I’ve discussed in previous articles the idea that emotional history can be a significant factor with chronic migraines. That’s not to, in any way, ignore the relevance of medical factors that could also be happening. For some, medication is very helpful with 
combating chronic migraines and headaches. However, for many chronic migraine sufferers, medical treatments often provide only moderate to sometimes very little help.
Triggers aren’t always clear
Migraine sufferers often are able to identify concrete triggers for migraines — such as certain foods, weather, hormonal shifts, physical exertion, muscle tension, and others. But even when these types of triggers are identified and managed (or altogether eliminated), it’s often only part of the picture. Migraine sufferers can lower the frequency of occurrences by identifying these concrete triggers, but many still suffer from migraine attacks anyway.
This is where emotional history often becomes more relevant. There are many possibilities for how emotions can translate into migraines — and for each person it works differently. For some it can be chronic overwhelming levels of stress, or it can be depression, obsessive thinking, overwhelming anxiety, emotional volatility, different types of dissociation, previous traumas of different kinds, etc.
Chronic pain can be expressing what the body is storing
Migraines, and other forms of non-organic chronic pain can be a ‘silent voice’ for something. For many migraines sufferers, the 
migraine environment is formed at a young age. The idea of the ‘silent voice’ is that migraines can at times be articulating emotional experiences in our history that haven’t yet been worked through or released.
Consider the idea that we all carry our emotional pasts in some way, on an unconscious level. We live experiences and collect them, and our brains continue to adjust based on these experiences, even if we’re not conscious of making these adjustments.
The impact of old experiences
For example, if growing up you knew that you would be spanked for questioning your parents, you might recoil in fear when questioning them. Even if they weren’t go to spank you this particular time, you might have found yourself still pulling back or recoiling in fear simply because you questioned them. This recoil is your brain making an unconscious adjustment to your surrounding environment. With experiences like this, they can also carry into the present where you might find yourself having a reaction of some sort when asking an authoritative figure a question or expressing a disagreeable opinion.
However, at times, we end up taking in experiences that are beyond our ability to consciously comprehend. For example, seeing your parents argue as a young child, or a collection of small traumas, or larger scale traumas, or anything that can be experienced as too threatening, or too difficult (emotionally) to turn into conscious thought. Consider a child who is constantly living in fear of an abusive parent, or someone who is bullied. We constantly react and respond to the fear with internal and external adjustments (ruminations, observing, planning escapes, hypervigilance, etc.). And sometimes, situations are too much to bear, and we completely dissociate from them…pushing those painful experiences off to the side.
How trauma impacts our body, even if not conscious
As we continue to live our lives, these types of events build up. The experiences start out as raw emotion — for example, anger. If anger feels like an unacceptable emotion to us, we may cover it up by smiling, or being more nice — in some way not allowing 
ourselves to actually experience the emotions that are too overwhelming or threatening. Though we experience the anger on an unconscious level, it hasn’t necessarily come into full awareness because sometimes the conscious thought would be too threatening, or we possibly don’t have the capacity to translate the experience into thought because it was too removed from the world we know (for example, witnessing a murder is so far removed from someone’s functioning world that there is no capacity to make emotional sense of it. It becomes a significant trauma).
These experiences all leave marks and carry unconscious, disconnected, and unspoken emotion. The pain and suffering from these experiences haven’t found a voice. What often ends up happening is some sort of physiological manifestation since the mind becomes unable to hold the burden. And often this becomes chronic, repeating when the old held emotions become triggered for one reason or another. (This is a big part of what we work to understand and release in our therapy together).
Essentially, the migraines end up doing the talking.
Resolving and releasing
Being able to bring what is stored in the body into consciousness, finding the voice to consciously articulate and connect these internal (and external) experiences becomes a key component in resolving and releasing these raw experiences that people carry within them. This is where psychotherapy can make a significant difference. Having this knowledge of our patterns, and bringing in a new relational environment (how someone responds and relates to us) can create changes in our physiological responses as we rewire the brain away from these chronic triggers. The more we can rid ourselves from these emotional burdens, the more we reduce the frequency and severity of chronic headaches and migraines. If you’d like to explore the crossover between chronic migraines and your emotional history, contact me to discuss your situation.
