What Working with Pain Taught Me About the World
On the body, our defenses, and the possibility of change.
In the world of trauma therapy, psychotherapy, and emotional healing, we often speak about the importance of sitting with discomfort, allowing ourselves to feel, and learning not to run away from what hurts. We hear that the only way out is through.
But what does that actually mean? What happens inside us when we encounter pain? What gets activated? What makes us brace, contract, withdraw, fight, or disconnect? And more importantly, how do we actually work with it?
More than a decade of working with pain has taught me something that reaches far beyond the physical body. And the more I look at the world around me, the more I recognize the very same mechanisms I have spent years learning to understand.
When Pain Becomes a Doorway
For fifteen years, I lived with chronic pain in my left shoulder. Sometimes it was a persistent ache; other times, my entire arm would suddenly go numb. Over those years, I tried many different approaches, searching for something that would finally fix it.
Things began to change when I started working with my first somatic therapist, who incorporated a great deal of fascia work into our sessions. It was my first encounter with fascia therapy, a field that would later become part of my own professional path, alongside somatic psychotherapy.
As we worked together, emotional layers began to emerge, but something else was also happening. I started noticing how much unnecessary effort I was putting into the simplest movements.
I remember standing in the kitchen, cutting a salad, and suddenly becoming aware of how tightly I was holding the vegetables and the knife. The amount of strength I was using was far greater than the movement actually required. Another time, standing in the shower, I noticed the same thing in the way I was gripping the showerhead. These were such ordinary moments, movements I had made thousands of times without thinking about them. Yet there I was, discovering how much tension I was bringing into them.
And once I could recognize it, I could begin to experiment. I could hold the knife differently, use less strength, make the same movement with less effort. The movement itself didn't need to change so much. My participation in it did.
It was a simple but profound realization. The tension wasn't only something happening to me. Some of it was also something I was actively, though unconsciously, doing.
But the physical discoveries were only one part of what was unfolding. Through those months of somatic work, I was also encountering emotional layers that had been outside my awareness for a long time.
For several months, there was an enormous amount of sadness. I continued functioning in my everyday life, but underneath that functioning, I was moving through a period of deep sadness. Emotions that had been outside my awareness for years were gradually finding their way into my experience.
And then, after some time, something happened that triggered a very different response in me. It was the kind of situation in which I would normally have found myself feeling helpless. But this time, instead of helplessness, I felt anger. Powerful, visceral anger moving through my entire body. And what was so different was that I wasn't afraid of it.
The energy was enormous. I remember jumping rope and going for a run because there was so much movement happening inside me. I could feel the anger without needing to suppress it, and I could allow myself to move with it.
That experience was significant, but it wasn't a single breakthrough that suddenly made fifteen years of pain disappear. By then, I had been working with my somatic therapist for many months. Through the physical work, the growing awareness of my habitual tension, and the emotional layers that gradually emerged, something had been changing in me.
Over the course of almost a year, the chronic pain that had accompanied me for fifteen years gradually dissolved. And it has not returned.
The anger was one of the final pieces of that process. It brought me into contact with a part of myself that had previously felt inaccessible, and with a capacity to respond where I had so often experienced helplessness. What began as an attempt to fix a painful shoulder became a much deeper reorganization of how I experienced myself, my emotions, and my body.
What I didn't know then was how much this newly accessible anger would continue to teach me, especially in intimate relationships, where I would learn to experience conflict, rupture, and repair without losing connection.
Over the years, I witnessed similar processes with many clients. People would come to work with physical pain or tension, and as we began exploring their bodily responses, something much larger would reveal itself. Sometimes emotions that had been inaccessible for decades began to emerge. Sometimes everyday habits and ways of compensating began to change, even without us working on them directly.
I remember one client who told me he hadn't cried for twenty years. As his relationship with his body began to change, emotions started becoming accessible again. He also noticed that he no longer wanted the same amount of sugar or coffee he had been consuming. We weren't working on his diet. We were working on connection. And as that connection deepened, he began recognizing things about himself that had previously been outside his awareness.
This is one of the most profound things working with pain has taught me: when we begin to meet our physical pain, we may discover that we are meeting much more than the physical experience itself.
The Difference Between Enduring Pain and Meeting It
We live in a world that offers us countless ways to avoid discomfort. And understandably so. Pain is uncomfortable. We don't want to feel it. We want it to stop. Sometimes relief is necessary, and sometimes it is even what makes deeper work possible. But there is a difference between relieving pain and transforming our relationship with it.
There is also a difference between enduring pain and being present with it. We can sit with pain while internally fighting it, bracing against it, holding our breath, waiting for it to end. From the outside, we may appear to be tolerating discomfort, while inside we are doing everything we can to avoid the experience.
Presence is something different. It is not passive. It is an active relationship with what is happening inside us.
When I work with clients, I don't ask them to push through their defenses. I don't fight the bracing, the withdrawal, the overwhelm, or the impulse to disconnect. I recognize these responses as part of the body's attempt to protect itself. Sometimes the first thing I offer is simply my own presence, a presence that can remain steady while something difficult unfolds, without demanding that the experience change, disappear, or become something else.
From there, we begin to explore, little by little, within a range that allows the person to remain connected to what they feel. Because the capacity to stay present with discomfort is not something we either have or don't have. It is something we develop.
I see this in my work with clients. I see it in my children. And I continue to practice it within myself.
When I turn toward my own pain, I don't always make it disappear. But I gain access to something: my sensations, my feelings, my ability to move with what is happening rather than only react against it. And very often, something shifts. Sometimes the pain changes completely, sometimes partly, and sometimes the change is subtle. But the possibility of relating to it differently is already meaningful.
From Physical Pain to Emotional Defense
The deeper I went into working with physical pain, the more I encountered emotional pain. Not as something separate, but as something deeply intertwined with the physical experience itself. Again and again, working with tension, movement, and protective responses brought us into contact with emotions, experiences, and patterns that had become part of how the body organized itself. I began to understand that working with physical pain often meant encountering emotional pain, too.
When something becomes too overwhelming, too frightening, or too painful, our nervous system can move into defense. We fight, flee, freeze, or disconnect. These are not failures. They are protective responses. But when they become automatic, when we no longer recognize that we are acting from protection, they can begin to shape our relationships, our choices, and the way we perceive the world.
And this is where another important layer of the work comes in. In Bodynamic Psychology, we work with the relationship between the Body Ego and the Observing Ego: our ability to remain connected to our bodily experience while also observing what is happening within us. To feel anger without immediately acting from it, to recognize fear without becoming entirely organized by it, to notice an impulse and have enough space between that impulse and our action to discover that we have a choice.
This integration is not about becoming less emotional. Quite the opposite. It allows us to experience more of ourselves without losing our capacity to observe, reflect, and respond. And as that capacity develops, something changes in how we relate to other people, too.
What I Began Recognizing in the World
Over the past six years, I have watched the world become increasingly polarized. Through the pandemic, wars, social divisions, and the growing intensity of public discourse, I keep recognizing patterns that feel deeply familiar from my work with pain.
The speed with which we move into defense. The need to explain, justify, deny, or project. How quickly we fall into black-and-white thinking, dividing the world into right and wrong, good and bad, us and them, rather than remaining with the nuances and complexities of what is unfolding. The difficulty of staying present with fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, or another person's suffering. How quickly we move into opinions and arguments, sometimes before we've even allowed ourselves to feel what is happening.
It is often easier to move into the intellectual layer, into explanations and certainty, than to remain close to what we feel. When our internal capacity is overwhelmed, complexity itself can become difficult to tolerate. We reach for simple answers, fixed positions, and clear divisions because they offer something to hold on to. But as we develop the capacity to remain connected to ourselves in the presence of discomfort, we also develop more room for nuance, for uncertainty, and for realities that don't fit neatly into one position. We can hold more than one truth, recognize contradictions, and remain curious without immediately needing to decide, defend, or reject.
Because when another person's suffering activates something unbearable within us, our capacity to remain present with them can become very limited. We may become so occupied with protecting ourselves from what their experience brings up that we lose the ability to truly see them.
Of course, the collective world is more complex than one nervous system. There are histories, ideologies, power structures, and real conflicts that cannot be reduced to individual psychological responses. And disagreement itself is not necessarily a defense.
We can disagree profoundly and still remain connected, compassionate, and capable of recognizing another person's humanity.
But when I look at the intensity of reactivity around us, I cannot ignore how often I recognize the language of protection. The same mechanisms that can organize one body around pain can also influence how we meet one another. And at a collective scale, everything becomes louder.
The Scale Where Change Becomes Possible
When I look at the world, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by its scale. The polarization, the hatred, the wars, the suffering. It can feel so enormous, so far beyond anything I can influence.
But my years of working with pain keep bringing me back to something very concrete: change begins at a scale where we can actually participate.
And perhaps one of the most tangible places to begin is with our own physical experience.
We can notice how we hold tension in our bodies, how we brace against pain, how we hold our breath or restrict our movement without even realizing it. We can become curious about what happens when we bring awareness to these responses. Can we make the same movement with less effort? Can we remain present with a sensation without immediately fighting it? Can we recognize when our body is protecting itself, and begin to explore whether that protection is still necessary?
These are not abstract philosophical questions. They are things we can experience and explore in our own bodies, in the middle of ordinary life. And sometimes, when pain or bodily sensations are too overwhelming to approach directly, we begin with something more manageable, gradually building the capacity to stay present.
From there, the same capacity can begin to extend into our emotional and relational experiences. In how we meet our own fear. In whether we can remain present with anger without immediately acting from it. In whether we can tolerate sadness without shutting down. In whether we can stay with the discomfort of not knowing, without rushing to certainty. In recognizing the moment we are pulled into defense, and gradually discovering that another response may be possible.
As we develop this capacity, we may also become more able to remain with complexity, to recognize perspectives beyond our own, and to stay connected to another person's suffering without immediately needing to explain it away. The more room we develop for our own experience, the more available we can become to the experiences of others.
This is not about eliminating defenses. We need our defenses. They are part of being human. It is about developing the capacity to recognize them, to understand what they are protecting, and to discover that we don't always have to act from them.
This is what working with physical pain taught me. And it is what I continue to learn through emotional work, trauma work, relationships, motherhood, and the people I accompany. Because trauma, too, can be understood as pain that has become encapsulated, knotted into our protective responses, sometimes held for years in ways we no longer recognize. And the work of meeting that pain, gradually and with enough support, brings us back to the same fundamental question: can we remain connected to ourselves in the presence of what hurts?
We are not only experiencing pain. We are also participating in how we respond to it. And that participation can change.
To me, this is the work of alchemy. Not turning something bad into something good. Not pretending pain is a gift, or that suffering is necessary for growth. But discovering that even within painful experiences, something can begin to move when we meet them differently.
Something that was held in contraction can begin to find movement. Something that was disconnected can begin to find its way back into connection.
And while we may not be able to change the entire world at once, the way we meet ourselves inevitably influences how we meet the people around us: our children, our partners, our clients, our communities.
Perhaps the larger scale begins to change through the smaller one.
One body, one relationship, one response at a time.
Want to explore this in your own body?
My free masterclass, The Loop of Pain, explores how physical pain and protective responses can reinforce one another, and how awareness can become a starting point for change.
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