This is my relationship with pain producing activities, I think it is an important part of pacing, progression and protection.
We have been indoctrinated to push through pain since birth. No pain, no gain. The idea being we always have to push our boundaries in order to broaden them and pain is just a part of life, the more you can handle the better prepared you'll be. Like most people I can see the reasoning in this. However; I can see the error too.
We have become so conditioned and tolerant to pain that we ignore it. Which is biologically unsound, pain is a warning mechanism, it's a system designed to get you to do something else. Pain begets pain, the more pain you have, the better your brain gets at producing it. If you have an already sensitized system the last thing you actually want to do is add more pain signals.
Something that happens to a lot of us during our discovery stages with chronic pain is experimentation with therapies. There are many therapies out there that can make your life and your pain better. There are just as many that can make it worse. The trick is telling the difference and modifying them to fit your needs.
For example, early in my treatment I went to many massage therapists and discovered many different techniques. There was a particular massage therapist that used to make me cry, she claimed the only way to release my muscles was to go deep, really really deep. She would hop on the table with me and press her elbows into my glutes with all her weight. When I cried out for her to stop she told me I had to bear it to get results and she bullied me into bad flares and agony, and honestly it could have done long-term damage. Another therapist grabbed the skin across my lower back and folded it upward, I screamed so loud he actually stumbled backwards several feet, he claimed I shouldn't have responded that way.
Had I not been so desperate for help I might have never gone to another massage therapist again and I wouldn't have found the one I'm with now. She does a lighter form of Swedish massage, absolutely no form of deep tissue and that makes a huge difference for me. It wasn't just manual therapies I experienced this in either, I struggled through various exercise routines with the same mind-set, pain equals progress and it actually only ever set me back significantly.
So what do we do? If you have fibromyalgia then everything hurts, and everything makes it hurt worse. What is an acceptable level of pain? My answer to that is this; walk up to the door, but don't open it. You will find that the walk gets longer and longer, but if you open that door you have to be ready for the confrontation and that means pain, fatigue, and potentially aggravating an already sensitized system. You know your threshold, respect it.
That is not an excuse not to try new things or to never feel any pain, but to be alert and confident and to say no when it's gone too far. Please don't suck it up and push through something that is outside of that, if it hurts now then it's going to be so much worse later. Our thinking has to change, we have to learn how to protect ourselves and how to feel safe again. *I think -when we ignore our limits like that we are telling our brains that we are the threat, and our brain will react but shutting our bodies down.
Be gentle and kind to your body and listen, that's what's it's asking you for.