Tennis Elbow

Tennis elbow is a good example of how the mind reacts when stress becomes focused and is too much, subconsciously, for the person to deal with?

Let's take two tennis player friends. One is very agile on the tennis court, but thinks that he needs to improve his racket skills. The other one has very strong and precise skill with the racket, but he perceives that his legs and agility aren’t good enough.

The first friend works hard to improve his racket skills. He focuses on all the hits he’s missing or hitting wrongly. However, despite maximum effort he still is not satisfied with the results. He’s focusing the stress on his arm/elbow for his perceived lack of racket skills and subconsciously starts to devaluate himself.

At this point, the first friend starts to have tennis elbow pain. And of course the more pain he has, the harder he finds it to play and he feels even more self devaluation.

The tennis elbow pain is a smart move on the part of his subconscious brain to reduce his psychological stress. He will likely get tennis elbow because all of his psychological stress is focused so intently on his elbow, trying again and again for the results he craves.

Eventually he has to quit playing tennis. His brain has succeeded in stopping the psychological stress... Hooray!?! However, serious self-devaluation has also set in because of his physical problems which have resulted in ending his tennis playing. All of this, so far, is subconscious. Unfortunately his tennis elbow has him feeling even more self-devalued because he can’t play tennis now – and he does want to. And this, naturally, causes repeated relapses and prevents healing.

To help this man, he needs to see, understand and acknowledge these psychological observations. Once he brings this to his conscious mind, his body can start repairs. The body-mind is brilliant and only needs to be told - or to truly see - the situation once to start repairing and healing. During repairs it might feel a bit more sore... But just for a few days until the job is done.

Tennis elbow exercises might cause more damage for now. The best tennis elbow treatment would be to rest the elbow rather than add stress. Allow the body to heal - it won't be long at all before you can start to exercise again. An important reminder is to start all exercise slowly to allow muscles to keep pace with the new demand.

On simple appearances, we might think that the cause of the injury is repetitive motion of the elbow in this cases? In fact, on closer observation you can see that there is physical pain exactly where he has focused his psychological self-devaluation. The pain is very real and physical but the cause is psychological.

It's also important to remember that elbow (and knee) pain results from subtly different psychological roots in every circumstance. For example elbow pain - tennis elbow - could result from self-devaluation at work (hating your job!) That is where a consultation with a Total Biology practitioner is valuable: to be able to link your particular pain or disease with the 'right' psychological cause. If you try and show the brain the 'wrong' link, healing will not occur. The brain and body-mind is far too smart for that!