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For people living with chronic pain, discomfort is only part of the story. Over time, pain can become so familiar that many individuals struggle to remember what life felt like without it. However, the impact goes far beyond physical sensations. Chronic pain often disrupts sleep, weakens focus and concentration, and limits mobility, creating a ripple effect across every aspect of daily life. Many people also experience a deep sense of isolation. Even with access to online forums and support groups, the constant focus on symptoms and negative experiences can unintentionally reinforce feelings of hopelessness rather than relief. The Hidden Burden of Chronic Pain A common and frustrating reality for many sufferers is the absence of clear answers. Years of medical appointments, scans, and treatments can lead to dead ends and false hope. This uncertainty often leaves individuals feeling stuck, unheard, and unsure of where to turn next. Living with chronic pain also places strain on emotional and social well-being. Persistent discomfort can interfere with sleep quality, reduce productivity at work, and create tension in relationships. Over time, this combination of physical and emotional stress can become overwhelming. Why Chronic Pain Sufferers Feel Unheard One of the most difficult aspects of chronic pain is the feeling of not being fully understood. Because pain is invisible, it is often hard to communicate its severity to others, including healthcare providers. This can lead to frustration and a sense of being dismissed or overlooked. Despite these challenges, many individuals with chronic pain develop remarkable resilience. They learn to cope, adapt, and push through difficult days. This determination, while admirable, can also mask how much support they truly need. Why Hypnosis Can Be Effective for Chronic Pain Interestingly, this same resilience makes chronic pain sufferers especially strong candidates for hypnosis. Their ability to focus, endure discomfort, and remain mentally engaged can enhance the effectiveness of hypnotic techniques. Hypnosis is not a new or experimental approach. In fact, pain relief is one of its most researched and historically documented uses. Records dating back to ancient Egypt, around 1500 BC, describe practices in so-called sleep temples, where individuals sought healing through guided suggestion and focused attention. Patients would enter a trance-like state while priest-physicians offered positive suggestions to influence their experience of illness. Modern hypnosis uses similar principles, though with refined and evidence-based techniques. For example, eye fixation methods are often used to help individuals enter a relaxed and focused state of awareness. How Hypnosis Changes Pain Perception
It is important to understand that hypnosis does not simply remove pain. Instead, it works by changing how the brain interprets pain signals. Pain is not just a physical sensation; it is also shaped by perception, attention, and emotional response. Through hypnosis, individuals can learn to:
A Different Approach to Pain Relief For those who feel stuck in a cycle of chronic pain with no clear answers, hypnosis offers a different perspective. Rather than focusing solely on eliminating pain, it empowers individuals to change their relationship with it. This approach can help reduce suffering, restore a sense of control, and open the door to a more balanced and fulfilling life, even in the presence of ongoing symptoms.
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 I recently started playing with Legos again. As a kid, Legos were more my brother's thing, though back then we mostly had generic colored blocks rather than themed sets. We'd build elaborate towns together, invent stories for the characters, and after our first trip to Disney, we even constructed our own Lego Disneyland. None of my kids really caught the Lego bug, but last year my son gave me a flower bouquet set for Mother's Day, and working on it together reminded me how genuinely satisfying it feels to build something with your hands. This year I got a couple more sets for my birthday. Something fun. Something analog. I've been craving that more and more lately: time away from screens. So much of my life is spent on the computer that my free time has increasingly become about finding ways to truly unplug: reading, coloring, crafting. For a while, though, I didn't realize that what I thought was "downtime" wasn't actually restoring me at all. I was scrolling. Watching reels. Consuming without creating. My brain was busy but not resting; stimulated, but not nourished. Sound familiar? When "Easy" Isn't the Point Here's what surprised me when I picked up those Lego sets: it wasn't easy. Lego instructions are entirely visual: no words, just photos of each step. And I am very much a multi-modal learner. I want the lecture, the book, and the notes all at once. Give me all the information. So a wordless picture book for assembling a complex structure? A little disorienting. More than once, I assembled a section incorrectly and had to take it apart and start over. In the past, that might have derailed me. The frustration could have spiraled: why can't I get this right, this is supposed to be fun, I'm making a mess of a children's toy. (You might be familiar with the inner voice I mean). But instead, something different happened. I felt a quiet, steady determination. A calm certainty that I could figure it out, and that starting over wasn't a failure. It was just part of the process. I've been thinking about why that felt different. And I think it comes back to the work I've been doing, both personally and professionally. Growing at the Edge of Your Comfort Zone I've been training in a modality called Metaphors of Movement, and working with it has required me to stretch in ways that don't always feel comfortable. Learning new approaches means sitting with confusion, experimenting, getting things slightly wrong, and staying curious anyway. The same has been true of IEMT (Integral Eye Movement Therapy), another approach I use with clients. Both were developed by Andrew Austin, and he describes the distinction between them in a way I find beautifully clear: "When life has messed up the person (i.e. stuff happened to them) then IEMT is the model of choice. When it is the person who is messing up life (i.e. they are doing stuff to life) then MoM is a better choice." IEMT helps process what happened to you. Metaphors of Movement helps shift the patterns you're creating, the subtle, often invisible ways we get in our own way, limit our own lives, or repeat cycles we can't quite see from the inside. That distinction matters. Because many people arrive at therapy having done significant healing work. They've processed old wounds, made sense of their past, found their footing. And yet something still feels stuck. Life still isn't quite unfolding the way they'd hoped. That's often where Metaphors of Movement becomes remarkable. What This Means for You If you've ever felt like you've done the work: journaled, reflected, maybe even been in therapy before, and still find yourself running into the same walls, it may not be that you haven't healed enough. It may be that the next layer of change isn't about what happened to you. It's about discovering how you've been unconsciously shaping your experience since then. That's subtle, important work. And it doesn't require you to have it all figured out before it starts helping. Here's what struck me most in those Lego moments: the set got built. Even while I was confused, even while I backtracked, even while I checked the photos three times trying to figure out which piece went where, the thing came together. Piece by piece, step by step. Metaphors of Movement works the same way with clients. Even as I'm still deepening my own fluency with it, even when I pause to check my notes mid-session, the process does something. Change happens, often in ways that feel surprisingly gentle and surprisingly lasting. You don't have to wait until everything is perfectly understood to begin. You just have to be willing to sit with the process, and trust that starting over, or slowing down, or asking for help isn't failure. It's just part of building something worth keeping. Curious whether IEMT or Metaphors of Movement might be a fit for what you're working through? I'd love to connect.
It's my 46th birthday this week. I thought about marking it the way people do on the internet, one of those "who's going to tell her?" photo roundups, the kind where you scroll through decades of yourself and cringe, laugh, or both. So I pulled out the old albums and started looking. What I found surprised me. The Girl in the Photos The baby photos and early childhood snapshots are sweet but distant. I can piece together the context: a birthday cake, a Christmas morning, a family holiday, but I can't feel myself inside those moments. That little girl is mine in the way a character in a beloved book is yours: familiar, but separate. The teenage years are different. My best friend and I were obsessed with taking photos, and those albums are full of laughter so vivid I can practically still hear it. And then: marriage. Motherhood. Young and fully in it. Being Someone's Mother for Half My Life Here's a number that stopped me in my tracks this year: I have officially been someone's mother for half of my life. Looking at those photos, my daughters with their impossibly chubby cheeks and boisterous smiles, my son, the apple of all of our eyes - there was a deep ache in my chest. The best kind of ache. The kind that means something mattered. I saw every version of myself in those images: someone's wife, someone's mom, pregnant again (and again, and again), single, then someone else's wife. Divorced again. Life, in all its beautiful, messy iterations. I saw my brother, young, tall, a genuinely hilarious uncle. I saw my sister, always beside me, always laughing. I honestly don't know how I would have raised my children without her. She is one of the greatest constants of my life. I saw my own mom, not much older than I am now, kneeling in garden photos and pulling kids onto her lap. What a gift my parents' involvement was. Weekends at Grandpa's house, visits to Grandma's, a steady undercurrent of love and support that my children grew up in. A Trip Down Memory Lane (Without the Grief) I was emotional going through those photos. But here's what was different: it wasn't sadness. It was joy. Pure, full-bodied joy. The kind that makes you think: I would take all of it back. Every hard, exhausting, beautiful moment of it. What once felt impossibly challenging, when viewed from here, looks like perseverance. Like growth. Like a life actually lived. And I know exactly why I was able to feel it that way. The Unexpected Side Effect of IEMT Nobody Talks About I'm an Integral Eye Movement Therapy (IEMT) practitioner, and I've experienced the work firsthand as a client. Most conversations about IEMT focus on its power to process difficult emotions: grief, frustration, fear, painful memories. But today I want to talk about a side effect that doesn't get nearly enough airtime. After doing IEMT work, I can look back at my entire life without judgement. Not through a lens of regret. Not with the urge to delete photos of an ex or cringe away from old versions of myself. Not with the heavy, complicated grief that so often colours nostalgia. Instead: gratitude. Appreciation. A genuine, settled love for every version of me that shows up in those photos: the young mom, the woman starting over, the girl who was just figuring it out. Could I have done some things differently? Of course. But for the first time in a long time, I don't need to armour myself against my own history to answer that honestly. That is an extraordinary thing. And it gives me real hope for the years ahead; that they can be even more joy-filled, now that I've made peace with the ones behind me. When Your Identity Gets Outgrown: The Transition Nobody Names Having my children young meant I arrived at a version of empty nest syndrome earlier than most. For a season, I had quietly forgotten something important: being a mother is not my identity. It's a part of who I am, one beautiful, defining piece of a much larger whole. The feelings that arrive when something you've devoted years of energy to becomes self-sustaining (or complete) are rarely discussed openly. But they are so common. I see it regularly with my own clients: not just in parenting transitions, but at graduation, retirement, after a long relationship ends, after a major career chapter closes. These are the quiet identity earthquakes. The "who am I now?" moments. They deserve far more space in the conversation. Change Is Slow, and Then All at Once I was speaking with someone recently about one of the more unexpected shifts I noticed after my own IEMT sessions: I could leave dirty dishes in the sink. I was laughing as I said: "maybe you can't relate, but if you know, you know" and she understood immediately. Because it's never really about the dishes. With subconscious modalities, change doesn't always announce itself. At first it can feel like nothing is shifting. And then one day, you pull out a box of old photos on your birthday, and you realize: everything has. 46, and Actually Looking Forward In many ways, I can't believe that 20 years have passed since some of those memories. It feels like yesterday and like another lifetime, both at once. But I'm not sitting here wishing I could go back. I'm sitting here grateful for all of it, for right now, and for what's still ahead. Happy birthday to me. I can't wait to see what comes next. If any of this resonated with you, whether you're navigating a big life transition, struggling to look back without regret, or simply curious about IEMT, I'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or reach out directly.
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