Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

Yesterday was Mother’s Day and it’s a holiday that I have had a tendency to gloss over until recently. Just over eight years ago, my mother tragically died from a drunken binge that ended with her falling down the stairs and snapping her neck. She had just turned the age of 61.

For the longest time I was very angry about my her death. Ironically, I was just as angry about her life, especially the last few years of it. And I was extremely angry as well about how she treated me especially when she had been drinking. After her death, I played the avoidance game with my feelings about her passing. When the first mother’s day rolled around a few months later, I was extremely active in my sex and love addictions. While I might have often initially played the sympathy card to try to get something I wanted from those I knew, I wasn’t really trying to grieve nor do I remember crying much. There was a part of me that wanted to remain numb to it all.

I spent most of the next six years following her death engaging in the same toxic behaviors and continuing to avoid at all costs having to deal with the suppressed anger and rage surrounding my relationship with her. Every year another Mother’s Day would pass and I acted like I didn’t care. A few years ago though, I started having to face the pain I had shoved deep down about her. In some ways I think my body forced me to face it as the emotional side of me was too shut down. I believe that the trauma from her began to manifest itself instead in my physical body with chronic pain.

Through therapy, prayer, meditation and more, I worked hard to open up and heal all those wounds I had endured from her alcoholism and sicknesses. Today I’m not angry anymore about my mother in any way, shape, or form. Instead, I am beginning to remember the good things, and the good times, that I did spend with her throughout my life. They were always there but the anger kept me from seeing them.

In some sense, this entry is dedicated to my mother who I loved dearly. I know she did the best she could to raise me and I know she loved me as best as she was able to. While there are many memories I try to forget now as I don’t want to live in my painful past, I do want to reflect on some things I remember that I loved most about my mother.

Mom, if you can read this, wherever you are, I want you to know I love you and I miss you. I hope you had a good Mother’s Day this year and are able to see how far I’ve come in my life because of so many of the things you taught me for the better. I know you did the best you could to take care of me, and I know you raised me with the best of intentions. I honor you for that. While you had your faults, so did I. I forgive you for them and ask for your forgiveness for my own. And I look forward to the day that I see you again. I want you to know how much I miss doing things with you. Here are just some of them Mom.

I miss playing cards with you.

I miss watching movies and talking about their plots with you.

I miss going out to dinner to new restaurants with you.

I miss traveling and sightseeing to interesting places with you.

I miss sitting and taking walks on the beach with you.

I miss having ice cream sundaes and cones with you.

I miss your famous Chicken Marsala.

I miss calling and talking to you about the things we were both doing in life.

I miss getting a hug from you.

I miss hearing you play the guitar and the piano.

I miss making you laugh and hearing your laughter.

but most of all…

I just miss you.

Mom, Happy Mother’s Day. You are the best mother I could have ever had and I’m grateful to God for having me be your son. I love you.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

One of the first major medications to become mainstream in this world was penicillin and while it was officially discovered back in the late 1800’s, it didn’t become mainstream in its pill form until the 1950’s. Since then, it seems as if there has been a shift with many people from one of natural healing to one of pill therapy.

Granted penicillin has saved many lives and helped many people since it came into widespread use. Prior to that, I know many people died from something as simple as a scratch or a cut that became infected. While I’m not knocking medications such as that and their effectiveness to elongate a human life, there is a sad reality that is facing our society today because of drugs and medications. People are becoming more and more dependent on them to exist and function throughout any given day.

While penicillin indeed was a major breakthrough in medicine as it’s purpose was to help heal infections, many of the drugs that followed have done no healing at all, and instead, simply have band-aided deeper issues. There are quite a number now of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and anti-pain based medications. None of them heal anything other than to help a person cope with their life and what has been handed to them. And many people get on them today to help with what they are going through but never do the work necessary to aid their body in its healing process and instead choose to stay dependent upon them for the rest of their lives.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my own case with battling chronic pain, depression, and anxiety, I never healed from those conditions when I took any of the vast numbers of prescriptions that doctors prescribed me. In each of those types of medications I took, what I was going through was only suppressed or covered-up. When I’d take them, I might feel slightly better on the level of depression, anxiety or pain I was feeling, but I’d also have to deal with a whole new slew of side effects that my body would have to endure while I was on them. I’m sure most people have seen at least one of those commercials for these types of medications. They show a person hurting on some level and isolating from life before taking some wonder drug. Then it shows the effects of that person after taking the drug with them doing a lot more activities and living life seemingly a whole lot better. As the commercial comes to a close, in a rapid fast forward fashion, a long list of side effects are read off. What’s sad is how many people are becoming dependent on all of these types of medications today and having new health issues be created because of them. Each of them are changing the chemical pathways and productions in the body, but as soon as one ceases to use them, for many, like myself, the symptoms would return.

After a long battle over the years of me going on and off of them again and again like the hills and valleys of a roller coaster, I finally decided it was worth investing time to delve into why they were happening in the first place. Why was I getting depressed and having anxiety attacks all the time. Why did I develop chronic pains all around my body? Doctors would say it was genetic and heredity and that I wasn’t going to be able to function without taking one of those types of drugs. I beg to differ.

Most of the reasons, if not all of them, on why I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain in my life comes from the circumstances of the life I came into and put myself in day after day after day. I was often mentally and emotionally abused as a child. I was sexually molested as well. I did vast amounts of recreational drinking and drugs. I ate terribly for a long time. I put myself in unhealthy friendships with people who continued to use and abuse me. I was often promiscuous. I relied on legal stimulants such as caffeine to exist and a whole lot worse. All of those things made me who I was and dealt me the hand I had to hold.

I think most people don’t really want to face any type of pain whether it’s mental, emotional, or physical. I know I didn’t. I loved medications at first. It was just another way of me running from the deep-seated issues I had within. Until I decided to change myself, until I started to open up pandora’s box from my past, until I started eating better, until I started hanging around healthier people, and until I started living my life with God at its center, I couldn’t function without medications and pills and I continued to fall back into some level of addiction based behaviors.

It’s been over a year now that I haven’t taken any prescription or been acting out in any addiction. I’m trying to cleanse my life of all the poisons I placed within it. I eat as best as I can. I don’t spend time around people who are actively living in darkness through addictions or other clouded paths. I do a lot of writing and work on myself to heal from all the past traumas I’ve gone through. And I start and end my day asking God for guidance, strength, and healing so that I can keep moving forward on my healing path.

So far it’s working. I’m still alive. I’m still free from medications. I’m still functioning on some level. Is it the level I desire to be at? No. But I want to heal completely from what has caused me to get in these pains in the first place. I want to heal from what got me unbalanced to start with. I know it didn’t take me overnight to get here and please don’t take me the wrong way. I’m not against medications especially those that might help a person survive or get back to a reasonable state of functioning. But I’ve learned well enough now that much of the conditions many of us deal with today go back to how we have been living our lives in the first place.

I think it’s important to remember that any medications, drugs, or substances we may have taken to feel better, any abuse we may have endured, any addictions we may have gotten ourselves involved with, any unhealthiness we may have consumed regularly with food or drinks, any toxic people we may have hung around with consistently, or any other behavior we may have done that wasn’t filled with God’s love and light, each could have contributed to us getting sick in our own way.

I’m not sure about anyone else, but I know I don’t want to be sick anymore. I’m doing my best now to heal naturally. I walk through a lot of fear regularly because of it. It’s tough. It really is. But I have a lot more faith in God now that I will make it to the other side of this, free of medications, free of drugs, free of addictions, and free of anything that ever took me off of the path of love and light in the first place.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Sometimes it’s really hard for me to see the positive. Dealing with chronic physical pain quite often will taint the world that I see around me. It’s almost as if when this happens that I’ve put on a pair of clear glasses that have been completely smudged up. The biggest challenge that faces me everyday in the midst of this is to see the bright side of life.

On more days than not, I have wished others could understand how I really feel. From the outside, the only thing they might notice with me is the sadness in my eyes as it’s usually very difficult to place a smile on my face and laugh. All too often people will inquire if I’m ok when they see my somber state. While I know they mean well, it’s what happens during these inquiries that actually leads to an increased level of stress within me and in turn higher physical pain. Most will ask me if I’ve tried this doctor or that doctor, this alternative practice of healing or that alternative practice of healing, this medication or that medication, and some will even come up with their own explanation of what they think it is that I have. Over the past three years since its inception, I have become more of a hypochondriac at times when these people will play medical doctors and give me a diagnosis that they feel I should go look into more. Sadly, all of this does nothing more than further fog up the glasses that get in front of my eyesight.

Until one is faced with dealing in their life with daily, intense, chronic pain, their level of understanding will most likely be at a minimum. There are times I demonstrate to people what it’s like by pinching a part of their body so hard that they are wincing in pain and then I don’t let go. I’ll ask them next what they are thinking about as I’m doing it and 100 percent of the time it’s always the pain. I then finish by explaining what it’s like to function every day with a ton of that type of pain going on within me. Thankfully, this explanation will often help in that understanding.

Because of my own understanding now of what it’s like to endure chronic pain, I have grown to have a deep level of compassion for those who are going through their own levels of it. That in itself is one of the first things that I began to look at with positivity since this all began. I once was a very close-minded, and somewhat ignorant individual who made fun of people who were disabled, injured, handicapped, or for that matter, just different than me. I’m so far from being that person anymore and I’m grateful to God for having allowed me to experience what it is that I have for that reason alone.

Being grateful is just one part though of how I keep on trudging along in all of this. The other is trying to be as positive as possible and looking for the bright side of life, even when it seems too daunting. I pay attention now to flowers popping up out of the ground, to trees budding and blooming, to my partner’s cat purring on my lap or rolling around on the ground in delight, to sun rays descending down through thick clouds, to friends calling me or e-mailing me out of the clear blue just to say hi, to good samaritans who do random acts of kindness for me or others, to warm embraces by my partner, to rainbows that appear out of nowhere, and to so much more. It’s these little things that make the big differences in my life and help me to keep going forward, one day at a time.

While I don’t know how long I’m meant to endure this, nor do I really understand God’s long term plans for me at this time, I at least can continue to do my best to look for the positive. Even in the worst of storms I have found there is great beauty. I just have to look for it. There is good in everything and everybody. I see that a lot clearer now. But even better, I know at some point, God willing, I will be able to see the bright side of life free of all hinderances including from those smudge-filled glasses.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson