Trauma specialist Samira Rajabi candidly shares coping strategies for living with invisible pain including mindset shifts, reducing stigma, and radical presence. Topics cover navigating chronic illness, challenges in professional settings, and strategies for coping and acceptance.
Embracing uncertainties and coexisting with pain can lead to transformative shifts in perspective and response.
Opening up about invisible pain can validate experiences and foster understanding and acceptance.
Accepting pain's impermanence allows for resilience, adaptability, and a shift in our relationship with it.
Deep dives
Redefining Pain
Pain doesn't have to be viewed as solely negative and unbearable. By changing our narrative around pain and accepting its presence, we open up the possibility that it may improve or that we can better cope with it. Embracing uncertainties and learning to coexist with pain, whether visible or invisible, can lead to a transformative shift in our perspective and response towards it.
Visible Invisible Pain
Living with invisible pain poses unique challenges, as it often goes unspoken and unacknowledged. Opening up about invisible pain, either to ourselves or to others, can help validate our experiences and create a space for understanding and acceptance. By making invisible pain more visible, we can navigate it with more ease and compassion.
Navigating Uncertainties
Accepting uncertainties and the impermanence of pain can be liberating. Understanding that pain, whether physical or emotional, is transient and may not be everlasting, allows us to approach it with a sense of resilience and adaptability. Rather than viewing pain as a permanent burden, recognizing the potential for improvement or increased tolerance can lead to a shift in our relationship with it.
Managing Pain Narratives
Changing the way we speak to ourselves about pain can have a significant impact on how we experience it. By verbalizing our pain and addressing it with compassion and self-compassion, we can help retrain our brains to perceive pain signals differently. Adopting a narrative that acknowledges pain as a temporary and manageable part of our experience can assist in soothing the intensity and impact of pain.
Embracing Present Moments
Living a good life involves being fully present in the moments we inhabit. Whether it's sharing space with loved ones, immersing ourselves in the joys and challenges of parenthood, or simply being mindful of our immediate surroundings, embracing the present moment can cultivate a deeper sense of aliveness and connection. By savoring each experience and maintaining a focus on the present, we can enhance the quality and richness of our lives.
Ever felt weighed down by invisible pain or chronic illness nobody else can see? In this powerful conversation, trauma specialist Samira Rajabi gets refreshingly candid about her own decade-long journey navigating conditions like a benign brain tumor, headaches, and hearing loss.
Drawing from her book All My Friends Live in My Computer: Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning, Samira shares coping strategies for the daily struggle of invisible suffering. Discover mindset shifts, tactics for reducing stigma, and insights into radical presence despite inescapable pain.
