Individual Counseling
Phantom Limb
There is a fascinating phenomenon that, for any of you Sci-fi nerds out there, supports the response Morpheus gave to Neo when asked how you could die in the Matrix when it wasn’t real. “The brain makes it real.” The phenomenon we are talking about is phantom limb. Between sixty and eighty percent of people who have had a limb amputated report feeling sensations where that limb used to be. Sadly, most of the time these sensations are quite painful.
For a long time the generally held theory was that nerve endings where the limb had been cut off were sending mixed signals to the brain. Since these nerve endings were no longer functioning properly, the signals being sent were by default interpreted as pain.
However, advances in neuroscience have shown this belief to be false. Actually, many surgeons attempted further surgeries on amputated limbs to clear away the nerves that were supposedly causing problems. But this backfired, and left most patients with painful sensations of two phantom limbs instead of just one.
A recent Grey’s Anatomy episode did a pretty good job of describing some of the therapies that do seem to have efficacy for reducing or eliminating pain, and they all have to do with reprogramming the neural pathways of the brain instead of changing the signals being sent to it. This is yet another example of plasticity, meaning the brain’s remarkable ability to change itself. In the show, Arizona Robbins is struggling to get her life back together after a plane crash leaves her with an amputated leg. Up until now she has had to deal with emotional and psychological pain. All of a sudden, extreme physical pain enters the picture and threatens her ability to operate on patients. It obviously also interferes with her quality of life.
There is a simple method that Owen Hunt shows her to help reduce the pain. In real life this method was created by Vilayanur Ramachandran, and it involves using a mirror box in order to let the person see a limb where the missing limb is. In the show, Arizona takes a long, rectangular mirror so that while she is sitting and looking down she sees her fully functional leg reflected where her other leg was before the amputation, making her brain believe she has two fully functional legs. This artificial feedback technique has shown long-term improvement in some subjects by allowing them to “… ‘move’ the phantom limb or unclench it from potentially painful positions.” (Wikipedia)
Probably the most important takeaway from a therapeutic point of view is that Arizona feels embarrassment during the episode and that she is going crazy for feeling pain where no limb exists. She hides herself away in the bathroom while working with the mirror, not telling her girlfriend what she is doing. This compounds an already difficult situation. Like we said at the start, upwards of eighty percent of people experience the same sensations. New therapies using more complicated technologies are being created that show great promise for reducing the pain so there is no reason to suffer in silence.
Related posts:
- Prepared For Pain Like all other organisms, we are highly motivated by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Unlike most other organisms, pain and pleasure take place for us not just in the physiological sphere but also in the psychological sphere. Actually fMRI scans have shown that our brains interpret emotional pain the same way they interpret physical pain, […]...
- Neuroscience 101 Neurons that fire together wire together and neurons that fire apart wire apart. If you can remember this simple sentence you have a really good anchor to come back to when thinking and talking about neuroscience. What does this mean though? It’s really the sophisticated way of explaining a process that behavioral psychologists have known […]...
- Walk If you know any elderly people you know a favorite diversion is taking walks. Common wisdom for a long time has been that brisk walking is healthy for the body and the mind, and it’s a low impact exercise that just about anyone can do, regardless of physical limitations. New findings in neuroscience are bolstering […]...
- Ostracism It’s better to express your authentic thoughts and feelings and be excluded than to minimize these thoughts and feelings and be accepted. But the fear of social ostracism hangs over a lot of what we do and many unconsciously prefer being included to being themselves. Ostracism really does hurt. The brain apparently interprets rejection just […]...
- Mindful Counseling There is often a dissimilarity in expectations between medical treatment and mental health treatment. One of the reasons is probably because psychology and counseling are more ephemeral. You can’t touch or see psychological ideas. And sometimes improvements happen without anyone really knowing how or why. Erich Fromm wrote about how when people seek medical help […]...
- Emotional Abuse is Real Pain Every child in our culture learns the refrain “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” This statement could not be more false from a psychological point of view and we will make the case that not only is the emotional pain caused from verbal abuse real, but that it […]...
- Mental Health Defining mental health is complicated. Many of us make the mistake of thinking that it is the absence of symptoms of mental illness. It’s easy to see why because the mental health industry is powered by people who can no longer cope with their symptoms on their own and decide to try therapy to alleviate […]...
- Dealing With Emotional Pain When your physical body is injured the pain you feel isn’t the injury itself. The pain is the built in alarm system alerting you to the fact that this or that part of your body is injured. It’s easy to forget this. We usually take our injuries and the pain cued off by them to […]...
- Eye Of The Storm Many are content with yoga as just a great workout when it has the potential to be so much more. The lessons you will learn about yourself and your body can be applied to many other areas of your life. You have to do the work of consciously making the connection though. One way to […]...
- Mindful Eating If you are overweight due to overeating there is a better route than going on a diet. Actually dieting doesn’t work as a long-term solution for weight loss. The majority of people who lose weight by going on a diet end up gaining it back before starting the cycle all over again. One reason why […]...
- Misanthropes It’s our contention that misanthropes aren’t born, they’re made, that their misanthropy is not actually a dislike for humankind but a chosen strategy for reducing psychological and emotional pain. If repeated attempts at connection with various people and inclusion in various groups are rebuffed the resulting distress will come from two primary places. One will […]...
- Panic Attacks I saw a funny poster on Pinterest that reads “Even my anxieties have anxieties.” Actually this is a pretty good way to describe panic attacks. They are often the physical, visible manifestation of deeper existential issues. One of the best ways to eliminate panic attacks from your life is to bring existential anxiety into conscious […]...
- Mental Illness And Causation Let’s imagine a morbid scenario. A man in good health and good spirits is taking his usual afternoon walk through the park on a summer day when he is attacked by an unidentified assailant and stabbed several times. Paramedics are unable to reach the scene in time and he dies. I could argue that he […]...
- The Slow Fade If you’ve dated enough people you’re familiar with the slow fade, either because you’ve used it yourself or had it used on you. From the behavioral psychology point of view the the slow fade utilizes extinction to achieve the desired result, whereas just coming out and saying you want to break up utilizes negative reinforcement. […]...
- Congruence When people talk about difficult past experiences you might notice that they laugh or smile even though what they’re recounting was and still is very painful to them. This is a defense mechanism, a way to try to dampen down or even transform the pain around what happened by making it seem funny or ironic. […]...
- Psychology Of Seeking Revenge Seeking revenge appears to be about righting a past wrong but it’s actually about mitigating a present hurt. Although the events happened back then those hurt feelings are still very much alive right now. And so from the psychological point of view while revenge is almost always consciously rationalized as simple justice, as giving the offending […]...
- Why Grief Is Scary When faced with a situation that elicits grief the concrete loss is obviously scary to confront. No one wants to admit that something or someone they love has slipped through their fingers forever. But there’s a deeper reason grief is scary, and this is that all of the unfinished business from previous losses comes bubbling […]...
- Grounding Exercise For Trauma Traumatic events are bad enough on their own, but for many people things get even worse as they relive those traumas time and time again, what we call PTSD. You could say that PTSD is living in the past, that past events are experienced as viscerally real in the present. Since what we are talking […]...
- Physical Expression of Emotion We recently wrote about the mind-body split that constitutes how many of us in the West see ourselves, where our bodies are something that we have but are not really us. One of the outcomes of this philosophical perspective is that we aren’t very aware of our physical bodies, and are especially unaware of how […]...
- Anxiety And Control When people come to feel helpless in the face of life conditions they perceive as hostile the psychic result is painful anxiety. Anxiety is by its very nature ephemeral, hard to define, hard to pin down, which is probably why many aren’t fully aware of the pressing need, from the events that cue off those […]...
