Serenity
In Our Bones, Brains and Belly
Those of us who have children in addiction feel it in our bones. No, we really do. A shoulder aches out of nowhere. Skin rashes happen. We sleep a lot from emotional exhaustion and for escape. In our son’s latter years of using, I had a surgery, two unrelated E.R. visits, joint pain and more. My husband had a surgery and other procedures. Our son’s been in long-term recovery for seven years and we’ve thus been as they say, healthy as horses. Call it coincidence, I’m just saying. 
For decades, neuroscientists have been aware that a specific brain circuit is involved in registering physical pain. Whether you get pricked with a needle or sprain your ankle, many of the same neural circuits come alive to process the pain: the insula, the cingulate cortex and the somatosensory cortex. Scientists have discovered that
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