Psychosomatics Of Migraine. Cervical Migraine

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Beginning(Psychosomatics of "simple" migraine, no aura)

Cervical migraine is one of the most common types of migraines. As in the previous article, we will not dwell on the description of its symptoms, but rather consider the psychological components of this issue. This is important because, in contrast to the "simple" migraine related to situational psychosomatics, cervical migraine is closely related to the psychophysiological characteristics of a person, his personality structure. At the same time, like a "simple" migraine, cervical also can be of different types. From a medical point of view, this is due to two main areas, where the problem can be associated with both the pathology of the ligaments and the spine itself, and the pathology of the muscular corset.

This type of migraine is, in a certain sense, chronic, and as in working with true psychosomatic pathology, the main direction here may be to improve the quality of life, reduce the frequency and degree of pain, learn to cope with cause and effect, etc. However, it is important to understand that psychotherapy will not give the client a new spine and new muscles, and a lot will depend on diet, sports, sleep and rest patterns, etc.

At the same time, the psychosomatics of cervical migraine lies in the fact that those character traits that are present in the client to a large extent affect the launch and resolution of each of the attacks. By analyzing the cases and using the observation diary, we see that the client's behavior changes before the onset of the headaches. Some fall into a state of helplessness, despondency, they do not see prospects in specific areas of life, they do not feel confident that they are doing a necessary and useful business, what they have created seems to them to be complete nonsense, stupidity and meaninglessness. The imbalance of serotonin leads them to excessive consumption of sweets, muscle weakness and sub-depressive state. Then comes the turn of the attack and treatment, during which there is a kind of reboot of the system, internal resources are activated, clients "pull themselves together" and after the attack passes (usually in a few days), they feel an uplift, a surge of energy, self-confidence and the desire to act. Psychotherapy helps such people to move the phase of "self-confidence" (gives the skills of introspection and self-healing) in the pre-migraine period, thereby not leading to it. The more the client practices self-improvement, the shorter and less frequent the attacks become.

At the same time, they note that the distance of days without pain increases, and when clients feel the onset of another attack, they begin to use introspection techniques and, with a successful study of the case, instead of 2-3 days, the attack may pass on the same day when it began, or not start altogether. The presence of such dependence is also confirmed by the fact that often when clients notice and get used to the fact that the attacks have become easier, they believe that the disease has passed, they stop observing the prescribed "therapeutic regimen" and the attacks return again. This is due to the fact that cervical migraine directly depends on the constitutional characteristics of a person, which cannot be changed, but can only be maintained in a given tone, with the help of psycho and physiotherapy.

Other clients suffering from cervical migraine, on the contrary, show excessive rigidity, self-confidence, they note that in the "pre-migraine" period they become too fixated on some goal, life loses its color and everything is seen from black and white positions "good or bad", "right-wrong", etc. This type of migraine is more common for men, because associated with such personality traits as the desire to control and dominate everything. Such people even tell the psychotherapist that "they understand that they are wrong, but some force makes them insist on their point of view, and the brain, as if playing along, easily picks up manipulative arguments and arguments for being right."

Balance is difficult for them. Even when they are engaged in physical rehabilitation, it is excessive zeal that can lead to the physiological prerequisites for the development of a migraine attack. They also show difficulties in stopping in time, stepping aside, and often migraine attacks unfold when some obstacles constantly arise on the way to achieving the goal. Instead of revising the goal, strategy and additional variables, they go ahead, the obstacles become more - the tension increases.

At the same time, the neck can make itself felt obviously - by an accidental unsuccessful turn, incorrect load distribution, or maybe imperceptibly, as, for example, one of my clients "rolled" her neck exclusively in a dream on an orthopedic mattress, with a "correct" pillow, and the other noted that it seemed to be stretching it out in a draft, which seems to be absent, but once it stretches, it means that it is somewhere;).

For such clients, psychotherapy primarily helps to choose their own personal, individual "therapeutic regimen", which must be followed in the future to maintain a "healthy" state and stop seizures in the initial stage. It is important to understand that those behavioral patterns that bring a person to an attack are not associated with some random stressful event, but with the psychological difficulties of interaction that have been dragging on the client all his life, from child-parental problems to maladjustment problems. In childhood, this manifests itself in different stories, for example, some clients say that they were "friends with both nibblers and nerds", which on the one hand can be seen as skills to easily establish contacts. On the other hand, in combination with additional information, this often indicates that the child all the time had to "play" some roles, adjust, confirm his need and importance, be convenient for everyone, etc. And vice versa, some clients choose a leader's behavior model because they could not find their place in the team, were outsiders until a certain period, they constantly had to put a lot of effort in order to attract attention and prove something. Probably because their present state is often associated with rigidity, excessiveness and hypertrophied "I". The task of psychotherapy is not just to reveal this, but also to make out which behavioral models for a particular person are constructive and which are destructive, and how to turn the latter to one side.

If a person belongs to a different constitutional type, but he also has pain in the neck, most often the neuropathologist diagnoses tension headache, which is associated with muscle spasm and is not "chronic". As in the previous case, the observation diary helps to identify all the patterns.