Chronic Pain and Emotions: Coping With the Anger, Grief and Fear

It’s evening again. The pain was there when you woke up. It was there at work, or on the sofa, or in the car. It’s here now. You’ve mostly stopped mentioning it. People were kind at first. Then they got tired of hearing about it, and so did you.

What you may not say to anyone is how angry you are. At your body. At the appointments that end with “let’s try something else.” At the friend who asked if you’d tried yoga. At yourself, for not being the woman who used to say yes to everything.

And under the anger, if you let yourself look, there is grief. For the walks. The work. The easy Saturday. The version of you who didn’t plan each day around a body.

That’s the emotional side of chronic pain. We want you to hear one thing first: these feelings are not a sign you’re coping badly. They can come with carrying something heavy for a long time. And they are the part you can reach tonight, without waiting for anyone.

Chronic pain and emotions: how are they linked?

Pain and feelings live in the same body, so they meet all the time. A bad pain day can bring fear, anger or tears of its own. You may have noticed your own version of this.

That doesn’t mean your pain is “in your head,” and it doesn’t mean emotions caused it. Your pain is real. It needs the people who look after your body.

What we can speak to is the layer on top. Here is a picture from our book: “Lay two rulers on the table. One is what is happening. The other is how you think it should be happening. The space between them is the suffering.”

With chronic pain, the second ruler may be the body you used to have. The one that didn’t hurt. Every morning the two rulers get laid side by side again. It isn’t wrong to miss that body. But it’s worth asking yourself, gently: how much of today’s weight is the pain, and how much is the war between the two rulers?

The emotional side of chronic pain

Here are some feelings that can travel with long pain. You may know some of them by their place in the body.

Fear. Of the next flare. Of the scan. Of being like this in ten years. The mind is good at building it. “Your body can be lying safely in a warm bed while your mind builds a nightmare about next year. Fear lives in the future. The feeling lives now.”

Guilt and shame. About cancelling again. About needing help. About being, in your own word for it, a burden. If that word lives in you, there’s more in why do I feel like a burden.

Loneliness. Because pain is hard to share. Nobody else can feel it, and after a while you stop trying to explain.

None of these mean you’re broken. Pain doesn’t mean something is missing in you. These are feelings, and feelings are something physical: a tight throat, a stone under the ribs, a heat in the face when someone says “but you look fine.”

Chronic pain, anger and grief

These two deserve their own space.

Anger is easy to swallow. You’re supposed to be grateful, positive, a good patient. So the anger goes underground and comes out sideways: a snappy word to someone who didn’t deserve it, a slammed cupboard, a night of scrolling. In the book we draw one clear line: “Feeling it is allowed. Throwing it at someone is not.” You can let yourself be furious at your body without saying a word to anyone. If anger is the big one for you, read how to release anger stored in the body.

Grief for the life before the pain is real grief, even if nobody has died. You may feel it as a closed throat or a weight in the chest. It “needs tears more than it needs advice.” There is no right timeline for it. “Grief takes the time it takes.”

There’s one trap here we want to name, because we have fallen into it ourselves. It’s feeling something so it will leave. You lie down, you feel the anger or the ache, and part of you is watching the clock: is it gone yet? We know that clock, and in The Feeling Session we called it what it is: “That is not feeling. That is a cleverer way of pushing. The feeling knows the difference.”

So what we’re offering is not a pain technique. It’s a way to stop fighting the feelings that come with the pain.

A minute of not fighting

Lying still for twenty minutes may not be possible on a bad day, and you don’t need to. You can do this sitting, propped on pillows, in whatever position hurts least. Lying down is easier, but “you can do this on a chair, in a car that is parked, on a park bench.”

It’s one minute. If the anger is loudest right now, or the grief, or the fear of tomorrow, let this minute be for that.

Practice1 min

One minute of changing nothing

Say inside: “I’m not changing anything this second.”
One minute of changing nothing.
For everything that comes: “I allow, I allow, I allow.”

You decide how long. If it’s too much, stop. Look around the room, have some water, call a friend.

What you might notice. If the anger comes first, let it be first. If the ache gets louder for a moment, you can keep going, or let the minute end there. If nothing changes, that’s allowed too.

Evenings are often the worst of it, when the pain has had the whole day to wear you down. Lighter is seven of those evenings with us, each one ending in a Feeling Session we guide you through slowly. It isn’t therapy, and it isn’t medical treatment.

On the next bad pain day

One minute before sleep. In whatever position hurts least: “I’m not changing anything this second.”
Find one feeling that isn’t the pain. Anger, sadness, fear, tiredness. Ask where in your body it is. You don’t need a name for it. Just the place.
Question the forecast. When the mind says “this will never get better,” ask yourself whether you know that for certain, tonight.
Let the anger be unfair. You don’t need a good reason to be furious at your body. Feel it. Don’t throw it.
Say how today really was, to one person. Not “I’m fine.”
Keep your appointments and your plan with your doctor. Do this next to them, not in place of them.

If your pain has a name, we have also written about the emotional side of fibromyalgia and emotional causes of back pain, and our body section gathers the feelings that can come with other kinds of pain and illness.

Your body has been carrying a lot, and so have you. Tonight you don’t have to beat it. One minute, a chair or a pillow, and the anger or the grief allowed to be there, as big as it wants.