Joanne Smith argues that chronic pain and weird symptoms aren't caused by physical defects but by learned protective patterns your brain creates. She says staying stuck is a choice and that viewing pain as brain-generated, not structural, is the only approach that actually works.
this is the choice we have. Do we want to stay stuck? Do we want to stay in chronic pain forever and a day until the end of time? Do we want to keep ourselves stuck knowing that there is a way out of this? And for some of us, it's been decades and decades of fear and anxiety and worry and catastrophic thinking and feeling rubbish and feeling unwell. And I'm saying, well, We're not really broken. Chronic issues, chronic symptoms is not a defect with the body. It's not a good sign of the condition of the body. We're saying that the brain is creating this. It's a learned pattern to protect us. I know it sounds a little bit unbelievable and it can be quite difficult to wrap your head around at first. Many people think this is crazy, this cannot be true. It goes against everything that we've ever grown up being told or knowing about. So it's not intuitive, it's counterintuitive. And this is the way out. This is what works. This is the only thing that makes sense. This is the only thing that people with these chronic symptoms are actually seeing progress by doing.
