Joanne Smith explains that chronic pain works as a habitual loop you can't force to stop, but you can influence it. Setting new expectations, doing diagnostic work, getting professional help, and changing how you talk about pain can reshape the patterns that drive it.
You'll just keep on getting what you always got. Same trigger, same response, every single day, over and over. So how to change it? This is where it kind of gets a bit— to me, it gets a bit fun now because I play around with this sort of stuff all the time now. It gets really interesting and really powerful because we can't force it to stop. That's not— That's not on offer. You can't force— I can't force this hand to hurt. I can't do that. And it's the same way that I can't force it to stop hurting. It's not like under our control. So this is why I use the word influence, because there's certain things that are under our control that do influence what happens. So setting a new expectation, it seems too simple, it seems like, hmm, as if that's gonna work, just set a new expectation, but if you understand this stuff and you see it to be true for you and you think, oh yes, that could be me, and you've done your homework, you've done your diagnostic, you've got in touch with whoever it might be, for some help to find out, then you can do this stuff. You can set yourself a new expectation before the thing that you would be going to do, where it would normally happen, you can actually just use the power of language.
