'Not Another Headache'
Do you say this to yourself on a regular basis?
Do you take painkillers? Often?
Perhaps you find that sometimes they help and sometimes not?
For many people their headache is diagnosed as chronic daily headache. For others frequent migraine is the bug bear.
Yet medication does not always provide the total answer, the relief, or the 'cure'. Frequent use of pain-killing medication can lead to overuse headache (rebound headache), for example. You may also wonder whether your migraine can be 'fixed' with just medication.
Is taking a pill really the complete answer? Might your problem be more than a physical one?
Migraine as Emotional Distress
In fact, it has been known for hundreds of years that emotional distress triggers headaches. Being angry or sad. Even being excited or happy can trigger a headache.
In 1743, Junkerius talked of migraine being caused by suppressed anger. Other less common reactions linked to emotion have also been identified as root causes for headaches, such as resentments, dissatisfaction and anxiety.
How Therapeutic Support Can Help Migraine
Therapeutic support can help uncover the emotions that can underlie the pain of migraine.
There are many factors which combine to give an embodied experience of an emotion or feeling.
The 'real' pain is perhaps an emotional one, which is hidden, or embedded within an experience of headache or migraine. This can be due to some, or all, of the factors in the following short list.
An alternative way of describing these kinds of headaches, then, is as a conversion headache, the explanation being that psychological distress is 'converted' into a more manageable physic; symptom.
So whether headache can be attributed to the inability to manage difficult emotions (such as anger or anxiety), or to alexithymia (the inability to identify emotion), what seems to happen often is that some sort of converted, or embodied, emotional experience lies at the root of chronic headache and migraine.
The good news that these these experiences can be unravelled with therapeutic support. Headaches can be investigated. Emotions can be explored.
Getting Started
If you have tried all of the medications and are still in intense pain on a frequent basis from your migraine, it may be time to explore the root of your migraine as being not only biochemical but also psychological and emotional.
Do have a look at the therapeutic support options I offer which can help explore your migraine difficulties in several different ways. You can use the form to request the kind of help you would like to start with.
If you are unsure please do contact me to discuss what you are looking to achieve through Steps to Therapy and we can decide together which service might be most appropriate for you.