Migraine Disease: Do You Ever Feel Like You Are Being Punished?

When migraines started to take over my life it was hard to resist the feeling that I was being punished in some way. Migraines after all can feel like you are being beaten up by a gang with your hands tied behind your back—totally unable to defend yourself or flee the attack in any way. Was I being punished?

I kept wrestling with that feeling, even though intellectually I believed it was ridiculous! Still, intellectually knowing that I wasn’t being punished wasn’t enough to fend off the feeling. Not being able to comprehend why the migraines were happening seemed to lead me down the road of some really old programming I must have gotten in my childhood. “Good people don’t get punished. Good people get rewarded.”

Now I know that just isn’t true. Plenty of good people have had bad things happen to them, but somehow I couldn’t muster up that same truth for myself. I must have done something wrong that had made me unworthy of a pain-free-happy-go-lucky-life.

In the midst of some really bad migraines I would find myself hysterically crying out, “What the hell do you want from me?! What did I do?” I can’t tell you honestly who I was even announcing this to…was it myself? Was it God? Was it the migraine? My body? I don’t know, but I do know that anytime I did this it made me glaringly aware of my belief that I must be getting punished.

I hated this feeling. As if the migraines weren’t bad enough, now I had to fend off this awful feeling too. And seeing other people go along their merry way through life didn’t help either. They became added evidence (in my mind) that I was being punished. They were living proof that some people know how to walk through life without being punished. I kept observing others and feeling like I was wrong, damaged, and unworthy in some way that I wasn’t able to understand.

At some point in the midst of recognizing how heavy this sense of being punished really was, I began to contemplate why I would be punished. Why was I unworthy? Why wasn’t I the kind of “enough” that granted me health and happiness? I’d like to tell you that I came up with a very short list…but that wasn’t the case.

I began a two week course of adding things to my list everyday, just sitting with the question “Why would I deserve to be punished?” I let my fears and negative judgments pour out of me. After all, If I was gonna be holding onto this incessant feeling of being punished I wanted some damn good evidence that I should be. I even wrote down the long shots.  You know, the ones that come flying out of your head and yet sound ridiculous— just in case any part of me truly resonated with them.

When my list was complete, I went through each item on that list from personal qualities I possess to actions I’ve taken, and behaviors I’ve engaged in. I read each item aloud to myself, closing my eyes, and speaking the statements very matter-of-factly. Over 90% of my list triggered the hell out me! I got an unpleasant emotional charge out of so many of them. There were a bunch I couldn’t even read out loud without tears bubbling up inside of me—some tears of shame, anger, guilt, and regret. Many of the things on my list sparked long tucked away memories of situations that I thought I had long ago moved past or healed beyond. Obviously, I was wrong.

Oddly enough, this exercise brought me great relief. I finally knew why that feeling of being punished was chasing me relentlessly everywhere I went. I was creating it. There it all was staring back at me on the page. I had just outed myself as the greatest punisher of all. Suddenly it became clear to me that healing my migraines was going to have a lot to do with healing my relationship with myself (and my migraines). I had some very important “inner work” to do. And I was up for the challenge.

Finally I saw an opening for where I could be taking greater control of my life, my illness, and the emotional stressors that were exacerbating my illness.