I got my sister high: another story about context and pain

It was my first day of a 4-day trek in the Colombian jungle. I'm high on life (I promise, just life) and taking it all in gleefully. Every few miles or so we'd stop with our guide at small cabins selling snacks and water. We stopped at one, about 5 miles in, that had these amazing cocoa bean/coconut/honey/almond bars. I tried one and was immediately obsessed, vowing to buy plenty more on my way back down the trail on day 4. (I have a thing with hoarding snacks).

Day 4 arrives, and we stop back at the same snack post. I have my large ziplock bag ready to go and I fill it with the 12 bars that are displayed. I see a bag twist-tied on the table with more of the same bars, and I'm thinking, "I might as well fill up my whole bag!" I'm fully drinking the Kool-aid of my Colombian experience. So I ask the saleswoman if I can buy more and point to the back up bag. She said, "No no those are special bars. But I have more of the regular ones." We agreed that I didn't want the special bars and she brought out a bag of backups from behind the counter. I filled my ziplock bag with 6 more bars.

Fast forward -- I left the jungle, met my sister, Hania, in Medellin where we spent a week together, during which I gave her one of my highly coveted bars. She saved it in her bag, we flew home our separate ways, and the next day I got a text from her saying she tried a couple of bites before starting her work shift (she's a trainer at LifeTime in D.C.) and approved of it.

Two hours later I got a text from my mom . . . "Alia, how did you feel after eating that chocolate in Colombia?" I had zero idea what Mom was talking about. I didn't even tell her about the bars I bought. I thought she might have read something online about drug trafficking and was overreacting 😆. I made a joke, but she wasn't having it. She texted again, "Call me."

I found out that Hania had called Mom slightly panicked because she was suddenly not feeling well. Between Mom and myself, we figured out that she was high. Really high. I couldn't help but bust out laughing -- but it wasn't so funny for Hania. Because here's the kicker. My 33-year-old sister is a proud abstainer of drugs, alcohol and caffeine. She has never consumed a mind-altering substance save the cup of coffee she tried with me in Guatemala last year. The current experience also happened via an edible which meant it took an hour for it to kick into her system -- she had completely forgotten about the bar by the time it hit her, not to mention she had no reason to believe there was weed in the bar! So she clearly didn't put the two together.

When I called her, she was in the office of her gym, head down on the desk, completely confused and scared.

Imagine being in her shoes. These are her words describing how she felt: "Really spacey, a little dizzy, unbalanced, a slight tingling in my forehead that spread to my face and even down to my toes. I felt dissociated from conversations I was having. I was forgetting everything that happened more than 5 seconds ago. My mouth was parched. And my heart was racing randomly."

Wouldn't that be terrifying if you had NO CONTEXT for what you were feeling?? Wouldn't you think you were about to die??

Now, imagine that you're a regular marijuana consumer and you knowingly ate an edible. Feeling spacey is the moment you know it's finally kicked in, and you relax into it. You feel happily woozy and being unbalanced doesn't phase you. You welcome the warm tingly feelings and hope they spread across your whole body. You're forgetting conversations but you're not worried about it, it's part of the fun.

You experience the same exact sensations as what Hania did, but you have a different reaction to them. Your brain output is not fear. It's pleasure.

Why? Because you know you're safe.​
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It "hurts so good" -- how my sister's experience applies to pain

​I harp on words to describe our sensations a lot because words help us bring unconscious processes into conscious awareness. Words we use to label sensations in our bodies are objective descriptors such as sharp, spreading, throbbing, stretching, warm, etc. However words like happy, hungry, love, angry, hurt . . . and pain -- those are all judgments we make based on the descriptors. This happens largely unconsciously throughout the day, but when we choose to dissect the process consciously, we have an opportunity to dissociate the judgment from the sensations. This is the process of re-wiring the brain, or unlearning and learning. Why would you want to engage in this process?

Because we know that chronic pain is learned -- which means it can be un-learned.

You've heard the phrase "Hurts so good" right? It's when something hurts but we actually enjoy it, or at the very least, we're not afraid of it. The most obvious example would be a deep tissue massage. If you've ever had a deep tissue massage or heard someone talking about it, you know that it's very intense with plenty of groaning and wincing involved. Imagine you've never had a massage before, nor any idea of what it was. You lay on a table, practically naked, and have a person dig, prod, push, and poke you with all their strength. Wouldn't that feel like torture? You might expect to be bruised the next day or afraid you couldn't walk, and you would never choose to go back. Yet, people pay a lot of money to have this done to them regularly for 60-90 minutes at a time. Why? Again, because they know they are safe. Society and wellness tell us massages are good for us, and the more it hurts, the better it is for you. So we give in to it, we know it's temporary, and we tend to feel better afterward. There's more context and the context all points to -- it's safe.

A personal example

I was doing my favorite outer hip stretch after a run a few days ago. I decided to close my eyes and choose the words to describe the sensations I was feeling. You may be shocked to hear the first two words that came to mind . . . throbbing and burning. Those were the objective sensations of that very deep stretch, and guess what? It felt soooo good in my body! The throbbing and burning were components of what made it feel productive. If I were walking home from work and I started to feel the same throbbing and burning sensations in my legs, I would be quite nervous. The contexts are different. But . . . the sensations are the same.

How does this help us in practice?

We can use our attunement to the actual sensations, without judgment, to down-regulate the fear and panic cycle that often accompanies us when we feel something painful. Slowly, your brain might have the opportunity to unlearn parts of the pain cycle and learn new and better ones.

To be clear, I'm not saying that you can force yourself to magically get rid of your pain this way or to forcibly make something feel pleasurable when it's not. But our panicky spiraling thoughts in those moments of pain actually contribute to making our pain worse (there's plenty of research on this). They also contribute to the process of making pain a learned habit. Every time you feel a certain set of sensations, your brain has learned to immediately conclude, "pain." But what if the "throbbing" you were feeling was just that - "throbbing"? With no immediate conclusion of what throbbing must mean, your brain has an opportunity to explore other conclusions. You may discover that sometimes, throbbing can exist without being threatening. If your system doesn't feel threatened, you're less likely to feel pain.

The more non-threatening experiences you have with various sensations in your body, the more valuable that "data" becomes for your brain -- your brain will literally prioritize those experiences when formulating new conclusions about what meaning these sensations have.

Side note: in case you're wondering what happened with those bars, I believe the saleswoman at the snack shack in Colombia accidentally mixed up her back-up bags of "special" bars and normal ones, because they look exactly the same. I have 17 bars left, and I believe 5 of them are special . . .