How Somatic Therapy Can Help You Deal With Chronic Pain

As a spoonie myself, I get it - chronic pain is a full time job.

You have to keep up with your physical therapy exercises. You have to make sure you’re getting enough ice and heat on your muscles. You need to get enough exercise - but not overdo it! You have to make sure you have enough down time to rest, but also if you’re too still or too anti-social, you feel that too. You need to make your doctors appointments - but some days you just don’t have the spoons. And the doctors don’t even help that much, anyway!

And if you don’t do this all perfectly - hello, pain flare! Let’s start from the beginning alllll over again.

There is so much to manage. It’s a lot and it can make you feel like you’re in a hamster wheel, wondering when you’ll ever find your groove.

Somatic therapy can be extremely helpful if you’re struggling with chronic pain. It can definitely help to reduce your pain levels, and it can also help you not spiral out when you sense a pain flare coming on.

Somatic therapy can reduce your pain levels

Pain isn’t just a signal from your body. It’s actually a complex experience created by the brain. Your brain is constantly focused on your survival - interpreting potential signs of danger not just from the outside, but also from the inside of your body, from your nerves - and it makes quick calls without your conscious awareness about whether to amplify or mute the sensation.

Those of us with chronic pain usually have nervous systems that have learned to amplify those sensations. Because we’ve felt pain for so long, the danger signals start to compound. Even well after an injury heals, the brain can get stuck sending danger signals.

With somatic therapy, we can use mindfulness and relaxation techniques to counter the stress response amplifying your pain.

Somatic therapy helps stops the pain-anxiety cycle

It’s very common for people with chronic pain to feel trapped in or betrayed by their bodies. In somatic therapy, we develop a working relationship, an open line of communication, with your body, and even specifically with the parts of your body where you experience pain.

In doing so, you will be able to slow down, listen to any messages the pain has for you – remember, the pain is often responding to a sense of danger. When you can listen and understand what the pain is afraid of, you can respond in a way that restores a sense of internal safety.

Developing this relationship where you can slow down and be with your pain also prevents you from adding additional reactive feelings on top of the pain. When I feel pain, sometimes there is anxiety that comes up, and then frustration, and then shame that I should be more healed. With mindfulness skills, I can allow my pain to be one part of my experience, rather than my entire experience, and I can stop myself from spiraling into a vortex of a million other emotions about what’s happening with my body.

You will be able to roll with your pain and energy levels every day, instead of feeling like they rule your life, which in turn positively impacts your pain levels by down regulating your nervous system.

Somatic therapy helps you meet your body’s needs

Because you won’t succumb to the anxiety and shame spirals about your pain as much, you can spend more time actually responding to your body’s needs – both personally, and by asking for help or advocating for yourself.

I have come to see myself as a steward of my body. I cannot completely control my body, but I can be in service of what I’m noticing it needs. Through the somatic skills of tracking and attunement, you will become more familiar with what kinds of tension and pain require what kinds of care. This will help you engage in self-care or advocate for what you need with more ease. You’ll also be able to share with more accuracy what your pain feels like to doctors, which may help you get more effective treatments.

And because you are able to slow down and not spiral into shame, you won’t feel like a burden for naming that you need a chair to sit down, or more time before you meet for dinner, or even if you just need a friend to come over instead of going out together.

Somatic therapy will help you grieve what has changed or been lost due to your chronic pain

           Everything that changes or that’s lost because of chronic pain brings grief. You might not feel as much freedom in your body to do the activities you used to do, or go as long or as hard as you would like to. This is a big lifestyle change. Without allowing yourself to grieve, you can become angry and resentful of your body, or what caused the injury in the first place – and I totally get that!

Allowing yourself to grieve can help you to breathe easier in the long run, because when we grieve we are going through a process of accepting our new reality. With this acceptance, you will have more space in your brain to get creative about how else to take care of yourself or feel satisfied with your life. You’ll also be able to be with the hard emotions when they come up, instead of seeing them as a problem or another piece of evidence that your life sucks.

            Don’t get me wrong – I still have my days where I wish I was as mobile and carefree as I used to be in my 20s, but somatic therapy has helped me to have those days, love my body, and still enjoy life.

You don’t have to do this alone

Chronic pain can be such an isolating and defeating experience. Somatic therapy can help you to feel more agency in your life, less alone, and more hopeful about living a fulfilling live despite your pain. I’m here for you to integrate my expansive knowledge in the physical and emotional aspects of the body.

Working together, we can use mindfulness, movement, talk, and bodywork to help you heal. Schedule a free 20-minute consultation and we can get you scheduled for somatic therapy today.

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