(no subject)

[eclective.livejournal.com]

(x-posted to soulbonding)

Apologies for the crosspost, and also the fact that I haven't previously intro'd ourselves to this community; many of you have seen us around in the SBing community, many of you haven't, but if you don't know us, we're a system of loosely 14 or so with a couple of main frontrunners, and most of us are soulbonds, i.e. people who identify as having origins which are portrayed in this world as fictional, or something like that.

Anyway, we were recommended by another system on this list to post here as well as the soulbonding community, so here goes; one of our system is suffering from physical pain (it affects the body at times, but only mildly, and hardly at all when she's not fronting; we know that she feels it more strongly, though) that we thought at first was phantom pain, but she's been suggested to have it checked out physically just in case. (This morning she was physically tender to the body's touch, so I suppose it's worrisome...)

The trouble is, obviously, she's a soulbond. If she does have any physical illness it's unlikely to show up in our body as anything more than stress symptoms, and our soulscape is a pseudomedieval world where the shiniest new invention on the block is metalworking, so she's not going to get any kind of thorough medical examination there; none of us are doctors, so the most we can do is poke and prod at her externally (which we now have to stop because it hurts ^_^;;). So, this is a kind of dumb question, but does anyone have experience with this sort of thing and what did you do about it? It may just be a phantom, and she says she's okay, but still, I don't like to see her in pain.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well... can you be more specific? Where is the pain located, how often does it occur, what kind of pain is it - stabbing, aching, burning, what? Does anything make it better or worse? Does it occur only under certain circumstances? Is it accompanied by any other symptoms, like dizziness, numbness, nausea?

I am not a doctor. I do, however, have quite a bit of experience with pain, both my own and that of others'. Your body may or may not have a physical illness; if you have reason to think it might, you need to go see a doctor to check that out. Your body may have a physical illness that the doctor can neither definitively diagnose nor do anything to fix - if so, welcome to the club; there are quite a few of us in it.

Dismissing symptonms as "nothing more than stress symptoms" is foolish, because ALL symptoms are "stress symptoms" - if you were puking your guts out from chemotherapy, it would be because the chemicals were stressing your body. Lots of other things can stress it too, and they can be harder to identify, so let's run down the list here:

1. Toxins and allergens. That's a huge category, which includes everything from junk food to environmental pollutants to the dust mites in your mattress, so it may take some trial and error to find out what needs to be eliminated.

You could start with the obvious ones, though: tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, other drugs, sugar, refined flour, hydrogenated oils, dust, mold, petroleum-based chemicals. The most common food allergies are to wheat, dairy and citrus, but there are a lot of other possibilities. One useful hint: if there's a food you tend to particularly crave, it's probably one that's bad for you.

2. Things your body needs and isn't getting. The big items in this category are Sleep, Water and Exercise, particularly aerobic exercise which raises your heart rate. It also includes fresh fruit and vegetables, vitamin supplements, relaxation techniques, and proper breathing. If your posture and breathing are poor, your whole body is going to be out of whack from that alone.

3. Emotional and environmental stressors. Abusive or dysfunctional relationships are first on this list - "relationships" meaning not just with partners, but with family, friends, and at work. Drama makes people sick, literally. Next on the list is 'external angst', as it were - what people get from watching the news, watching grim movies, reading grim and scary fiction, listening to dark and discordant music - it's the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" principle. And then there is noise, clutter, disorganization, lack of space, too many commitments - what people generally mean when they talk about "normal stress". Hint: it isn't normal; people weren't designed to live like that.

4. Personal issues. This is a huge category too, and includes ALL the bad stuff that happened in the past, about which it's too late now to do anything but work on healing from it. Soulbonds generally have a lot of these, because fictional characters who don't have "issues" are generally pretty boring, but a lot of the reason people bond with soulbonds in the first place is because they've got "matching issues". When a character in a book finally resolves his or her issues, the book ends, but... what happens to a soulbond who does? Is "living happily ever after" an option, or are the issues the major point of the exercise?

I haven't got any soulbonds, but I do share this body with my two 'brothers', and one of them - duathir, whom some people here know - has a lot of trouble with physical pain, discomfort and disorientation when he "fronts". Partly it's because this body is very anomalous, and also has a good many miles on it, so pain and sensory disturbance are "business as usual", but he is more sensitive to them. Partly it's because he's got major issues about being in a physical body at all, so he has a hard time accepting and coping with the realities of his situation.

To sum up - you would do well to go see a doctor just to rule out organic illness, but after that, you're on your own. There's no 'cure' for chronic pain, but there are a lot of ways to manage and minimize it. I wish you all the best!

[shadowechoes.livejournal.com]

We have a similar problem, although none of Us are soulbonds.. so. In the last few years, We've had Our ribs broken three times, and the group of splits/system members that were around in that period of Our life are the ones that feel it the most, even to this day (the last time ribs got broken was about a year and a half ago). Whenever they're around, especially the member of Our system who was there for the breaking, Our ribs ache like they're freshly broken again - no painkillers will begin to help. I guess it's cause nothing can lessen the pain of body memories, at least not for Us. *shrugs* We've never been to a doctor for it (and that's probably why they're still so messed up - never healed right), We just bear it as best We can.

Sorry We don't have any useful advice. :/ I agree that you should try going to a doctor though like Elenbarathi said.

~Ash and Jane

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Based on our own experiences and those of some other people we've spoken with, we think that many cases of 'phantom pain' (defining it for this purpose as pain with no obvious external cause) actually result from mental/emotional stress being converted into physical stress. This is called a conversion reaction, and it's been known about since the 19th century (IMnshO, one of the few damn things Freud ever got right).

It's also well-known in the medical community that people can continue to periodically experience pain in areas of the body where they were once hurt, even if the technical injuries have long since healed. Thanks to the Cartesian dualism that pervades Western medicine, such patients are often sent away with the admonishment that it's 'all in their head,' and the fact that there's a complex mind-body interaction going on here is unacknowledged. Have you or your soulbond experienced any major injuries in the past and does the pain seem to correlate with those in any way? Pain is the body's way of saying something is wrong, whether it's a solely physical cause or the conversion of mental stress into physical stress.

You mentioned the technology of your world-- have you got chiropractors or anything equivalent? Chiropractors have helped us A LOT in managing conversion-related pain (since we tend to take it out in our lower back) and they certainly don't rely on any fancy technology to do it.

[eclective.livejournal.com]

The chiropracty thing is a good idea... since it's a pain that, when it's present, is more about sensitivity to physical touch than a kind of back/neck ache type pain, we wouldn't have thought of it. If it works for that type of pain as well, we could try to find someone although she's seemingly okay at the moment.

And, yes, the pain does strongly correlate with a past injury to the soulbond in question (a gunshot wound that got rather infected and was kind of treated in an on-the-field sort of way, but which healed quite a long time ago now, and the bullet was removed), which is why we assumed it to be phantom.

Everyone's help has been muchly wonderful, BTW. Thank you. ^_^