Your migraine condition took years to reach the pinnacle of an attack. The same goes for miracles: far from always being instantaneous life-changing events, they, too, can take time to develop fully.
Discouragement and despair will con you into believing the lie that this pain is insurmountable, even incurable. All that has happened is that you have run out of ideas on what to do. I promise you – there is an army of competent therapists able to show you how you can reverse what seems to you like a juggernaut of pain.
Let’s face it – as much as they love you, as your family stands by and watches you suffer, they go through a range of emotions from heartbreak to extreme frustration, and nothing they do wipes away the pain. With migraines, you are ‘touchy’ and overly sensitive, with exaggerated reactions to anything. As if your life isn’t already complicated enough suffering migraines, you now have to deal with the emotional fallout from your pain-modified behavior, the guilt, regret, embarrassment, and the emotional wreckage you leave in your wake.
If you now learn new strategies, you will likely feel an improvement. That will supercharge you – you are now a convert and want everyone around you to follow in your footsteps. Your non-migrainous family members aren’t sitting in on the therapy sessions and learning alongside you. They will now be knocked out of their comfort zone by the potential surge in your energy, and their reactions may not be as therapeutic as you would like.
Most of them are not medical professionals trained to deal with convalescent patients, and you will feel their emotions as you adopt a healthier lifestyle. You’ll be sensitive to every change in the dynamics around you. That may distract, delay, or prevent you from working toward pain relief.
You need a champion, someone who has the time to listen to you complain about your head hurting so much, so often, about the roller-coaster ride of days still with migraines – which plunge you into the depths of even worse despair and view you with sober recognition for the manic heights of achieving power over pain.
You need someone who will figuratively hold your hand, keep you on an even keel, help you keep your emotional balance, hear you at your emotional worst and not hold it against you, and act as a sounding board so that in the throes of your pain, you won’t lash out at your nearest and dearest, and who will be the person who lifts you up when you just don’t want to go on.
One of these heroes is a psychotherapist. You may think: “What do I need to see a shrink for?! I’m not crazy!” I beg to differ. You can so easily be crazed by the pain of migraines. While suffering may ennoble some, like most of us, you are probably not at your best – you are cranky, crabby, short-tempered, a doormat – all reactions that might not even be on your radar when you are your pain-free self.
Are those reactions sane? Every single negative emotion will rear its ugly head, and if you have a series of migraines, one after the other, you will understand why this particular type of migraine is called “the suicide headache.” Are those reactions sane?
Have the humility to temporarily or occasionally reach out for help. Not necessarily from someone who expects you to ‘perform’ lifestyle changes, ‘work at’ therapies, ‘demands’ you improve – just someone who helps you recognize – because they have been trained to read your mind and see the changes that you are making – that you are slowly getting out of your cocoon and turning into a butterfly flying free from pain.
