I was working and a mom and just continually being a very harsh critic on myself, pushing myself to do more, and really not knowing how to do any kind of self-care and starting to feel guilty if I did take time for myself.
So it was a real recipe for disaster, and no wonder that my digestive system was not doing well because when you're in these survival states, your digestive system shuts down, right? It's not as important to digest your food as it is to run away from a tiger. But in my case, there was no tiger chasing me.
Many of the things in the environment were actually safe for me, but I kept myself in a dysregulated state all of the time because of these personality traits, these survival states that I had used to cope and did not know any differently and did not have any tools to regulate myself out of. Dr. Schubiner describes internal pressures. Internal pressures meaning the pressures that we put on ourselves that keep us in these fierce states and in states where we're more likely to produce that neuroplastic pain.
He says people who are at higher risk for having mind-body syndrome are people who put more pressure on themselves, who are more self-critical, self-blaming, who feel more obligations and have a strong sense of duty. They worry excessively, take responsibility for external problems, they're overly conscientious and caring about others, and especially to the exclusion of doing things for themselves. So I checked every box on there for myself.
That's exactly the way I was living my life. It was actually well-meaning and well-intended. I wanted to be a good person.
I wanted to be there for everyone. I wanted everyone to like me, but by setting myself up for these unrealistic standards, I was actually really harming my own body and creating a state of dis-ease constantly. I like to remember that these personality traits developed as protective survival responses.
Sometimes you'll hear them called trauma responses. When you look at these personality traits of chronic pain, you can see them in the survival states. So this is what I mean.
The kind of person who might tend to go more towards fight and have chronic pain would be the kind of person who would be angry or frustrated with themselves, critical of themselves, also tending to find imperfections in others, feeling like a victim, and blaming. So this is actually a survival state, and this is what your nervous system has developed as you were growing up, as your nervous system was developing. So as you were growing up as a child, this was not a conscious decision.
The autonomic nervous system happens automatically. It's below our conscious control. So our response to an unsafe situation as a child could have been to go into fight.
Now, for someone who tends to go into flight, that response is this perfectionistic response. Like, if I could just do things better, if I could do things perfectly, then I'd be safe. Then people would like me.
If I could figure out all of the problems and fix them, if I could work a little harder, if I could push a little more, it's this frenetic energy of doing things and doing them at your own expense. That's the energy of flight. I have to keep doing more so that I can be safe.
With freeze, you tend to go into more isolation, thinking that if I can hide, I'll be safe. This is where shame lives. So people who are overly critical of themselves are often in shame, thinking something is actually wrong with them.
And fawn is a survival state that I guess I didn't even really realize that I've been living in probably most of my life. Fawn is a people-pleasing state where you would feel safe if people like you. So I would rather shut down part of myself than show up as myself and risk being disliked.
And so I was always gauging myself based on other people's opinions of me, external circumstances. It made it very hard for me to make decisions. I would always want to ask a lot of different people and get a lot of different responses, so it was confusing.
And in fawn, you tend to be more empathetic. You can read the room. You come in and you can just feel what other people are feeling, and you can imagine how it is for them.
And you're, again, so into other people's emotions and managing their emotions for them that you're forgetting about your own self. And people pleasing for me just became so innate because I was always looking for external information to know if I was doing the right thing or not. Again, our nervous system is just always on the lookout for danger.
And if we've had some events in our childhood that we don't want to repeat, our brain is actually on the lookout for anything that resembles something like that. So we can be on guard and looking for danger all of the time. And when the nervous system senses danger or threat, it doesn't mean that there's a real threat, but the nervous system senses that there's a threat, it will decide to put us into a survival state and these old familiar patterns, these old personality traits that cause us to disconnect from ourselves, to live in the future or the past, and to be in this frightened, fearful state that when we're in it long term, it does affect all of the systems in the body, the heart rate, the blood pressure, the breathing rate, the blood sugar, the fat storage, your immunity, your inflammation, your water-sodium balance, all of these things are managed by the autonomic nervous system.
It's automatic, but this is just for survival mode. This is to get us to survive, but not necessarily to thrive. For me, unlearning these personality traits was the biggest part of my healing.
And I had to build the tolerance in my nervous system to feel safe showing up as me, not asking for advice, taking time for self-care, and placing emphasis on how I felt over how other people feel. There were times, and there are still times, that it's very scary. And so be so compassionate with yourself.
If you are noticing some of these personality traits and you want to get rid of them because you don't like them, just please know that the first step is understanding them, accepting them, really seeing what this protective response has been and why you developed it and that this makes sense and that your brain and your nervous system is just trying to protect you. And we want to teach it that it is safe. We don't want these primitive responses in the driver's seat of the car driving us, the nervous systems coming along for the ride, but we want these primitive responses to be in the passenger seat or in the back seat.
And when you learn the tools to regulate your nervous system, then if you do go into these survival states, you know how to process through them, you know how to move through them and get back to regulation with most ease, rather than what we typically do, which is fight and resist, which actually makes our symptoms worse. If you identify with these personality traits, and if you have been doing this work and want a little extra help, or if you want a community of people who know what you are going through and are going through similar things, check out Alignment Academy in the show notes. And for more information, check out my website, bodyandmindlifecoach.com.
All right, you guys, have a great week. Bye. Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.