Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia consists of widespread muscle pain and tenderness often accompanied by fatigue and altered sleep, memory, and mood.  However, even though the symptoms are quite real, there is no evidence they are caused by disease or injury.  When auto-immune disease, hormonal disorders and peripheral nerve conditions have been ruled out by standard medical evaluations, and when the diagnosis of fibromyalgia is confirmed, then it is most likely that the brain is involved in generating or contributing to the symptoms. 

Why would the brain do this? Nearly always, one or more types of stress is involved even if this is not fully recognized at first.  These include:

1. Adverse Childhood Experiences and their long-term impact including:

   a. Stressful personality traits such as focusing too much on the needs of others, excessive self-criticism, perfectionism, lack of assertiveness and many others.

   b. Unrecognized negative emotions such as anger, fear, shame, grief, or guilt.

   c. Triggers including people, situations or events that remind you of stressful situations.

2. Current life stresses

3. Depression, Anxiety or Post-Traumatic Stress

The good news is that all these sources of stress can be successfully diagnosed and treated.

To learn more about whether you might have these issues, try taking the self-diagnostic quiz below. It has 12 ‘Yes or No’ questions. The more questions to which you answer ‘Yes’, the more likely it is that the resources on this website will help you.