I promised a post on the major turning points in my pain experience at the beginning of the year. Then life, and death, happened and it was put on hold. Those posts (there are two, reflecting two major turning points) will come soon, but first I wanted to share why I’ve been away, for those who may be wondering. It’s →
These days I’m feeling like I’m just a person, not a person with chronic pain, which is an interesting perch to view the past eight years from. I’m trying to piece together how I got here. Granted, I’ve been trying to do so for some time! But never from this vantage point. I recognize how much acceptance has been a part →
In my last post I shared some thoughts on pain education and the phrase ‘pain is an output of the brain‘. I compared pain as output to pain as a lived, conscious, complex experience that people feel. From my perspective, describing pain as an output robs the experience of pain’s harsh, all-encompassing, life-changing reality. We are not machines producing outputs. →
On a 4-mile run the other the day I ran my fastest first 2 miles in over 7 1/2 years. My fastest first mile, too. And I did it on asphalt and concrete in heavy sneakers I didn’t buy with the intention of running in. Factors that would have made me avoid running in the first place just 6 months →
Psychological. What do you think when you see that term? Be honest with yourself, what’s going through your head right now? When you think about the word psychological or the phrase ‘psychological factors’, what comes to mind? I ask because I have seen misconceptions abound when it comes to the P word. Misconceptions about the term ‘psychological’ I have seen →
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks. Thinking about it ever since Peter O’Sullivan asked me to tell him my story when I was a patient demo during his Cognitive Functional Therapy workshop at the San Diego Pain Summit. And every time I think about it, I get teary. It touches something deep within me →
How do we get better if we have to constantly prove we’re in pain? And does that constant need to prove we’re in pain prevent us from getting better? In recent posts I wrote about the shame I felt after developing chronic pain and how I’ve been working through that shame. They were the hardest posts I’ve ever written, my most vulnerable by far. And →
This post is both stand-alone as well as a part 3 from my ‘Expanding Our World, Expanding Our Movement’ series (Interested? Here’s part 1 and part 2). It revisits and reinforces some of what has been written about in previous movement posts but this one is specific to why I think movement variability and moving through postures, and not specific →
In part 1 of this series, I talked about how when we have chronic musculoskeletal pain, our world’s can become pretty small and how in those smaller worlds, we don’t move in the ways we used to or move as much as we used to. It hurts, after all. When we’ve been hurting for a long time, it’s easy to associate →
When we have chronic pain our world can become very, very small and when our world becomes very, very small, it becomes less populated, less interesting, less motivating, less engaging, less enjoyable…just less. And when our world becomes so very small, our movement becomes small too. Our movement becomes stifled, guarded, restricted, limited…less. We may not move much or as much as we used →
At some point along the way in writing this blog and trying to figure out this whole chronic pain thing, I went from learning about and understanding more about the science of pain to actually living what I know (well, mostly living what I know, I have my moments). I didn’t really notice it myself, at least not until it was →
This past weekend I attended the first annual San Diego Pain Summit and I can’t even begin to put into a cohesive string of words all that I am thinking, nor can I come close to formulating into a single blog post all that I learned during the course of three days of thought-provoking presentations from a stellar line-up of speakers. On top →
There are a number of things I’ve been wanting to write about but I always have trouble knowing where to start (I have a tendency to want to give you guys EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE). So I’m going to start chipping away at them in small doses, starting with some clarification on what pain is and what it isn’t. Today →
Forgive me if this post is pretty similar to the last one (and a bit of a rant) but I’m all fired up right now after seeing another headline on social media that read “Pain: It’s all in your head”. ARGH!!! As someone living with pain, and who regularly hears from others living with pain, headlines like these really get →
We are the story we tell ourselves. I’m not sure where I heard that but it really rung true for me. We are the story we tell ourselves, we are the words we use to describe ourselves, our lives. So why is it that so many of us tell ourselves a negative story? Or a sad story? Or an angry story? Language →