Fibromyalgia: emotional and spiritual meaning

What fibromyalgia is

Fibromyalgia is a long condition of widespread pain in the muscles and soft tissues, with tenderness, a burning quality to the ache, sleep that does not restore, extreme fatigue and stiffness that is often worst in the morning. Thinking can feel slowed or fogged. It is diagnosed more often in women than in men. An older way of diagnosing it counted tender points across the body and treated eleven of them as enough. Clinicians now look at the spread of the pain, the fatigue, the sleep and the other symptoms, and they rule out illnesses that can look similar. The cause is not settled. Poor deep sleep, a physical injury, an infection and a nervous system that has become very sensitive to pain are all discussed. None of them is a mood, and none of them is something you can diagnose in yourself.

Care is usually paced movement, help with sleep, and sometimes medicine chosen by a doctor. Chronic fatigue has its own chapter in the dictionary and is not this page. The reading below does not replace a diagnosis, and it does not replace the plan you were given.

The emotional meaning of fibromyalgia

The pain is read as sitting beside a thought that you are worth nothing, and beside a feeling of being powerless to change your life. The syndrome is tied to perfectionism, to anxiety, and to a high demand on yourself that has gone past your limits. A great moral pain follows you constantly. It may go back to an event in younger life that left a heavy guilt. You feel you are in the way. Asserting yourself is hard. You do not feel up to it. You have the impression of having fallen from a height.

You feel a great deal of pressure from the people around you. Under that, you are the one pushing too hard. There is anger, with the impression of receiving no love from those around you. You no longer want to go forward. You would rather cut yourself off from your feelings, because there is no softness in the life. The question that belongs with the constant pain is where it comes from, not a verdict that you produced it.

The same gesture, over and over

The pain often shows when the gestures are repetitive and monotonous. That repetition is read as recalling the moral suffering of forcing yourself, without end, to carry responsibilities you did not really choose. You wanted to stay faithful to principles that stood against your deep needs. You are living a life you have no taste for.

The muscles and tendons are the tissues that do that repeating work. A strain or a tear is still a physical injury. Widespread pain that has no injury behind it is the picture here.

Where the pain sits

Eighteen places are named as especially sore, across muscles and tendons: the shoulders, the neck, between the shoulder blades, the lower back, the sciatic nerve, the knees, the elbows, the wrists and the chest. The neck and the region between the shoulder blades belong with the upper back and neck. The lower back and the sciatic nerve have their own pages. So do the knees. The elbows, the wrists and the shoulders are the arms and hands. Pain in one of these places can be fibromyalgia, and it can be something else that lives there. The place is a question to sit with alongside the examination.

A gentler way to hold it

The direction is to learn to take care of yourself, and to give yourself the softness you have been short of. Let the child in you live, the one who grew up too fast. You no longer have to be a superwoman, or a superman. You only have to be yourself. You have the right to be happy, and to live in joy. Let creativity come out through play, art, sport, or any activity that brings a greater ease. That is how a life opens, and how a peace can settle.

• Notice the demand that has passed your limit. Perfectionism and anxiety are the climate this pain is read in.
• Separate other people's pressure from your own push. Both can be present. The second is the one to look at.
• Ask which duty you did not choose. Monotonous, repeated work is the gesture that wakes the question.
• Name a principle that fights a real need. Faithfulness to that principle is part of the picture.
• Offer yourself one softness. Play, art or a sport is the form suggested.
• Keep the medical plan. Paced movement, sleep, and a medicine you were prescribed stay with your clinician.