
When I first spoke to Valentina, she was exhausted.
Not just from her pain—but from the cycle of chasing relief and always ending up back where she started.
She was 38, an accountant, and her pain would come and go—but when it came, it took over her life.
“It always started in the same spot,” she told me. “Deep in my lower right back and glute. Like a burning knot I couldn’t stretch or rub out.”
She tried everything: massage, chiropractic, yoga, even sitting on a tennis ball. Sometimes it helped a little. But never for long.
What struck me most about Valentina was her curiosity. She had started noticing something strange.
She was training for a marathon—and during her long runs, sometimes two or three hours, she felt fine. No pain at all. But when she got home, showered, and sat down to relax?
“It would hit me out of nowhere.
Like the moment I stopped moving, it seized up.”
That was her first crack in the logic she’d always believed: that pain had a purely physical cause. And then she noticed something else.
Valentina wasn’t being dramatic. She adores her mother. But their relationship is… complicated.
Her mom is loving. But also judgmental. Overbearing. Intense. Valentina felt constant pressure to both care for her and win her approval. And the more we talked, the more she began to see the pattern:
“Every time she books a trip.
Every time she says she’s coming.
That’s when it starts.”
It was like clockwork.
Once she saw that emotional connection—once we talked through how the nervous system stores and expresses tension—something clicked.
Valentina didn’t stretch harder. She didn’t fix her posture. She didn’t find a magic chiropractor.
What she did was face something she’d never fully allowed herself to believe:
That her pain might not be mechanical.
It might be emotional.
It might be a protective mechanism—a way her brain was expressing stress it didn’t know how to process. And once she saw that fully, something remarkable happened.
“I haven’t had a flare-up since. That was six months ago.”
When I followed up recently, Valentina told me she’s still pain-free. She still runs. Still works full-time. Still sees her mom (but with healthier boundaries).
She didn’t suppress her pain—she unlocked it.
And all it took was the courage to look in a different direction.
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For decades, patients with back pain have been told the same story: your spine is damaged, your muscles are weak, your body is broken. Surgery, injections, endless physical therapy — yet the epidemic only grows. But a small group of doctors and researchers dared to say: What if the problem isn’t in the back at all?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins discovered that once the brain learns to associate certain sensations with danger, it can keep generating pain even after the injury is gone. The good news: the brain can unlearn it too.

In a landmark study from the University of Colorado, two-thirds of chronic back-pain patients became pain-free after a brain-based program—no surgery, no medication. The treatment worked not by fixing the spine, but by retraining the brain.
You’ve fought hard and tried it all, but the burden was never yours to carry forever. Your brain is ready to reset, your body to feel safe again. Pain is not who you are - it’s time to reclaim your life.