Sure, I can give it a try with explaining more. I'll go through your initial post and I put (s) at the beginning of every passage that is mine.

1. As a child I was given a lot of pain as well as being neglected so my mind got confused about pain. It took me years to be able to define pain. Like oh I have a head ache.

(s)Me too. I was badly verbally and psychologically abused especially by my mom. Plus I'm a shaken baby and when I was older my legs and feet were often kicked. Also being ill wasn't okay, my dad especially seemed to look down upon we three girls when we were sick.

I wasn't allowed to have my own sense of self, my own boundaries. As a survival skill I learned to stay out of my body often, I had to space out a lot.

2. So I learned more and more how to define pain within the last 12 years. As it happens I also have had more and more pain from a broken back in childhood mainly, but other things as well.

(s)Me too, I've had to learn basic building blocks, how to be in my own body and experience, how to define what I am feeling.

I have fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraines, and possibly some arthritis. Being abused probably didn't help with any of this.

3. When I have to ask for help with pain I feel frightened. PTSD The mother did not ever believe me and I learned to play dead to keep my body, but also my soul alive. Today I fear I won't be believed and get teary just talking about the pain and asking for help. It didn't help that Dr. Quack saw that as an emotional thing that meant I did not have pain.

(s)Exactly. A way for me to survive was to be invisible. But I couldn't depend on that either, since my mom accused me of all sorts of things that weren't actually happening. I could be spaced out, gazing into space, not thinking of anything, and she would claim that I was being condescending and thinking mean thoughts about her. I was ruining her life. So bring me to current time - I'm supposed to detail all my symptoms but not upset the doctor, not supposed to make them feel that I am bad. I'm supposed to be invisible but only in the right way. I'm supposed to be brave and chin up but also tell them the truth. On and on, it can be exhausting. It is exhausting.

"Emotional thing" means that I'm even more bad. I'm obviously just malingering, I'm unstable, I don't know reality. Of course this is a trap because if I try to prove I'm not bad, well then.......I obviously am.

4. My pain is getting worse. I have multiple issues that I work very hard on with PT, massage, acupuncture. But I need more drug help as time goes by.

(s)My pain is getting worse too. I've used various things and I'm lucky if at least the edge is taken off. I'm able to be stable with how I've crafted my life, which includes that I'm not employed.

5. I get stuck in the fear and not being believed and guilty conscience thing. I have such a guilty conscience I often think people are going to think I am shop lifting and I never even have. Please, does that make sense? I worry the doc will think I want drugs to get high or won't believe me.

(s)Yes, this makes complete sense. I was taught to not trust my own experience. I'd get completely hypervigilant including about my own thoughts. And according to my mom I had some sort of supernatural evil power, so maybe I secretly do want to shoplift, maybe others can sense this about me, maybe I am evil. (Thank god for lots and lots of therapy on all this.)

6. Our culture is such that the above dues happen. If docs can't say definitively that xyz are causing my pain they are hesitant to help me with it. People do drug seek to get high. It is a major problem. I do not.

(s)I fully agree. It is one thing to have an acute visible health challenge: "Oh you poor thing you broke your arm and you have a cast, here, let me get that door for you.". Another to have a chronic invisible illness: "Maybe you just sit around too much and need to cheer up. Damn, you're annoying. And you're female too, typical.".

7. I was referred to a rehabilitative Psychologist recently who is actually the one who suggested quite firmly that I leave Dr. Quack; He told me something old intelligent me never knew, methadone does not make you high. There is no high to get. I felt relieved to hear that. Like I was believed and vindicated.

(s)I'm glad that rehab psych is in your life. You are worthy of being believed.

8. I spoke with a pain specialist w/whom I used to work. She told me it was absolutely logical and normal and good practice to want extra meds for break through or new pain to have on hand. She also agreed that going to E.R. for pain management was not a good thing. They have to assess is you are drug seeking and you get more trauma. I feel it's humiliating to me. Last time I went, and for the first time ever I could not be silent with my pain. I moaned loudly. The whole E.R. could hear me and it took them an hour to give me a shot in the ***! HUMILIATION Not the *** part, the moaning and the waiting, the dependence.

(s)Yep, I've read up on pain and practice of pain relief here in the states and the pain specialist is completely correct.

9. Ahh, alas the largest issue. I hate depending on anyone for anything. I have to depend on a doctor to give me pain meds and what if they don't believe and all of the above. It is a major trigger for the PTSD. I have never been one to feel pain as others do. I can have a lot more pain then most peers and maybe not even notice and then it's so out of control I need major drugs to go back. it is better to keep pain managed rather then allow the peaks because then it takes more to manage it. Am I making sense?

(s)Asking for help with chronic "invisible" pain is one of the last things I want to do, because it can be exhausting and traumatic. I'm possibly dealing with burnt out hurried people who don't want to deal with me and who even might have negative thoughts about who they think I am. This is like volunteering to be with my mom again. I don't want to but sometimes I need to. I do what I can to support myself, I work on not stressing myself out with how I am thinking, but facts are facts, going to a doctor with chronic pain can be a real sucky experience.

Managing pain is the ideal but we aren't always given the tools to do so. Then things get too intense and we might be blamed for that. This can feel frustrating and like a trap. No matter how fast we dance, it ain't fast enough.

A therapist told me that I have a double whammy with PTSD and chronic pain because they both can be traumatic in the same way. With abuse I never knew what was going to happen next while knowing that the worst was probably going to happen. With chronic pain I never know how the pain levels will be yet at the same time I know that most likely I will indeed be in pain.

I tend to be hypervigilant although I've come a long long way in healing. I've tended to blame myself. I've taken responsibility for stuff that wasn't my responsibility. I've not known also that it is really really okay for me to have preferences too.

We get to have people on our side, on our team. No guarantee of finding good people though. It can all feel to me like a gamble, a bad one, a risk, a making myself vulnerable so I can be seen and possibly helped.

(((hugs)))