Why Do I Feel Pain Where No One Can See It?
The Pattern
You have pain that moves. Pain in your back, then your stomach, then your hip. Imaging finds nothing. Doctors call it functional, idiopathic, or stress-related. You start to suspect you are making it up. You are not making it up. The pain is real. It is just not the kind of pain that shows on a scan, because it is not an injury. It is a body holding what has nowhere else to go.
Origins & Context
Gabor Mate's work in When the Body Says No traces the relationship between unspoken emotional loads and physical pain. The body becomes the speaker when the voice has been forbidden. The pain that has no visible cause is often the body's most honest communication.
Bessel van der Kolk's research with trauma survivors documents the high prevalence of unexplained chronic pain. The pain often corresponds to body regions associated with held emotion or unprocessed memory. John Sarno's earlier clinical work on tension myoneural syndrome offered an early framework that has been refined and extended by trauma-informed somatic medicine.
The pain is the body speaking what the voice was not allowed to say.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You have pain that no one can find. You see specialist after specialist. You start carrying a quiet shame that you are inventing your own suffering. You are not. The pain is doing what pain does, which is report on the internal state of the system, and your system is reporting something it has not been allowed to say in words.
It shows up as the slow recognition that your pain has emotional correlates, that it flares during certain visits, certain seasons, certain conversations. You are not crazy. You are inside a body that has learned to speak in symptoms when speech was unsafe.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Functional Somatic Symptoms in medical literature, and as Body Memory in trauma-informed work. Gabor Mate names the broader phenomenon as the Cost of Repression. John Sarno named one classical version as Tension Myoneural Syndrome. Peter Levine frames the underlying mechanism as Unresolved Survival Energy held in tissue.
Related entries in this library: Body Keeps the Receipt, Nervous System Dysregulation, Self-Abandonment, Dissociation, Developmental Trauma.
Nikita's Note
I want you to know that the pain is not in your head. The pain is in your body, and the body has reasons. The fact that the reasons are not visible to imaging does not make them unreal.
The pain often eases when the body finally has a witness for what it has been carrying. Not a fix. A witness. That has been my experience and the experience of every person I have walked beside through this.
From the work
The pain is the body speaking what the voice was not allowed to say.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.