Dear Therapist: When Pain Takes the Things That Bring You Joy

A reflection on fear, flares, and learning to trust a nervous system that forgot how to feel safe

Photo by Erik Dungan on Unsplash‍ ‍

"I definitely have neuroplastic leg pain. Swimming and hiking are first loves. I went swimming for thirty minutes last week and the next day was so awful. I've lost all courage to try again. How do you get past the rebound pain? I feel like pain is attacking everything that used to bring me joy."

Dear Reader,

You went swimming. Thirty minutes. And for those thirty minutes, something that belongs to you, the water, the movement, the particular freedom of it, was yours again.

I want to start there, because it matters.

You said the next day was awful. That the pain came back so severely it took your courage with it. And I notice you used the word attacking, as if your body had waited for you to reach for something joyful and then punished you for it.

I want to offer you something about that timing, because I think it's actually important. Pain that arrives the following day, rather than in the water or immediately after, is telling us something. What your body most likely encountered the next morning were the normal, benign sensations of muscles that had worked, the kind of mild, diffuse awareness that follows any return to movement after a rest period, however brief. In a settled nervous system, those sensations barely register. But in a sensitised one, they don't get evaluated for what they actually are. They simply arrive as unfamiliar physical signals, and the nervous system, primed to protect you, reads them as threat. Not because something went wrong. Because the system has become so alert that it can no longer easily distinguish between I swam and my body noticed and I am in danger. Nothing was damaged. The alarm just couldn't tell the difference.

Your body isn't attacking you. It's protecting you. Clumsily, excessively, at completely the wrong moment, but protecting you still. Somewhere along the way, your nervous system learned that this kind of movement meant threat. And so it did what frightened systems do: it mobilised everything it had.

You cannot negotiate with something you believe is your enemy. But you can, slowly, begin to earn back the trust of a system that has simply forgotten how to feel safe.

This is where I want to gently offer something, not as a prescription, but as a different way of thinking about return. The question isn't whether to go back to the water. It's how you go back, and what you're asking of yourself when you do. Thirty minutes, approached with determination and hope, sends one kind of signal. Five minutes, approached with genuine curiosity, let's just see, nothing is at stake here, sends quite another. You're not sneaking past the guard. You're teaching it, repetition by repetition, that the gate can open without catastrophe following.

Avoidance makes complete sense after what happened. It's not weakness. It's the most rational response to an experience that hurt you. But avoidance also confirms the nervous system's hypothesis, that the water was dangerous, that joy has a price. Each small return, however tentative, begins to rewrite that story.

And then there is the grief in what you wrote, because I don't want to move past it too quickly. When pain gathers in the places that make you most yourself, it isn't only frightening. It's a particular kind of loss. The loss of ease. Of freedom. Of being able to reach for something joyful without calculating the cost. That deserves to be named, not just solved.

Swimming and hiking aren't just things you do. They're part of how you know yourself. Finding your way back, even partially, even slowly, is about more than movement. It's about reclaiming the self that lives there.

The courage you lost isn't gone. It's waiting to see whether it's safe to come back out.

It is. Gently. On your terms.

Jean

If this resonated with you, I've created a free guide that explores all five key reasons chronic pain persists and what you can gently do about it.

📥 "5 Key Reasons Your Pain Becomes Chronic, and How to Break Free"

And if you feel the need to put your experience into words, you can also write to me via Dear Therapist.

If you're ready for personalised support on your journey, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out, and we can have a friendly chat to see if my approach is the right fit for you.