A Physiotherapist’s Personal Story of Recovery from Chronic Pain
- Jennie Toomey
- Apr 28
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Our blog this month was written by Jennie Toomey, a UK-based physiotherapist who used the neuroplastic approach to recover from years of debilitating chronic pain.
My story of recovery is shared to inspire and motivate others to consider engaging in science-backed mind-body work.
How my journey with chronic symptoms began
As long as I can remember I had been sensitive – sensitive to the social cues within my environment, to what others thought of me, and to the cruelty and hurt in the world. I would have described myself as perfectionistic, highly empathetic, people-pleasing, inwardly self-critical and determined.
Throughout the entirety of my twenties, I experienced near constant symptoms, which of course my logical brain tried to find cause-and-effect reasons for. This looked like a stream of back pain, bladder pain and just about every tendinopathy (tendon pain) under the sun…on both sides of my body. I received diagnoses of chronic tendon reactivity, chronic cystitis, likely fibromyalgia and pelvic misalignment. A symptom would last anywhere between a few months to over a year. As soon as one symptom started to dissipate, a new one would crop up.
How I initially responded to my symptoms
I spent an inordinate amount of time and money over the years searching for the person/thing/exercise that would ‘cure’ me. I had MRI scans, blood tests, bladder instillations, every type of massage imaginable and bought all the gadgets. Throwing all my efforts into researching, controlling and fixing my symptoms gave me a sense of being ‘in charge’. Of course, I now see that this hyper-alert control ironically gave my primitive nervous system some substitution for the sense of safety I desperately craved.
How chronic symptoms led me to my career
In my plight to better understand the body and ‘fix’ myself and others, I decided to become a physiotherapist. Of course, a few years into working, I was feeling somewhat less enthusiastic. Many patients just wouldn’t get better or would improve a little then feel much worse. This was much more likely if symptoms had been around for a long period of time.
The day after being offered my first senior post, I awoke with terrible foot pain. My heels and then top of my feet would burn 24/7. I couldn’t walk more than 100 metres without stopping to apply ice. Even the bedsheets touching my feet was agony.
With my determined, perfectionist and anxious tendencies, I continued to exercise daily to maintain some feeling of control – I couldn’t exercise standing so I found full-body workouts for people with foot pain! However, a few months later, I was also hit with unbearable bi-lateral hip pain. This was preceded with my elbows swelling and aching to the point of not being able to hold my phone or pick up a pen.
Hitting rock bottom
At this point, I was completely crippled with extreme anxiety and angry that I couldn’t do anything I wanted to – why me? This was coupled with hyper-fixation on my pain, and again, finding the fix.
Unsurprisingly, I had been off work for several months by this point. Being in pain most of the day took a huge toll on my relationship at the time, which also broke down, and I had to move out of the house I had bought with my then-partner and back in with my mum.
To top it all off, I was told by the chronic pain lead physiotherapist at the time that there was a good possibility I would never recover, and that I may have to think about permanently modified duties.
To say I was at rock bottom would be an understatement.
A new avenue to explore
By some divine chance, I accidently downloaded Eckhart Tolle’s book ‘A New Earth’ and stumbled across a form of parts work* called ‘inner bonding’**. Listening to these profound insights daily opened my mind to wider perspectives and for the first time, I fell into deep surrender. Clearly no one was coming to save me. If this was my life from now on, I at least wanted to stop hating myself, stop judging myself and stop pressuring myself to be perfect.
I found safety in getting curious and understanding my behaviours and ‘personality’. Playing detective, I discovered that I had subconsciously formed many false beliefs about my worth early on in life that had led to repeated thoughts/feelings and behaviours as way to ‘survive’. I made a firm decision never to criticise myself again and started recognising and speaking kindly to myself when I found myself in an old thought or behaviour loop, keen to understand the intention of my automatic responses.
Embracing mind-body approaches
I commenced my own subconscious reprogramming practice, which involved combining visualisations of health and freedom with feelings of joy and peace while collating evidence of the opposite of my old beliefs.
I started compassion and grounding meditations daily (in positions that were bearable or when walking) and inviting in my emotions (which were plentiful), letting them permeate every cell of my body. I was motivated by amazement that staying with the uncomfortable sensations of emotions and physical sensations with courage and curiosity actually led to their dissipation. I now know that I was unknowingly practising embodiment*** and somatic tracking****!
Slowly but surely, with a new-found understanding and compassion for myself, I started engaging in things I used to enjoy. My focus became my relationship to self, rather than the pain, which had already started to dissipate as a knock-on-effect of my nervous system not being stuck in survival.
Delving into the neuroscience
At this point, I knew nothing about the emerging neuroscience behind the mind-body connection. But I was getting better (with flares) by the week. Fascinated by the improvements I was experiencing physically, I curiously and unbiasedly dived into reading every bit of neuroscience research I could get my hands on (the perks of my determined and driven personality trait 😉). I began with research papers by neuroscientist, Lorimer Moseley and papers in the emerging field of pyscho-neuro-immunology, later coming to work of clinicians like Dr Howard Schubiner and Alan Gordon (LSCW).
The non-linear road to recovery
Of course, as my sweet primitive brain and nervous system had practised creating networks for pain many times before, it wasn’t going to lay up protecting me from other social and emotional potential threats quite this easily. I would often experience old pains when in certain environments or contexts previously associated with fear of pain. I found that my brain was really good at activating pain networks when I was in situations that evoked the potential of feeling hurt emotionally, or if I perceived any form of being trapped.
Several times I would get a new symptom or have an old one crop up and fall back into fear. The more I understood the neuroscience, and the more I focused on speaking kindly to my symptom while curiously exploring the emotional threat beneath, the safer I felt and the symptom would melt away in time. Of course this took a lot of practice – the ‘pain-fear’ cycle takes patience, compassion and repeated small actions to be broken.
It has now been several years since I have experienced any persistent pain. I work as both a nervous system practitioner and pain recovery coach and use my position as a physiotherapist to deliver modern pain science and treatment to patients. I never dive into this work with my NHS patients. After all, the medical system and biological evolution both present challenges in considering pain as being influenced by anything other than structural change. Instead, I incorporate a lot of exercises that help regulate the nervous system while guiding the person to increase activity levels. I gradually introduce more pain science as the patient starts to feel better, helping them to make sense of their pain in relation to their life experiences.
Key takeaways from my recovery journey
Through my lived experience of recovery, I learnt that:
The potential for our brain to interpret threat and output pain will always exist.
Our modern medical model, while immensely necessary, is designed to label and categorise symptoms, not take a broader approach to ask why.
There are many, many ways to turn down the danger alarm signal, and help our brain out in interpreting sensory data correctly.
Symptoms can continue if we remain in chronic fear, concern and anticipation around them. Compassion and willingness to befriend these protective parts of us, while gathering evidence that symptoms are neuroplastic, helps us move through natural fear and concern.
The nervous system ultimately responds to our internal state of safety. This often requires deeper shifts.
Repetition + patience + emotional and belief shifts = new neural networks and reduced pain outputs.
References
*Parts work is a (usually practitioner-led) practice to help a client understand the role of their unwanted or frequently played out emotional and behavioural patterns and cultivate deeper compassion for themselves. By developing a curious and compassionate self, we are able to see our unwanted or unfunctional behaviours/emotional patterns as ‘parts’ of us that developed to protect us from feeling overwhelmed with grief, terror, shame or loneliness. We often developed beliefs about ourselves and the world early on that initially served to protect us, but may now be creating unwanted stress within the nervous system. The most well-known form of parts work is ‘Internal Family Systems’ patented by Richard Schwartz.
**Inner bonding is a self-healing practice developed by Margaret Paul for allowing healthy emotional expression, then curiously enquiring to discover the beliefs and/or needs behind our emotions. This enables us to practice compassion and take loving action for ourselves moving forwards.
***Embodiment refers to the practice of being fully present in the body in the current moment, engaging your senses and noticing sensations and emotions in your body.
****Somatic tracking is a mind-body technique that can be used as part of a neuroplastic approach to pain recovery (or recovery from other chronic symptoms). This practice helps to teach the brain to reinterpret sensations in the body through a lens of safety (rather than fear). It involves mindfully attending to physical sensations in the body, re-appraising them as safe (not dangerous) and bringing lightness, curiosity and even humour to the practice to help unwind the fear that fuels chronic symptoms.
