Creative Engineering

I haven’t posted anything for months, but I feel very strongly about an experience I had yesterday and I want to tell you about it. This is a story involving a person who had been feeling extremely strong pain for months and months, and myself.

At first glance this post will look like it’s rather unrelated to what I have posted about before. In fact, it’s about the human mind and about how it works, and about how it changes.

Please understand that I have to suppress a lot of details and slightly warp the story to protect the identity of that person. I just flipped a coin to determine that I’ll be presenting that person as male, and I’ll call him Chris. I don’t know any person called Chris, so I guess that’s okay.

So Chris had been trying everything he could find. Pain medication, stronger pain medication, elaborate diagnostics, alternative approaches to healing, everything. All doctors pretty much agreed that there was no physiological basis for the pain. Chris found that hard to accept, because that had to mean that it’s a psychosomatic thing; a signal from the body that things aren’t going right… a signal that change needs to happen. Still, he started looking into psychotherapy. A few attempts had no real effect; at some point he found a therapist who could indeed help him reduce the pain for a while (in exchange for a lot of money, of course). A permanent solution wasn’t in sight, though. The last thing he tried was an inpatient therapy, during which on some days he actually felt really good… but there wasn’t any method to it. The pain would keep on coming back.

Then we met, and we talked about it. Read the full post »