Why conventional therapies are largely ineffective for chronic pain.

The impact of chronic pain is immense, practically every aspect of your life is affected. You may know how the pain has started, or it may have appeared out of the blue. You may know your medical diagnosis, or you may not. You have already tried to “fix what is wrong” with various therapies and remedies. But the pain keeps coming back. Anxious to find a cure, you may even consider more radical medical options, such as a surgery.

What may have never crossed your mind is that your pain could be a “side effect” of the strategy your organism has developed in order to keep functioning despite the various “blocks” in your body.

What are these “blocks”? They arise from your body’s instinctual defensive responses to perceived physical or psychological threats. When such experiences are not resolved, they are held in chronically tense muscles and tissue.

Body blocks have remained largely “below the radar” of modern Western medicine – they don’t show on X-ray, MRI or CT scans. Nonetheless, they are real. In functional terms, they are the parts of your body that do not participate effectively in performing its various “jobs.” Worse yet, these blocks disrupt communication between different body parts that normally constitute a unified ensemble. To continue functioning, the organism has to find a way to work around those blocks.

Practically all body blocks have one common feature: you don’t know that you have them! They feel so habitual and “normal” that you take them for “the way things are supposed to be”! For most people it comes as a complete surprise when they discover that they have no sensation or control of certain parts of their body – for example, the major muscles in their trunk. It is only when you regain awareness of those parts that you may realize how different it feels to have them “unblocked.” Another common feature is that you can’t use the blocked parts of your body to perform voluntary movements – or certainly not in a functional, organic way. From a neurological perspective, this indicates a disrupted communication between your brain and the blocked parts of your body. As a consequence, these parts cannot function in concert with the rest of the body.

Your brain is then forced to find a different way to organize your movement by creating alternative neuromotor patterns. For example, instead of the blocked muscles, which were designed to meet a specific functional demand, it will engage other muscles that are still available, even though their biomechanical properties are tailored to a different performance requirement. This commonly causes overcontraction of the “newly appointed” muscles, which may further lead to their damage and pain. Aside from pain in these muscles themselves, there also often develops other associated pain (such as headaches brought on by muscle tension in the nearby areas of the shoulders and neck).

It seems perfectly logical that we should be able to eliminate pain in overworked muscles by relaxing them. This is what conventional treatments (such as massage, physiotherapy, stretching, or manual adjusting) are aimed at. Most often, however, this approach yields only temporary results because it addresses symptoms rather than the cause.

A major reason why conventional therapies are largely ineffective for chronic pain is that they view muscle tightness as a “fault,” whereas it actually represents the organism’s solution for the task of maintaining functioning with fewer means (each body block reduces its repertoire of resources for organizing action). Muscle tension is set by the brain according to life’s demands, and no matter whether it hurts or not, the appointed muscles have to work this way to accomplish a particular function, if other options are not available. This may sound strange, but remember that your brain is built for survival. In other words, its main job is to ensure the continuation of your functioning, which will therefore always have priority over comfort! Indeed, any attempts to relax the tight muscles forcefully entail fighting against the patterns of neuromotor activity that manifest the organism’s survival strategy. While such attempts may ease muscle tension temporarily, they cannot be expected to yield enduring improvements, since the brain will keep restoring the “necessary” tension.

But there is another option. We can refrain from battling against the body. Instead, we can identify its parts that are blocked and free them. Those blocked parts of the body are not lifeless; they can be reawakened and reintroduced to the brain, where they will be happily reconnected with the overall neural network and once again become instrumental in coordinated functioning of the body.

Once these blocked parts are reengaged to perform the functions they were designed for, the other parts of the body stop being overworked and pain goes away naturally, without any additional treatments. It can happen so fast that it feels almost unreal.

As a somatic therapist, I use gentle touch to detect patterns of tension in a person’s body and explore how they affect its entire organization. Further, I help my clients to become aware of the blocks held in their bodies and to release and reintegrate these blocks.

My clients typically start feeling more ease and freedom in their bodies from the first appointment. With every following session they become more aware of their habitual pain-perpetuating actions, and learn new ways of functioning that are not causing them pain and discomfort. The enhancement of physical and mental self-awareness eventually enables them to part ways with chronic pain – for good!