Anyone else experience emotional pain as physical pain?

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While I haven't experienced this I can understand exactly what you mean.

What else is emotional pain but physical pain?

My investigations lead me to believe that emotions manifest in the body, but their cause isn't physical. For example, compare these examples. 1. Someone slaps you, and you feel it. 2. Someone calls you something and it hurts you.

Also, being slapped, is likely to cause some emotional response as well. Stubbing your toe is usually accompanied by an anger response, feeling stupid or something.

I think that's the reason they get confused.

Yes. I think strong emotions can trigger our bodies to release certain chemicals which we can taste in our mouths or feel roiling around in our stomachs and affecting different body parts. Strong emotion can also cause us to do things unconsciously with our muscles that hurt, like clenching our jaws.

Mind and body aren't separate. Thoughts and feelings manifest all over our bodies and sometimes that hurts.

For about a year, I went to a massage therapist. The first time she worked on my upper back I started crying and didn't know why. I didn't have any recent sad experiences. She found this entirely normal. She explained that it's pretty common for people to feel "stored emotion" when a therpist unclenches a long-clenched muscle. It sounds like New Age hooey but I did feel it. Apparently it's something like muscle memory. If you unconsciously hunch when upset to the point of causing chronic physical pain in certain muscles, then the unclenching of those muscles sends some sort of message to the brain that "this feeling in the muscles=upset" which means crying for no apparent reason when that muscle tension is suddenly released.

Long story short, emotional pain=physical pain very often.

Yes, too much emotional stress and no emotional support system is the reason why I am ill today, it triggered FS, IC and HS.

And yes, I experience a great deal of physical pain acutely everyday with Fibromyalga, Interstitial Cystitis and Hunner Syndrome.

It really hurts to be touched, there's a term for that, I can't remember at this time.

I don't have a whole lot of emotional stress at this time, that was actually years ago, but it's like there is a pain switch that is flipped on and now it won't turn off.

The modern meaning may not be literal but the etymology likely is related to literal sensations. I mean, there's the whole idea that emotions come from the "heart" rather than the mind and that instinct is tied to the "gut". I don't think these anatomical references were just chosen at random for idiomatic use. There is a logic to most sayings if you look deep enough. Before people had a scientific understanding of the functions of the human anatomy it would make perfect sense to interpret emotions as originating in the chest area since that is where physical sensations associated with strong emotions mostly occur.

Also, I haven't looked them all up, but I'm pretty sure most of the idioms you listed have some kind of literal reference in their etymology.

acetaminophen is a pain killer? more like a liver killer that does very little for pain...though I agree pain killers can help with emotional/psychological pain. Just not that one.

I sometimes feel physical pain from depression, it will literally be painful to do anything....and then people think I'm lazy or wonder why I move slow sometimes and its because of the physical pain associated. Its kind of hard to explain but I'll just feel kind of sensative so if someone randomly touches me it will actually hurt and I just have kind of a feeling of soreness all over which can be quite annoying when there is no physical cause. hmm why I never bring up these things in counseling....I really should.

I know what you mean. I don't have it quite as bad now that I've changed and upped my dosage of anti-depressant medication. The past 3 years or so though I've often felt depressed for no reason and there was a physical feel to it, almost like being on the verge of coming down with the flu. Vague aches and chills all over, like cold water in my bones, and an overpowering tiredness and lack of motivation. That and there was a fuzzy/heavy feeling in the front of my head, like my brain has been turned to mush.

Yeah I am sort of afraid to try more anti depressants.....I mean last time I had a bad reaction because it felt like it was taking away everything that was left of me. I mean as bad as the pain can be sometimes its the only thing I can feel so what's left if the only thing I can still feel is taken. But yeah I usually drink or smoke cannabis when it gets too bad because those allow temporarily get rid of the pain and replace it with other feelings.....the anti depressants just reduced the pain but left me with nothing else which caused me to freak out and become overly emotional.

I'm more the opposite. I usually notice I'm emotionally messed up before I see the reason is that I'm in serious physical pain. (By serious, I mean I can be this oblivious even to 8/10 pain. I can be totally nonfunctional, it's completely dominating my senses, etc., and be unable to think, and have messed up emotions, and not know that it's physical pain I'm in. Even if I'm writhing on the floor. My first assumption is always that I'm just emotionally weak or something and can't stop my body from doing these things. Often someone else has to tell me I'm in physical pain because I don't understand my body enough to notice. Part of this is because I've had severe pain conditions my whole life, part of it's because of terrible body awareness,, part of it's conditioning by the psych system to see everything as psychological (even if it's physical and life-threatening), etc.)

I also have fibromyalgia so after a big emotional outburst I will be in pain, sometimes, for weeks. I can also end up extremely fatigued but that is flighty. I've had a few instances of extreme emotional pain causing actual physical pain - heartbreak actually feeling like a heart attack with chest pain and numbness down my arm and up into my neck, periods of hard crying causing migraine like pain that wouldn't subside for days.

Did your fibromyalgia start out of the blue with no significant precursor, or was there an unusually stressful time or event that occured about the time you developed it?

Began with a deep two year depression after the death of my mother. Been lugging this beast on my back for 17 years...

Sorry to hear that, I was diagnosed with it about five years and sleep seems like the only refuge for me. An extremely stressful event started mine about 5 years ago, I've always felt that there is some kind of emotional connection with the condition. At least people understand it is real now.

I hear that! I had so many doctors essentially tell me I was 'just getting older, aches and pains are normal'. They must have tested me for lupus and lyme's eight times. I finally broke the cycling debilitating pain with more pain. I got myself a physically active job. Staying active is supposed to help - and it does - sort of. I traded periodic crippling pain for feeling like I'd been hit by a truck daily for 4 years. The big emotional upsets can still cause a much lighter version of the cycle like pain but nothing like before. I'm fairly lucky - some people are positively crippled by it.

Often a physical or emotional catalyst seem to be associated with onset but not always. If I stay in one position too long, I end up stiff and my joints lock up. Sleeping included. Mornings really really suck for me. Once I get going for the day, I need to stay in motion. As soon as I sit down after a long day - that's it. I'm not getting up again.

That's pretty much it. I don't mean that it causes physical pain or worsens existing physical pain but, to me, acute sadness *is* physical pain. I feel sad in the "normal" way, too, but to me the physical sensation is completely inseparable from the emotion and is often the overriding feature. I usually can identify that I'm sad, but the physical pain is the worst part.

Glad to know I'm not the only person who experiences emotions like this.