Is Your Pain an Enemy? Or an Invitation?
- Samantha Leonard
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
You are doing all the things.
Box breathing. Symptom tracking. Supplements. Cold plunges.
You have read the books, downloaded the apps, followed the protocols. You are working harder at healing than most people work at anything.
And you're still having flares.
The symptoms shift shape but never fully leave. The relief is real but it's temporary.
What if the problem isn't the tools you're using but how you're using them?
The Shift
You already understand that your neuroplastic condition is caused by faulty code in your nervous system. The program is running in the background, generating symptoms that feel entirely physical, entirely real, but whose source is not structural damage. The source is the nervous system which learned, long ago, that the world was not entirely safe.
Think about it this way: that code was written in crayon. In the earliest years of your life, before you had language for any of it. Before you could have named what was happening or why. The environment you grew up in taught your body what was safe to say, do, and be.
What about the environment that shaped you?
Maybe it was unpredictable. A parent with substance use disorder. Maybe the rules were rigid. This is how we act in our family. Or maybe they were just absent, overwhelmed, or doing their best with very little.
From this early environment you came to understand that your sadness was inconvenient. Your anger, unwelcome. Your needs were at best a burden. At worst, your needs were a threat to the fragile equilibrium of your family unit.
In this environment you adapted. You adapted brilliantly.
The Gifts and Their Shadows
You adapted.
You became attuned, driven, precise, self-sufficient. You learned to perform when you
were falling apart and to smile when you were terrified. These survival strategies worked, and may still be working in many areas of your life. But adaptation has a shadow side. And that shadow, unexamined, has a way of living in the body as chronic tension, hypervigilance, and pain.
Perfectionism The gift: You are precise, resourceful, and you excel. You have an eye for what matters. You don't disappoint. You are someone people can lean on. The shadow: You approach your life and health like a project to optimize. You may see every setback as evidence of failure. Some part of you suspects you are fundamentally flawed.
People-Pleasing The gift: You are warm and attuned. You have a genuine capacity to hold others with care. Your emotional intelligence is almost a superpower. The shadow: You are so exquisitely tuned to the needs of others that you have learned to override your own signals, including pain. Sometimes you wonder if your pain is punishment.
Problem Solving The gift: You are the person everyone calls in a crisis. You see solutions where others see walls. You have navigated impossible situations through sheer ingenuity and will. This has served you, and the people around you, in profound ways. The shadow: You have turned your pain into a problem to be solved. You research, troubleshoot, and strategize. You collect diagnoses, protocols, and practitioners. But the nervous system does not heal through solving. It heals through feeling. And every time you move into your head to fix what is happening in your body, you leave the very place where the healing lives.
Eudaimonic vs. Hedonic
There are biological consequences to the gifts and the shadows of these personality
adaptations. The adaptations that saved you are the same ones keeping your nervous system in a war it cannot win.
Researchers distinguish between two orientations to wellbeing. The first is called hedonic wellbeing. It is focused on pleasure, relief, and the reduction of pain.
The second is called eudaimonic wellbeing. It is focused on meaning, connection, and purpose.
If you have been living inside chronic pain for any length of time, it is worth asking yourself honestly: which one is running you? Are you oriented toward relief? Or seeking something deeper?
Your nervous system responds to these two orientations very differently.
Your body knows the difference between running from something and moving toward something.
Two qualities surpass all others in the quest to become healthy and whole:
Curiosity and Compassion. In my practice we use these as orientations - a way of meeting yourself that changes everything downstream.
Curiosity
Four of the most respected frameworks in trauma-informed healing converge on the same essential truth: chronic symptoms are not malfunctions to be corrected.
They are messages waiting to be understood.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), developed by Alan Gordon, works directly with the brain's learned alarm system. It begins with a radical reframe: the pain is real, but its source is a nervous system that has learned to misread safety as danger. PRT teaches the brain to update that prediction. This method guides a gentle, curious attention toward sensation. It asks: what if this feeling is not a threat? What if it is simply a message that has never been received?
Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, maps the inner world as a community of parts. Each part carries a role, a belief, or a wound from an earlier time. The manager. The exile. The one who goes numb when things get too real. IFS does not try to eliminate these parts. It asks them: what are you protecting? What are you afraid would happen if you put that down?
Compassionate Inquiry (CI), developed by Gabor Maté, follows the thread of the body's unfinished stories very gently, and without agenda, into the places where it braced, contracted, or went silent. It asks not what is wrong with you but what happened to you? That single shift in question changes everything about what becomes possible.
Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Peter Levine, works with the body's incomplete survival responses: the freeze, the brace, the breath that is never fully released. It does not ask you to relive what happened. It asks you to notice what is happening right now and follow it with curiosity rather than alarm. The nervous system knows exactly what it needs. It has just never been given the space to finish.
What these four share matters more than what distinguishes them. None ask you to fix yourself. They all tell you there is nothing to be fixed. All they ask is for you to get curious. To turn toward the sensation, the memory, the part of you that has been waiting for someone to come looking. Not to manage it. To meet it.
Curiosity is the key to the past.
Become willing to feel what is right here and open yourself to what it is pointing at.
Compassion
The word compassion comes from the Latin compati — to suffer with.
We know how to do this for others. It comes naturally when a friend is in crisis, or our
child is in tears. We move toward them without thinking. We hold the child. We rock the child. We feel along with the child. It is medicine.
But ourselves? The parts we have hidden, judged, sent into shadow? That is another matter entirely.
What are your core wounds? Do you believe you are somehow undeserving? That your pain is not serious enough? Your needs are not legitimate enough? Your wounds are not bad enough to warrant real care?
Here is what the research, the fairy tales, and all the therapies confirm: healing is relational. The nervous system learns safety through connection.
Using the approaches we explored earlier: PRT, IFS, Compassionate Inquiry, Somatic Experiencing, we do not have to wait for the right relationship to arrive. We can build one from the inside - we can develop a relationship with the parts of us we used to be. The nine-year-old with the report card. The child holding their breath, waiting for the house to feel safe again.
It is simpler - and harder than anything else you will do.
Your nervous system cannot respond to logic. It responds to presence.
To the warmth in a voice, the steadiness of an unhurried face, the quality of attention that says you matter and I am not leaving.
Your own compassionate presence, turned inward, carries that same signal. It is biological medicine that changes things at the cellular level.
Biology Confirms It
If that still feels abstract, here is what the biology confirms.
Steve Cole's research on gene expression shows that the quality of your inner life is not just psychological. It is biological. When you live in chronic threat, even relational threat like shame and disconnection - even a little bit of loneliness over a long period of time - your cells respond. Inflammatory genes upregulate. The immune system shifts into a posture of chronic defense. The body begins to fight a war that has no visible enemy, because the threat it is responding to is in the past. It is in the nervous system's memory of what it meant to be unseen, unmet, or unsafe.
It is not a metaphor. It is measurable.
The Only Question That Matters
Is your pain something to eliminate? A problem to solve? An inconvenience to outlast?
Or could it be a portal?
Could it be a doorway back to the moments, the memories, and the younger selves still waiting to be seen. The ones whose unfinished business has been living in your body all this time, patient and persistent and loyal beyond measure.
You do not have to do this alone. Find a somatic therapist who understands that the body is not the problem. It is the messenger.
Do it for yourself. Do it for the generations that come after you. This is not just your healing. Every generation before you did the best they could with what they had. You are the one who gets to do it differently.
The body has been waiting. It is never too late to answer.
Somatic Therapy For Chronic Pain Relief
Samantha is a member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, a Noom Certified Health Coach, and the founder of Davidson Yoga Therapy and Health Coaching.
She has held complimentary healthcare positions at The Blanchard Institute, Atrium
Hospital, Levine Cancer Institute, Sanger Heart Clinic, and Davidson College. She has presented for Fortune 500 companies and major Universities, both public and professional audiences, on this thing called yoga therapy and what it can do when it is unpeeled, revealed, and adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the person doing it.
She leverages her three decades of yoga therapy, and health coaching experience with the following therapeutic models:
Breathing Technology
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Jungian Psychology
Jungian Dream Interpretation
Somatic Cognition
Internal Family Systems
Interfaith Perspectives
Spiritual Technologies
Trauma Healing
Polyvagal Somatics
Ayurvedic Lifestyle Coaching
Compassionate Inquiry
Pain Reprocessing Therapy
The Neurosequential Model
All this is to say, there are many doorways to use on the path to healing and self-discovery, and Samantha’s breadth of experience allows for vast creativity on which approach is right for you!
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