Joanne Smith explains why chronic pain recovery looks different for everyone. She learned that pain is generated by the brain, which made her feel less blamed and more hopeful. Understanding the neuroscience behind it changed how she approached her own healing.
but for me and many people that I know, there is no one way to get well. We're all individuals and we're all really different, and it's a different process for every single person, you could say, but with similarities. So for me, it was a case of I didn't really consider the learning as doing work, it was just interest, it was just purely out of interest. Like, ah, that's got my interest, I think that could be potentially something that I want to learn a little bit more about. So maybe I just didn't see it as doing work and I just saw it as really interesting, and when you know that there's a potential that you could find some relief for yourself if you're going through chronic pain or chronic symptoms, then it didn't feel like any— it didn't feel like work to me, it felt as though it got easier. Because it felt as though when I kind of had an idea what was really happening and that all pain, all symptoms are all being generated in the brain, it's all real, we feel, we're feeling what we feel, it's not imaginary, it cannot be made up, it cannot be our own fault, it's something that happens automatically. When I knew all of that,
