Sharpening Discernment
Learn how sharpening your discernment can help you manage your pain and experience the peace, ease, and comfort you seek.
What is Discernment?
What is the meaning of discernment? It is the ability to judge and understand more clearly. It is the ability to see past a superficial understanding of something to separate truth from falsehood, wisdom from folly, and important from trivial.
What Does Discernment Feel Like To Me?
Discernment feels like a gentle breeze subtly tapping on my shoulder, reminding me to pause, take a breath, and breathe. It says, “There’s no rush; you don’t have to respond right now. You can stop, observe, and think.” It is a state of calm serenity, a slowness in my heart and soul that guides me to remain in control, to be fair, and search for the most likely truth.
Taking time to apply sound judgment before deciding something rewards me with a wave of comfort and confidence. It reassures me that I did my best, and I can trust my conclusions, without regret. It is an assuring sensation that is grounding, replenishing, and secure.
7 Ways Sharpening Discernment Can Help You
- Learn what pain is, including why your brain produces it and how it protects you.
- Explore the role of neurotags and how they support clearer discernment.
- Recognize your protective responses, and tell useful ones apart from unproductive ones.
- See how proprioception shapes the experience of pain.
- Notice how words influence your sense of pain and safety.
- Build a working knowledge of pain terminology so you can think and speak about pain with more clarity.
- Identify danger within you and replace it with safety, using DIM/SIM balance to create new routines and manage your pain.
Building Safety helps you find safety within yourself, so you have a healthy foundation for identifying threats that do not serve you. In Sharpening Discernment, we are using your experiential understanding of safety to replace your overprotective perceptions of danger.
Quieting the Noise explains how sustained stress, anxiety, and fear can amplify pain, and practices you can use to manage these feelings.
1. Pain Basics
I have been blessed with a cornucopia of painful sensations. These blessings haven’t been highlights of my life, but I am thankful for them. As I’m sure you agree, a perpetual state of peace, ease, and joy is preferable to discomfort any day of the week.
Why am I thankful for these feelings? My journey through discomfort helped develop a relationship with pain, showed me how to give it purpose, and transform it into something that helps others.
The first three things I want to teach you about pain are:
- Pain is not always the result of tissue damage.
- Pain is an output, not an input.
- The brain produces pain to protect you.
Education Is Therapy
Education is therapy, because knowledge liberates! Understanding what pain is and how it works helps you predict and manage it in the moment.
I Will Always Believe You When You Say You’re In Pain
Sitting on a thinly padded chair, waiting for your doctor in the treatment room, you glance outside at the leafy tree dancing against the wind. Somewhere in the sky, a few clouds shift. A shaft of sunlight peers in through the window; the stillness of the moment creates a space for you to enjoy a fascinating light show of shadows and shapes on the floor.
At this moment you are in pain; maybe it is an inescapable tightness in your neck or a pulsing burn in your lower back.
It’s a vague sort of pain that seems to move and shift on a whim. You’ve asked your spouse to massage it a few times, but nothing seems to help. Some days it hurts more than others, and even on your worst days you find a way to laugh and smile.
You’ve waited months for this appointment; for weeks you have been looking forward to it, and your spirits are high. If someone were to look into your eyes at this moment, they would see an expression of “I’m about to find out what is wrong with me and get rid of this incessant pain.”
When the door handle clicks and begins to open, you feel equal parts relief and worry. A thousand thoughts pour through your mind, causing you to feel strangely still. Your doctor sits down in their chair and turns toward a computer. Butterflies flutter within your tummy as you wait for them to engage with you.
They ask you some questions, turning to speak at you from time to time; in your nervousness, you try to lift your spirits, maybe finding a reason to laugh or smile.
Somehow, because of something you did or didn’t do- maybe it was because you weren’t crying at their feet, pleading with them for relief- but that day your doctor didn’t believe you were in pain.
I will always believe you when you say you are in pain. You could be dancing, prancing, and singing your favorite song while making jokes all day long, and if you told me you were in ten-level pain, I would believe you.
I will believe you because pain doesn’t have to be the result of an injury. I don’t need to see scars or bruises to believe you, because pain is a personal experience produced from within, and how could I ever assess, as an outside observer, what you are feeling in the moment?
Learn more about discomfort and how not all pain is the same in my Pain Patterns article.
2. Neurotags
Neurotags are networks of brain cells (neurons) that help us assess danger and safety. The two most common types of neurotag are danger (DIMs) and safety (SIMs).
How you respond to your feelings and experiences helps create and shape your neurotags. Learning, repetition, and context form and strengthen them.
3. The Protective Response
Pain is a protector, but sometimes it’s an overprotective parent. When your brain receives information, it weighs the evidence from DIMs and SIMs to decide whether to produce a protective response. If a protective response is created, the brain typically is asking you to do one of three things:
- Investigate the area
- Stop or change what you are doing
- Take action to address the injury
Learn more about the mechanism of pain.
4. Proprioception
Proprioception is an additional sense that serves as your brain’s internal GPS. It maps out where your limbs and joints are in space without requiring direct observation.
When you avoid moving a part of your body, the GPS map of that area becomes blurry, making it difficult to assess credible indicators of safety and threat. Without clear, predictable sensory information from that area, your brain tends to get anxious and default into a protective response.
Sharpening Discernment helps you intentionally rebuild this map so you can move without unnecessary restrictions or discomfort.
5. Somatic Labeling
Somatic labeling helps you remove the emotional charge from the sensations you feel and the words you use. With compassionate guidance, you will learn how to reframe your feelings and perceptions to promote an ongoing state of peace and ease.
You will learn new words and expand your sensory vocabulary so your brain doesn’t default to experiencing pain. This approach helps you assess what is happening in your body more accurately, so you can respond more appropriately to your body’s needs.
6. Pain Terminology
The terms used in pain science do not follow a single rigid taxonomy. Terms can overlap and vary in definition from person to person and source to source. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) provides updated definitions, but these definitions and terms evolve over time, and practitioners tend to use the terminology they were trained with.
Read more about the Pain Terminology you may encounter throughout your pain management journey.
7. DIM/SIM Balance
- DIMs are beneficial when they accurately signal real threats, prompting protective behaviors like rest and avoidance to prevent injury.
- SIMs are beneficial when they accurately signal safety, reducing unnecessary pain, fear, and protective guard to allow normal movement and recovery.
In Sharpening Discernment, you will learn how to identify and manage adaptive and maladaptive DIMs, beneficial and unproductive threat patterns.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Ready to apply these skills in daily life? Pain management coaching offers guided support through Sharpening Discernment and the full Discovering Safety Within approach. Learn more about Pain Management Coaching.
Disclaimer
Information provided on this website, including educational materials, pain neuroscience explanations, treatment suggestions, and any other content shared during sessions, classes, or coaching, is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or medical condition, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
You should always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding any medical concerns. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of information you receive here.
O'Fallon Pain Management
Pain Management at 2717 Hwy K, O’Fallon, MO 63368