Joanne Smith argues chronic symptoms don't mean your body is broken. Instead, your brain projects experiences onto your body like a projector onto a screen. Accepting this shift, rather than believing doctors who say something is physically damaged, can change how you understand and treat persistent pain.
So the dominant message for all of those years is that, you know, the body's broken. So when someone comes along and starts to share with you a new way of looking at things, you're just thinking, that's a load of rubbish. Mine's real. It's so real. It's so physical. I feel it. I literally lose my vision. You know, my body's responding. I literally feel it in the body. And it's like, I know the difference between Physical, and, um, and that the body's not broken and it's coming from the brain is creating this. So it's very difficult to wrap your head around. So for me, in the beginning, um, I could get my head around it for some things but not for others. So, you know, for me it was a bit like, I'd love to believe that, I'd love to think that that was possible for me. But then on the flip side, I believed what the doctors were telling me at the same time. So the first kind of experience I had, even into considering that there is nothing to fix and that the, the body's not broken. And a really nice way of looking at it is that you can see the brain as a projector and then the body like the cinema screen. So the body is just the innocent screen, and whatever the brain decides is going to happen will be projected upon that.
