What is chronic pain?

When you first encounter an injury whether that’s a twisted knee, pulled back muscle, or twinge of the shoulder- the symptoms are sharp and acute in nature telling you to not do the movements that hurt. If the symptoms persist overtime from repetitive trauma it may turn into an achy dull sensation. Chronic pain is long standing pain that persists beyond the usual recovery period. You may continue to feel pain even after an injury has healed 3 months past the first occurrence.

How to treat it?

Persistent pain can cause pain receptors to become sensitive, overactive, and disinhibited, so they become activated much more easily. Our goal is to help turn down the volume of those pain signals. We will guide you through graded exercises to reduce the fear of movement and desensitize the area with gentle manual therapy in order to work with the nervous system. We use some mindfulness strategies to unlearn this pain signal. Your pain is real and is constructed in the brain and will help you through it so you can move towards a pain-free lifestyle. We are trauma-informed practitioners and understand that our bodies will hold on to the trauma whether mental, emotional, or physical and it can be stored. The stress response can heighten your pain and we can help you re-regulate your nervous system together.