Insights
Insights Library
Articles on chronic pain recovery, neuroplastic pain, and the evidence-based therapies that help your brain heal.
Start with a person
How this looked from the inside.
I Used to Pack Painkillers for Every Trip. I Don’t Anymore.
After 25+ years of chronic pain, I recovered using Pain Reprocessing Therapy and decades of Tai Chi practice. Here’s my full story, and what it taught me about the brain’s role in persistent pain.
Read more →Foundations
The model the rest of the series assumes.
The Three Types of Pain
Either pain is ‘real’ or it’s ‘in your head’ – a false choice. Pain science describes three mechanisms, often mixed, and telling them apart changes treatment.
Read more →Why Chronic Pain Persists: Two Kinds of Protection
Pain that returns after treatment may be driven by an untargeted system. How the brain’s FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF circuits produce different pain.
Read more →Suppressed Anger and Chronic Pain
Anger you were never able to express doesn’t disappear. It surfaces as jaw tension, bracing, and pain that safety-based treatment doesn’t seem to reach.
Read more →How Chronic Pain Recovery Actually Works
Sensitization – a threat appraisal system calibrated too sensitively – is calibration, and calibration can change. How recovery actually proceeds.
Read more →What If My Chronic Pain Is Structural?
Disc bulges and degeneration show up on scans of people with no pain at all. Taking the structural objection seriously instead of waving it away.
Read more →Does Pain Always Mean Damage?
‘Pain means damage’ is a rule we learn before language – and for standard pain it’s right. But the brain runs the same rule for pain that isn’t damage.
Read more →The stress response
Where stress arrives, and how the nervous system meets it.
The emotional completion
Where the protective system fires, and emotions are allowed to complete.
The symptom response
The felt sensation of the symptom, and the responses to it.
The Six Fs of Pain
Understanding the six responses that keep chronic pain alive, and what to do instead. A framework for recognizing how your brain maintains pain patterns.
Read more →When a Belief Won’t Let Go
The evidence gathers, and the belief flips it away: ‘yeah, but’. Why limiting beliefs hold on in chronic pain, and the long way back to care.
Read more →Attend to the Circle
Gentleness is a felt practice, not an intention. How one Tai Chi instruction – attend to the circle, all else empty – quiets the danger signal in chronic pain.
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