Pelvic Pain

What is Pelvic Pain?

Pelvic pain that lasts longer than six months occurs in one in six women and one in ten men. The pain can be highly variable in severity and in its relationship to the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, sexual intercourse, defecating, emptying the bladder, body movement, and the presence of pain or illness elsewhere in the body. 

A number of diseases and structural abnormalities can cause this condition although in some cases an abnormality can be present but not responsible for the pain. This is likely the reason why laparoscopic surgery achieves complete pain relief in less than half of female patients.

When medical evaluation finds no disease or injury, or when treatment measures fail to achieve expected improvement, then it is likely that the brain is involved in generating or contributing to the pain.

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.