This is a transcript excerpt from a March 12, 2024 YouTube video titled "This Is How Pain Alters Your Nervous System to Protect You." In this chunk Speaker A explains that physical and emotional pain are symptoms of the brain's "alarm" responding to an altered, hypersensitive nervous system, not identity traits. Speaker A recounts a detailed personal story: a failed second hip surgery that left an unrecognized hole in the hip capsule, triggering widespread chronic pain, multiple pain diagnoses, extensive (mostly out-of-pocket) treatments, financial and family impacts, and long-term trauma. The speaker links past trauma and survival-mode nervous system changes to the body's overprotective pain responses and reflects on breaking and rebuilding identity and resilience.
Chapters
You know, I tell clients, whether it's a physical symptom or pain or anxiety or depression, those are actually symptoms of your internal alarm bells of your brain trying to get your attention to deal with something in your nervous system that has altered it into this now hypersensitive or overprotective state. They're symptoms. They're not who you are. They're not something you can't change. But it's very individual to each of us, again, based on our life experiences, our biodiversity, if that comes out more physical or mental and emotional. So in the same way, when you go through something, I think there's some protective guards that come up that want to be like, this will not break me. You know, but the truth is, as humans, because we're not robots, challenges always break us a little. You know, I. My second life altering health experience, I'll tell you what, nearly broke me, like, broke me. I. And that was so hard because I. I literally used to wear a necklace. I'm wearing a necklace now that I want to touch on, but I used to wear a necklace that said fighter. Right. That was like, became part of my identity. Yes, yes. And it was a beautiful thing. But like you said earlier, it continued to predict and perpetuate that I always needed to be a fighter. Not access that, but live in it. Right. Those are two different things. And when I had a second hip surgery that failed, so I had a real physical cause, they left a hole in my hip, which took years to even figure out because you couldn't see it on an mri.
They left a hole in your hip. How do you do that?
Well, in going into the hip capsule, you have to cut into the hip capsule, and so you break that barrier. And they weren't able to stitch it up. And it was in the medial part, the most inside part of the hip capsule, so it's not visible in an mri. So you can imagine how that profoundly altered the biomechanics of my body. My brain knew the biggest joint in the body was not safe anymore. It wasn't stable, but nothing would show it. We did MRIs, we did testing. We couldn't see it. And that's another long story. But the part of this is that when that happened, my body reacted so violently, and I went from, again, the epitome of health to pain in every area of my body. Chronic pain, patient nerve pain in 12 different areas of my body. I'm now being diagnosed with all these pain diagnoses that have no cure. You know, and I went through a long Thing again of trying to do everything known to man now. Alternative eastern regenerative, holistic, over 200 types of the injections we have today with stem cell and prp. I mean, I threw the gamut at it and I'm not getting better. And my family's nearly losing our home because we're spending everything on trying to get me better. And of course insurance doesn't cover any of this. It's all out of pocket. My husband and I lose our. Well together, we lose our professional dance career that we were at the top of. I have a two year old daughter I can't hold now I can't play with. And she was my miracle I was told I'd never have. And I literally got to a place where I was broken, like, and that was hard because I am strong and resilient, right? And I had already gone through something so significant. But living in that type of unrelenting pain 24 7, watching my family watch me suffer, not being able to be the mom, I want to be the wife, I want to be the person and the responsibility now as a wife and a business owner was very different than when I was a kid. And I'm saying this to go back to the point that I had to sit in the truth, that no matter what I'd already gone through, in fact, even though I defied the odds, the impact of what I went through had altered my brain and nervous system into that survival, into that trauma. And so when this surgery happened, my, my brain in a deep level was cross referencing every pain I was having and symptom now to what I'd gone through in the past and saying, okay, I need to protect you. I need to protect you. So I'm going to send protective responses of pain. I'm going to send protective responses here and then here and here and here. I've got to protect you because if I don't, we're going to die. And so I had to sit and not only realize that even though I had survived, it had had a lasting impact on me. And I had to strip away my ego because I'm a tough, strong woman. And it was like, wow, it had a profound impact on me. And I've been carrying trauma from it for over 20 years because when I was going through it, I didn't have time to like, feel the depths of my suffering I lost. I mean, my teenage years were spent fighting for my life in a hospital, right? I grew up really fast. I didn't get that like carefree teenage fun time. I was in something that was so significant and took me to just go to new levels. And so I had to strip back all of my strength, resilience, faith, and really sit in the truth of as a human being who had been challenged to the depths of my soul and now was doing it again. I was broken parts of me. But brokenness is not negative. It actually can be beautiful because that gives us a choice and chance not to rebuild.
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