When clients feel strong amounts of chronic pain or illness, they will say “I’m Broken”. I ask them what that means, and they say “there’s something wrong with me that needs to be fixed”, “I am not okay”. But many of them are neither “broken” nor fixable. They are just in chronic pain or states […]

I first heard this term, “new normal”, when I was taking a choreographed weightlifting class from a favorite instructor. Whenever we increased our weight lifted, she called it our “new normal”. At that time, I never thought of applying it to chronic pain. Soon after, my clients started coming in and saying, “When will I […]

I was reminded of the relationship between chronic pain and hopelessness when a client told me that because she again feels chronic pain, she feels hopeless. She said she felt hopeless because she could not insure or protect her body. I think many of us would feel this way if we started experiencing a lot […]

Often a pain patient or chronic illness patient says, “It is impossible to make any type of commitment because I often have to break it, and people find me unreliable”. Chronically ill or pained patients have to think about commitment in a whole different way than others. It is important in society to make commitments […]

You did not “do something wrong”! This line of thinking leads us to believe that all pain is preventable if we only don’t move a certain way, exercise a certain muscle, etc. It leads to an illusion that we can control our pain by our movement. This is a dangerous belief. I know one person […]