Why Your Chronic Pain Keeps Coming Back

You've done the physio exercises. You've been to the chiropractor. You've had deep tissue massages. And it helps — for a few days, maybe a week. Then the pain creeps right back into the same spot, like it never left.

If this cycle sounds familiar, you're not imagining it, and there's a reason it keeps happening.

Most treatments address the symptom, not the pattern.

When you have chronic pain — the kind that sticks around for months or years — the issue is rarely just structural. Yes, there might be a misalignment, a tight muscle, or an inflamed joint. But ask yourself: why does your body keep returning to that pattern? Why does the muscle keep tightening? Why does the alignment keep slipping?

The answer, in my experience, is that your nervous system is holding the pattern. At some point — during an injury, an accident, a period of prolonged stress, or even an emotional experience — your nervous system locked into a protective response. Muscles braced. Posture shifted. Your body organized itself around protecting the area. And even after the original event passed, the nervous system never got the signal that it's safe to let go.

Your body is protecting you from something that already happened.

This is why the pain keeps coming back after treatment. Massage loosens the muscle, but the nervous system tightens it again because it still believes protection is needed. Chiropractic adjusts the structure, but the body pulls it back out of alignment because the underlying holding pattern hasn't changed. The treatment addresses the effect. The nervous system recreates the cause.

What actually breaks the cycle.

To change a chronic pain pattern, you have to communicate with the nervous system directly. You have to show it — in a language it understands — that the threat is over and the bracing can stop.

That's what I do with Ortho-Bionomy and somatic bodywork. Instead of forcing muscles to release or cracking joints into alignment, I work with the positions your body is already holding. I gently exaggerate them, which activates your body's own self-correcting reflexes. Your nervous system recognizes the pattern, realizes it can let go, and releases it from the inside out.

The result is relief that actually sticks — because the pattern itself has changed, not just the symptom.

When pain has an emotional component.

After a decade of doing this work, I can tell you that chronic pain frequently has an emotional layer. Grief stored in the chest. Anxiety locked in the jaw. Anger held in the lower back. Your body stores what your mind won't process. Sometimes a pain pattern releases and an emotion comes with it — that's a sign the body was carrying both the physical and emotional tension together.

I work with whatever shows up. My job is to create the conditions where your body feels safe enough to release whatever it's been holding — physical, emotional, or both.