There are a growing number of scientific articles on stress and pelvic pain syndromes. 

There have been a growing number of articles appearing in the major journals like the Journal of Urology and World Urology that point out the significant association between stress and prostatitis and related pelvic pain syndromes. This is a new phenomenon because, in the past, urology has largely been uninterested in the psychological aspects that are related to chronic pelvic pain syndromes.

What does psychological support for those with pelvic pain syndromes mean?

In an article written recently in the January/February edition of Rev Med Brux, (Rev Med Brux. 2013 Jan-Feb;34(1):29-37), a Belgian medical journal, the authors, Issa, Roumeguere and Bossche, talk about the essential role of psychological support: “the role of psychological support remains essential.” This kind of discussion about chronic pelvic pain syndromes and their proper treatment is new in medical discourse.

Unfortunately, even though the role of stress is finally being acknowledged after many years of being completely ignored, the understanding of the psychophysical relationship between stress and pelvic pain and prostatitis is not well understood. To talk about psychological support for those suffering from chronic pelvic pain syndromes misses the point if you have an interest in offering any substantial help to these people.

Conventional psychological support does very little for pelvic pain.

Psychological support in the conventional sense of a psychologist/counselor who offers insights and cognitive strategies to deal with dysfunctional thinking, in my view, does very little to help those who have chronic pelvic pain syndromes. In my experience, a psychologist/counselor can spend a day with people who have chronic pelvic pain, give them the experience of being heard, and deal with their cognitive distortions, and it will make very little difference to their symptoms or to their life. I say this as a psychologist who has been in practice for 40 years and who has done tens of thousands of hours of psychotherapy and who had chronic pelvic pain himself for many years. Psychological support in the normally understood sense is NOT significant in helping the stress component of chronic pelvic pain syndromes, prostatitis, pelvic floor dysfunction, interstitial cystitis, etc.

It is the basic fear that the pain will never go away that drives the psychological component of these disorders.

Lack of psychological support is not the problem that needs to be solved for people who have chronic pelvic pain syndromes. Offering support without giving them the tools to reduce their pain, in my many years of experience, does essentially nothing to help. When you have aching, burning tightness in the area of your pelvis and genitals and you have pain with sex and you cannot sit down, these symptoms fundamentally impair your life. They impair the basic building blocks of life – of urination, of defecation, of orgasm, of being able to sit and sometimes even being able to stand. Reassurances and psychological support alone will do little to help these symptoms.

Empowering the patient to reduce his or her own pain is the best psychological support you can offer.

What calms anxiety and catastrophic thinking is the experience of being able to reduce your own pain yourself. When you are able to put a finger on your own pain, or put an instrument on your own pain, and work on it, this is life-changing. This is essentially the antidote to the thought that the pain will never go away. This also increases your quality of life.

Data from our Internal Trigger Point Wand Study

In another essay in this blog, I have discussed the essential unhelpfulness of psychological intervention in which the patient is not empowered to help and release his own symptoms. During the years of the clinical trial for our Internal Trigger Point Wand, we saw that emotional distress is directly related to the reduction of symptoms. When people’s symptoms do not get better, their emotional distress generally does not get better, unless they have glimpses of their ability to reduce their own pain themselves.

While our study did not distinguish between cause and effect and which came first, it is my observation that what comes first is the ability to reduce symptoms, leading to or causing a reduction in emotional distress and anxiety. This positively feeds into the reduction of the pain and psychological distress. If tension, anxiety, pain, and protective guarding is a description of the downward cycle which perpetuates chronic pelvic pain syndromes, then the ability to reduce your own pain increases empowerment. You will be entered into a new self-feeding cycle of emotionally feeling better, physically feeling better, emotionally feeling better, physically feeling better.

What is real psychological support – what does that really mean?

Simple manipulation of thinking through cognitive therapy strategies is not very helpful. The core catastrophic thought that triggers emotional distress in folks with pelvic pain is, “I am never going to get better and I am doomed to never be able to relax and have any kind of quality of life.” Yes, that is the villainous thought. Simply identifying it without being able to reduce the pelvic pain symptoms does very little. Simply intervening with words in an attempt to stop cognitive distortion has little traction.

Learning how to be “off” as a stress reduction strategy.

Stress reduction in general, and in pelvic pain syndromes including prostatitis in particular, requires learning how to be “off” rather than “on”. In our experience, working with many people with pelvic pain over the years, the major help that is offered by our behavioral psychological intervention has to do with teaching someone to cease efforting. The deepest relaxation occurs when all of the muscles are “off” and there is no guarding or protecting against something bad happening. My teacher, Edmund Jacobson, who taught me relaxation said, “Turn the power off,” which was his way of guiding me toward becoming effortless.

Being “on”.

We all know what it means to have to be “on”. Being “on” means that I have to be ready to respond to others. I cannot just drop my guard or take my attention off of being responsive. When you are in the work mode, and often when you are not in the work mode, you are always ready to respond, always ready to kick in. Being “off,” sort of like being “off duty,” means that you do not have to be watching the environment to be responsive to it. It means being able to let your attention come into yourself and not have to be out in the world, responding and adjusting to the changing conditions of the world.

When I do a pelvic pain clinic I am “on” for 5 days. From the beginning of the clinic to the end of the clinic I am there responsive to other people. I cannot just wander off by myself, being in my own thoughts, being in my own body, being in my own experience. My attention is out in the clinic, responding to the needs of others and to the environment.

Being “off” means your nervous system can heal and regroup.

When the clinic is over, I usually feel exhilarated and I typically utter a sigh of relief. My life is my own again. I am not “on” anymore. I can be “off duty.” We ask people in our clinic to do Paradoxical Relaxation – which means that you must be “off”. This is the reason why we ask parents to ask their spouse to take care of their children, to turn their phone off, to keep pets away, so they do not attend to anything in their environment outside of the instructions that allow them to release their guarding. Creating a space for an hour or an hour and a half to be “off duty” allows the muscles to rest and the nervous system to down-regulate or calm down. And giving yourself the space to be “off” is all important in giving the nervous system an opportunity to down-regulate.

Anger and the response of the pelvic floor.

When you become sensitive to what is going on in your pelvis, you will often notice how the pelvic muscles tighten up and become more irritated and painful when you are anxious, stressed or pushed in some way. A dramatic example of this is something we discussed in our book, A Headache in the Pelvis. A middle-aged woman was seeing a colleague of ours who was an experienced physical therapist in New York. While our colleague had her finger inside the woman’s vagina doing Trigger Point Release, this woman started talking about something that was going on politically that she had a very strong reaction to. As she spoke about this politician she hated, the muscles in the woman’s pelvic floor began to tighten around our colleague’s fingers and our colleague reported that she was afraid that her fingers were going to be crushed. Now, this is particularly unusual because the pelvic muscles of a middle-aged woman are not known to be particularly strong. However, the physical reaction in the pelvis, which was part of her angry response, was unmistakable and dramatic. When our colleague said to her patient, “Can you feel what is going on in your pelvis as you are talking about the politician that you hate?” the woman said, “Feel what?” She was not aware of it at all.

The pelvic muscles tend to overreact to stress in those who have pelvic pain.

The pelvic muscles in those with chronic pelvic pain tend to tighten up to stressful events. While there has been very little or no research has been done on this, it has been my own personal and professional experience that people who have pelvic pain become sensitive to the tissue down there and see a close connection between pain and stress. Some people experience it remarkably strongly and clearly, and actually, that experience of the direct connection between stress and increased pain is a blessing because it makes a concept a clear experience. It validates the fact that there is a psychophysical one.

In muscle based prostatitis, pelvic floor dysfunction and other pelvic pain syndromes, the most effective stress reduction empowers patients to reduce their own pain. Paradoxical Relaxation is the practice of effortlessness, of letting go. While interpersonal support is mildly helpful, it does not go very far. I often say to patients, “My reassurance will probably last about 10 minutes and then you will get back into your scary thinking.”

Effectively dealing with stress related to pelvic pain is giving patients the tools to be able to turn “off” their own fearful contracted pelvic reaction regularly. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teaching a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Reassurance and interpersonal support may help for a small amount of time. On the other hand, giving someone the ability to reduce pain and, in the psychological domain, reduce fearful guarding, gives a person a lifelong ability to manage stress and release themselves from the effect of pelvic pain.