How "Inhibition" Helps Chronic Pain

Yep, finally writing about Frozen.

I sometimes felt funny saying the word “inhibition” during an Alexander Technique lesson. Like so many terms in the AT, the immediate connotation isn’t always the true meaning. Probably because of Freud, inhibition is widely understood as a desperate attempt to stop something natural from coming to the surface, like how Elsa, in Frozen, tries to keep her ice powers under control by repressing her emotions.

[From “Let It Go”] 
“Be the good girl I’ve always had to be.

Conceal, don’t feel.

Don’t let them know.”

Obvi, this is not what inhibition means (to me).

Inhibition is not trying to stuff something back in the box. 

Inhibition is the act of ceasing or lessening an undesired response, not because it’s shameful but because a conscious part of you would like a different response. 

For an example close at hand, I often feel pain of some kind. My habitual response is to tighten against the pain, trying to hold my body in a contorted position – essentially trying to move away from the pain as if it were a hot poker. This worsens my pain, creates other injuries, and stresses me out since my breathing is restricted. I can’t relax because I’m trying to avoid what’s already here: discomfort.

An early link in this chain reaction is my brain scanning my body for pain and discomfort (this scanning and vigilance becomes heightened the worse I feel). One way I interrupt this chain reaction is inhibiting this kind of hyper-focusing, not because I’m anti-awareness (I’m Buddhist for Christmas sake!), but because this mental fixation leads to so many compensatory body patterns that are difficult to unravel.

As Alexander Technique students of mine may remember, I often use a concept I learned from Missy Vineyard of “the attic” (which is well explained in her excellent book).

Going up to the Attic

What happens for many people in distress or chronic pain is that as we are flooded with sensation, our body’s response systems don’t sit idly by and observe this dispassionately. No, we are tightening against pain and trying to frantically think our way out of the situation as stress hormones pump and further cloud our reasoning.

What Missy taught me years ago was to practice shifting my attention upward and outward rather than stay engaged in the trench warfare of my pain and tension. Specifically, she asked me to imagine my brain like a house with several stories and to think of the prefrontal cortex as my brain’s attic – the highest area within myself.

Missy called the mental state when I was narrowing my attention on sensations in the body the “basement.” (This wasn’t an indictment, just a pedagogical tool to distinguish between operating in the attic.)

My practice has been to periodically shift my awareness “forward and up” as if going up into my attic, knowing that I won’t receive a loud confirmation. “Yes, Dan, you veritable legend of the AT, you’ve entered the attic successfully!” 

No. 

What I do often notice is a sense of lightness and a crisp visual field as if I’m not seeing everything through the haze of my discursive thoughts anymore. I might perceive more peripheral vision.

How does one shift their awareness “forward and up”?

By believing that you can do it without receiving sensory confirmation every step of the way that you are on the right track. What feels “right” to you is what is familiar, and you won’t access the attic through familiar means. This way of using our brain is novel to many of us. 

It’s a thought or a wish, rather than a subtle muscular action you are trying to figure out. 

Imagine that you could shine a flashlight up into your prefrontal cortex, or that you are seeing out from a head on top of your head.

Employing the attic is a way of lessening our interference in our body’s posture and movement, not relying so much on what feels right. My inhibition (and my Alexander direction for that matter) is much more likely to succeed if I’m projecting my awareness forward and up. Confession: a lot of the time it doesn’t work for me because I’m trying to do it through feeling – I’m asking, how can I check that I’m doing this right? Wrong question. 

In fact, we are not asking a question. We are making a wish – I wish to shift my awareness forward and up as if there was a big picture window on my forehead looking out into the room. That’s where you want to go.

You’ll notice lots of muscle interference which is normal. Some part of you is so interested in this whole attic thing working out that it’s trying to make it happen by doing things that feel like going forward and up – neck or jaw tightening, holding your breath. Inhibit that. 

You don’t have to know how this works. You are sticking with thought and intention and not in control of the results.

See what happens. And remember there’s nothing to hold onto with the attic. It’s something to be refreshed, not maintained.

Post your questions, observations, and your abiding love of “Let It Go” in the Comments below. Just because we aren’t having in-person Alexander sessions and retreats doesn’t mean that the learning has to stop.