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Migraña TOC Bulimia
7 things you must know to overcome headache
Once upon a time there was a drunkard looking for his keys under a lamppost. A fellow countryman who was passing by went to look for them with him, and after a while he asked him:
- Hey, are you sure you lost them here?
To which the drunk replied:
- No, I’ve lost them over there, but it's too dark to look for them.
It's exactly the same with chronic headaches: you look for the cause where there seems to be more light, in neuroscience, but it's really beyond that.
01
The capacity to feel pain is neurophysiological
We don't know everything about pain, but we do have some certainties. For example, we all agree that the capacity to feel pain is neurophysiological: for a person to feel pain, there has to be a neurophysiological activation; without that activation there is no pain. What we do not agree on is why that capacity is triggered.
There are many different approaches, each with its own why; depending on the approach you choose to treat your headache, you will have a treatment that will have nothing to do with what you would have done if you had chosen another approach
02
The hypothesis of the medical model
For example, the medical model, based on the assumption that every health problem has a biochemical or anatomical substrate, searches the organism for what causes the neurophysiological activation that results in headache pain (genes, peptides, proteins, neurons...). However, when we look at what pain is, it becomes clear that this is an absurd hypothesis.
Pain is the organism's way of inducing us to do something to deal with what it has perceived as dangerous.
For example, if you touch a burning radiator, it wants you to move your hand away because it has perceived that tissue is being destroyed; conversely, if you break your arm, it wants you not to move it so that it can heal.
This means that pain does not exist at all, as something that can spring from a gene, a peptide, a protein or a neuron; it is born of a perception without which it cannot exist.
David Sojo. Terapia Breve Estratégica
De 5 estrellas
Valoración global de 62 opiniones de Google
Ha sido la primera vez que acudo a terapia y la verdad es que la experiencia ha sido muy buena, por su profesionalidad, su amabilidad y su cercanía. Totalmente recomendable, en pocas sesiones se obtienen resultados.
Recomendable. He estado en más terapias con diferentes psicólogos y esta ha sido totalmente diferente. Si esperas una terapia convencional, esta no lo es. No puedo decir que me haya cambiado la vida radicalmente, ni que me hayan desaparecido completamente los Dolores de cabeza. Pero he mejorado tanto en las migrañas como en temas de angustia y ansiedad.... y eso es mucho.
Me acerqué a David con problemas de ansiedad y después de un año de terapia - no ha llegado a diez sesiones - he aprendido a entender y gestionar el problema.Una experiencia muy recomendable.Gracias.
Leí el libro de David Sojo “La migraña se desactiva “ y me ayudó mucho, así que decidí contactar a David en relación a otros problemas. Tenia miedo de iniciar una terapia que durara años antes de obtener resultados. Sin embargo, desde la primera sesión ya he notado una gran mejoría. Lo recomiendo al 100%
Un gran psicologo y lo que es mejor,una gran persona.
Mi experiencia ha sido muy buena 👌. Gracias a la terapia he mejorado y he recuperado mi calidad de vida.
Tras un episodio de ansiedad laboral que me impedía vivir mi vida, no podría haber recibido mejor atención que la de David. Me ha ayudado a volver a retomar mi vida y mi trabajo con ganas. ¡Muchas gracias!
Me ha ayudado mucho, después de 5 años con migrañas, he conseguido aprender a controlarlas gracias a las sesiones.
Cuando acudes por primera vez a terapia no sabes muy bien cómo va a ser, David te ayuda y te guía por el camino a seguir. En 2 sesiones ha conseguido ayudarnos tanto a mí hija, como a nosotros. Gracias por la ayuda David , sin duda buen profesional y muy recomendable.
Desde mi experiencia David es el único psicólogo que me entendió a la primera sin contarme lo mismo de siempre,por fin un profesional que me ayudó a ver las cosas de otra manera!,se implica en ayudarte y así lo sientes .Solo puedo darle las gracias.
Fui con un problema muy concreto y en tan solo cinco sesiones desbloqueé el problema y además, pude solucionar otros que estaba evitando. Gran trato humano de parte de un gran profesional. Como sanitario lo recomiendo sin duda alguna.
David ha conseguido afianzar la confianza en mí misma y en mis capacidades. Su perspectiva en el tratamiento de la migraña me ha parecido sorprendentemente eficaz! No dudes en contactar con él si este tema te tiene desesperad@, porque hay esperanza!!
Desde la primera sesión pude conectar estupendamente con David. Tenía un problema de migraña desesperante y agotador y prácticamente desde la segunda sesión los dolores fueron minorizandose gracias al entendimiento que tuve de la migraña como dolor y no como enfermedad. Las directrices y la forma de tratar la migraña por parte de David me ayudan en mi día a día. Apenas tengo dolores de cabeza, pero de la migraña por suerte ni me acuerdo. Ahora seguimos trabajando en ello y en otras muchas más cosas. Siempre agradecida
He participado de varias sesiones de terapia con David y me ha encantado su enfoque. Después de haber consultado algunas otras opciones, hemos llegado (por recomendación) hasta David y ha sido un gran acierto. Nos ha ayudado muchísimo en un corto periodo de tiempo. David nos ha guiado con consejos muy útiles y esto ha tenido un efecto muy positivo en el tema que nos preocupaba. Sin dudas, recomiendo a David a otras personas que lo requieran.
David es una gran persona y un auténtico crack en su campo. Me ha ayudado mucho a sobrellevar mis problemas de obsesividad/ansiedad y siempre me ha dado las pautas para recuperar mi camino cada vez que me salgo de él… Lo que más destaco de él es su capacidad de ir al origen de problema y tratar de resolverlo con métodos científicamente contrastados. Hace las cosas muy fácil. Ahora me toca continuar con mi camino pero le estoy muy agradecido y trataré de aplicar todo lo que me ha enseñado.
Acudí a David por un problema de ansiedad que me limitaba bastante en aspectos importantes mi vida y que no conseguía solucionar tras otros métodos. Pero gracias a otro enfoque y a las herramientas que me ha descubierto y con las que tengo que practicar, veo con más optimismo la solución al problema.Gracias, David.
Por un problema de salud perdí la confianza en mí. Me volví una persona miedosa y algo hipocondriaca conmigo y con la gente que quiero. Poco a poco y con el apoyo de David, he recuperado la confianza, he empezado a asumir riesgos y he empezado a relativizar muchas cosas. Y sobretodo, he recuperado mi vida y he vuelto a ser YO. Gracias David!!!!❤️
Cercano, atento y excelente profesional. David me ha ayudado a salir del bucle que me tenía atenazada y dado las herramientas necesarias para poder continuar y afrontar el día a día. Muchas gracias David.
03
What is perceiving?
Perceiving is a mental process through which the organism gives meaning to an internal or external event.
Behind every pain there is an opinion, and a gene, a peptide, a protein or a neuron cannot have an opinion. Only a person (with genes, peptides, proteins, neurons...) situated in an environment with which it interacts, can perceive. To think that the nervous system perceives is like thinking that a guitar plays by itself, without anyone playing it.
Having genes, peptides, proteins, neurons... that is, an organism, is necessary to be able to perceive, but it is not enough; because an organism does not perceive by itself as an independent computer, it needs an environment and behavior. Perceiving is necessarily linked to action: there is no action without perception and no perception without action, what Merleau Ponty called motor intentionality. What appears in the person's consciousness, what he feels, is determined by his behavior, not by a peptide.
04
Pain and fear, reasonable similarities
Let's look at how fear, which has many similarities with pain, works:
Fear is our organism's way of inducing us to avoid what it has perceived as dangerous.
The ability to feel fear, like the ability to feel pain, is a neurophysiological ability that we all have. As in pain, the fear response involves genes, neurons, proteins, peptides... but they are not the cause, they are correlates, because fear does not exist at all, either, as something that can sprout from a neuron or a protein; fear is also born from a perception, it is always fear of something.
Its chronification doesn’t depend on a gene, a peptide, a protein or a neuron, it depends on the person's behavior: the more he avoids what he fears, the more the perception of fear increases, and with it the neurophysiological activation and the fear he feels. Conversely, if you face the thing you fear, the perception of danger decreases, and with it the neurophysiological activation and the fear you feel.
05
All heads hurt
It is exactly the same with headaches: it is one thing to have the capacity to feel a headache, which we all have (93% of people have some kind of headache during their lives, Rizzoli et al, 2018), and another to have it become chronic, something that depends on the behavior of the person, on the relationship they establish with the headache; not on neurophysiology, which is the guarantor of the sensation, never the cause.
However, neuroscience twists reality to make it fit its theory, and looks for the origin of chronic headache pain in some structure or process of the organism, leaving aside one of the few certainties we have: all pain has its origin in a perception.
There is not a single proof of disease in the organism of a person with chronic headache (nor will there ever be), and from a logical point of view, it makes no sense; nevertheless, with an eagerness that has much more to do with faith than with science, this path continues to be insisted upon. In the words of Hegel, if the facts do not agree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts.
The history of medical research into headache pain is a long history of confusion between correlates and causes: just because genes, proteins, peptides or neurons are involved in pain does not mean that they are the cause.
It is no coincidence that despite being the most widespread model, it is the least successful: no one has ever overcome migraine with a drug and no one ever will. Because the drug, at best, blocks the neurophysiological activation that triggers the perception, but as it cannot change the perception itself, the headache returns without remedy. The person thinks that thanks to the drug they can manage the outbreaks, when the reality is that due to the drug they are stuck in a loop of headaches, by delegating to the drug a task that only the person can do: change a perception.
06
How do you change perception?
We know that all pain is linked to a perception, and that all perception is irremediably linked to behavior. Therefore, to change perception we must change behavior:
- The essential characteristic of a chronic headache sufferer is that they stop living in the world to focus on their head, and the more attention they pay to it, the more likely they are to get headache pain. In fact, keeping a headache diary is one of the best ways to chronic it. Typically you say: When I don't have a headache I will do such and such, I will go to this or that... and you have to turn it around: you don't have to get over the headache to get your life back, you have to get your life back to get over the headache.
- In particular, you need to pay special attention to how you respond to the headache. When the headache starts, it means that your body has made a threat perception that, depending on how you react, will tend to get worse or go away. If you panic, get nervous or go into a darkened room, you are feeding the threat perception. Conversely, if, as far as the pain allows, you try to remain calm and maintain a certain level of activity (without forcing too much), the perception will tend to subside, and with it the neurophysiological activation and with it the pain. You have to react as if everything is fine, to show your body that there is no threat.
It is no coincidence that there are so many different remedies for headaches (botox, dietary changes, sport, piercing, acupuncture...), which work for some people but not for others.
If one works, how can another totally different one work?, why can't they be systematized for use with all patients,? what do they have in common?
What works is not the remedy itself; it is the fact of doing something different, which by chance and without premeditation, changes the perception in that person, being impossible to replicate it in another, because a perception is a particular opinion of reality.
07
Neuroscience
Few disciplines have not yet fallen into the fashion of justifying themselves through neurons (neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, neuropsychoanalysis, neurorobotics, neuropsychology, neurolinguistics...), because the light radiated by neuroscience and the brain, today covers everything. However, the key to overcoming headaches lies beyond neurons, and beyond neuroscience, which, in this case, far from illuminating, dazzles us with its light.
Based on the knowledge we have today about pain, there is no scientific reason to consider neurology as the right discipline to treat chronic headache. Neurology should deal with the biological problems of the nervous system, with that which is strictly medical (brain hemorrhages, paralysis, cerebral infarcts...), not with that which is felt by the person, because there is no pattern of connection between brain states (what happens in the brain) and mental states (what the person feels), and there will not be because they are different epistemological levels.
For example, the brain areas activated in an experience of pain, in the same person in the same painful stimulus, are not even always the same. Therefore, even if we manage to totally control what happens in the nervous system, we will not control the pain. What appears in the person's consciousness, what they feel, is determined by behavior, not by what happens in the nervous system. Trying to overcome chronic headache by studying neurons is like learning to dance by studying muscle fibers.
Medicine is a model based on physics, in a closed system. An ideal method of analysis for studying things that can be isolated, such as the kidney, the liver or a knee, but inappropriate for studying the brain, because its essential characteristic is the continuous interaction with the environment. Studying migraine by isolating the brain is like studying tidal phenomena by analyzing water molecules, leaving aside the relationship between the Earth and the Moon.
Chronic headache is infinitely more similar to a phobic disorder than to a neuronal disease. In fact, there is no evidence of disease in the organism of a headache sufferer. And just because it is not a disease does not mean that it is not a serious problem; it means that it is a serious problem that requires a different approach.
If you want to know more about this approach, take a look at my blog, the book or write to me.