What Your Pain is Actually Trying to Tell You
(And What to Do About It)

By Tabitha MacDonald, LMT | Soma Massage and Wellness Center, Lake Oswego, Oregon
Prefer to listen?  Podcast episode available.

Have you ever noticed that the pain that knocks your socks off is usually when you're taking your socks off?

It's almost embarrassing how undramatic it is. We expect these grand injury stories — a car accident, a fall, something that at least makes logical sense. But the truth? It's I was getting out of bed. It's I went to put my socks on. It's I got up from the toilet and everything just fell apart.

The most mundane things cause the biggest injuries.

Or do they?

The Shower Curtain That Changed Everything

Mine was in my thirties. I reached out to open a shower curtain and my entire back locked up. Nine months of barely being able to move. And it wasn't the first time — once or twice a year, like clockwork, my back would seize. Always at the worst possible moment. Huge workload. Full client schedule. No margin, no room, no time to stop.

For years I thought I just had a bad back. That was just my body. That was just my life after a certain age.

But here's the thing. I was a massage therapist. I was working with bodies every day. And I was going home, sitting on the couch, eating ice cream, and calling that self-care. I was using my body as my primary work tool and giving it nothing back. No movement, no maintenance, no respect.

At some point, my body made a decision: if she won't stop on her own, we'll make her stop.

And it worked. Every single year.

Until I started actually listening.

Here's what I've come to understand after two decades of working with pain: pain doesn't just show up. It whispers first. A little tightness here, a little fatigue there, a small signal that says hey, something needs your attention. And when we ignore those whispers long enough, eventually it stops whispering.

And it throws a tantrum.

That tantrum is what lands people in my office saying I don't know what happened, it just came on out of nowhere.

It was never out of nowhere. We just got really good at not hearing the quiet version.

The Four Layers of Pain Nobody Talks About

Here's what I've learned from working with chronic pain for over twenty years, both as a licensed massage therapist and as an intuitive coach: by the time pain shows up in your physical body, it has almost always already moved through three other layers first.

Most people — and most practitioners — only ever address the last one.

Layer 1: Emotional Grief, fear, anger, loss — emotions that didn't get fully processed and got stored somewhere in the body instead. The body keeps score, as they say. And it keeps it in muscle, fascia, and tissue.

Layer 2: Mental The stories and unconscious programs running quietly in the background. Pain is the only way I get permission to rest. My body isn't safe. I don't deserve to feel good. These beliefs drive behavior and behavior drives physical patterns — often for years before anything shows up as pain.

Layer 3: Energetic The inherited patterns. The contracts we made — often in childhood, sometimes even in the womb — about who we are, what we're allowed to have, and what our bodies are supposed to do. Science is now catching up to this through the field of epigenetics, which shows we can inherit our parents' behavioral and emotional patterns at a biological level. The fears they carried, the coping strategies they developed — some of that gets passed down. Not as a story. As a program.

Layer 4: Physical The structure, the alignment, the tissue tension — the layer most treatment focuses on exclusively.

All four layers are real. All four layers need attention. The reason so many people stay stuck in chronic pain despite trying everything is that they've been working with layer four while layers one, two, and three are still completely untouched.

What Happened on That Zoom Call

Recently I was on a Zoom call with a friend who was joining a practice session for one of the coaching programs I'm part of — a group where practitioners are learning the processes I use in my work. She volunteered to be the practice client.

She was dealing with an 8 out of 10 head pain.

If you've ever used a pain scale, 8 is not a rough day. 8 is an unbearable day. 8 is the kind of pain where it's hard to think, hard to focus, hard to function.

One thing I want to say about pain scales: your perception of your pain is the only thing that matters. Not what caused it, not what it looks like on a scan, not how it compares to someone else's experience. We are always, only, working with your experience exactly as it is.

Her experience was an 8.

She mentioned her wisdom teeth — coming in, needing to come out, that's where the pain was. Wisdom tooth pain is real and I wasn't dismissing it. But I could hear something else underneath it. I've worked with pain long enough that I can usually hear what's underneath the presenting complaint pretty quickly.

What I heard underneath the wisdom teeth was worry. Worry about what this pain was going to mean for her family. She has a small child. She couldn't concentrate, couldn't focus, couldn't get things done. And it wasn't the pain itself that was the problem — it was everything she couldn't do because of it.

I also noticed the timing. This was happening just days after Mother's Day. And she had lost her mother when she was very young.

When we got into the session and started the work, I could see it — these unconscious contracts her inner child had made. Contracts that sounded something like: I won't have health because you didn't. A young child's way of staying connected to a parent who was gone. Not conscious. Not intentional. But real, and running quietly in the background, shaping everything.

This is worth pausing on. Pain isn't always constant. Sometimes it's seasonal. Sometimes it's situational. Sometimes it only flares at a certain time of year, around a certain person, or in a certain environment. When that's the case, it's almost always worth asking: what does this time of year mean to me? What anniversaries live here? What does my body remember that my conscious mind has moved on from?

The body keeps that record whether we're aware of it or not.

The Double Bubble: Choosing Both at the Same Time

There's a concept in psychology called paradoxical intention, developed by Viktor Frankl. He noticed that when people deliberately leaned into the thing they feared most, the fear started to lose its grip. Instead of fighting the feared outcome, you choose it intentionally — and something in the nervous system can finally relax, because it's no longer fighting on two fronts at once.

That's the foundation of a process called the Double Bubble Recode.

Here's how it works in plain language:

First, you choose the pain. You don't try to make it go away. You don't white-knuckle through it. You actually decide — on purpose — that the pain is real, it's there, and you're going to let it be as big as it wants to be. Worst case. Full permission.

Then you choose the opposite. You step into what it genuinely feels like to have a body that feels good. Healthy, clear, free of pain. Not what you think it should feel like — what it actually feels like when you let yourself imagine it.

Then you hold both at the same time. And you let the part of you that holds your highest intelligence — your superconscious — find the path between them. You're not forcing a resolution. You're dissolving the conflict by refusing to pretend only one option is allowed to exist.

Why does this work for pain specifically?

Because a lot of the time, we are in a quiet war with our own body. Part of us desperately wants the pain gone. And another part — the part nobody talks about — has some kind of investment in it staying. Maybe the pain is the only excuse available to rest. Maybe it's keeping you from something that feels scary to move toward. Maybe there's a contract, like my friend's, that says belonging means suffering the same way someone you loved suffered.

When you choose both the pain and the absence of it simultaneously, you stop feeding that war. And the nervous system, which has been burning enormous energy maintaining the conflict, finally gets to exhale.

My friend came in at an 8.

She came out at a 2.

No touch. No bodywork. Just that process.

Why the Body Still Needs Hands-On Support

This is not a mind-over-matter story. Pain is not all in your head and thinking differently isn't enough on its own. The body absolutely needs support too.

After that session, my friend followed up with structural integration work on her jaw and cranium, and then worked with a craniosacral therapist. The psychological and energetic work created the opening — and the physical work helped integrate it.

Craniosacral therapy is one of the most under-explained tools in healing, so here's a plain-language version of what it actually does:

Your brain and spinal cord are surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid. That fluid has its own rhythm — a slow, quiet pulse, about six to twelve cycles a minute, that moves through your central nervous system completely separately from your heartbeat and breathing.

Your body also has a connective tissue system — fascia — running from your skull all the way down to your tailbone, wrapping around your brain and spinal cord like a sleeve. Stress, trauma, physical tension, even years of sitting at a desk in a position your body doesn't love — all of it can cause that sleeve to tighten and lose its natural rhythm. And when that happens, everything running through it — your nervous system, your ability to regulate and recover — gets affected.

Craniosacral therapy uses an incredibly light touch — sometimes literally the weight of a nickel — at specific points on the skull, spine, and sacrum to listen to that rhythm and help the body find its way back to it. It's not manipulation. It's holding space for the body to remember what it already knows how to do.

When combined with the identity-level and energetic work, the results are often profound. The mind releases the stored pattern. The body gets support releasing the physical holding. The nervous system stops bracing. All four layers, addressed together.

You Only Get One Body

My back no longer goes out. Not because I got lucky, and not because I found the right physical treatment — though that helped. But because I did my own work. I looked at my own layers. I got honest about the programs I had been running and the contracts I had made without knowing it.

I take time every day now to listen to my body. Because you only get one. And in twenty years of working in this field, I have seen too many times what happens when people don't tend to this primary asset. If you ask anyone who is sick, or aging, and didn't take care of their body — it's usually the one thing they wish they had invested in more than anything else. There is no buying it back once it hits a certain point.

The good news — the reason I genuinely love working with pain — is that the body is not trying to destroy you. It is trying to communicate with you. And the moment you stop fighting it and start getting curious about what it's actually saying, things can shift faster than you'd expect.

Ready to Work With All Four Layers?

If you've been living with pain that keeps coming back — pain that moves around, pain that flares at certain times of year, pain that doesn't fully respond to treatment no matter what you try — it may be time to look at the whole picture.

The one-on-one sessions at Soma Wellness blend Superconscious Recode, NLP, hypnosis, and identity-level work to address the root cause of pain across all four layers. When paired with skilled bodywork — structural integration and craniosacral therapy — we're working the physical, emotional, mental, and energetic dimensions at the same time.

The sessions are not a quick fix. But for many people, it's the first time they've felt genuinely heard — by a practitioner, and by their own body.

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Tabitha MacDonald is a Licensed Massage Therapist (OR License #19868), Intuitive Coach, and host of the Soma Flow Podcast. She is the founder of Soma Massage and Wellness Center in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and has spent over a decade specializing in chronic pain, trauma-informed bodywork, and mind-body integration. She works with clients in-person in Lake Oswego and online worldwide.

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