"Her back pain had been serving her."
The client had struggled with back pain for a long time. When we began working together, what first came up was a pattern of extreme control — a need to manage everything around her because of a deep fear of the unknown. She had spent her life acting from fear: fear of failing, fear of getting it wrong, fear of not being enough. That belief — I am not good enough — was at the very root of it all.
She had also spent years overcommitting. Saying yes when she meant no. Making herself indispensable to the people around her. This, we found, came from a fear of abandonment. As a child, her parents had divorced and her father had left. Her inner child had done what children do — she had blamed herself. And from that moment she had quietly decided that if she just did enough, gave enough, was enough, nobody would ever leave again.
When we turned our attention directly to the back pain — to understand what was really behind it — something unexpected emerged. As a child, her stepsister had been in a traumatic car accident — brain damage, body damage, a level of suffering that became the measuring stick for everything that followed. In that family, no one else's pain was allowed to count. Whatever anyone else felt was dismissed as whining, bitching, complaining. You sucked it up. You compared yourself to what she had been through and you said nothing. Nobody's feelings were valid — because how could they be, next to that?
And so her own back pain had become something quietly precious. It was the one thing that made her feel seen. The one thing that gave her permission to need something. The one thing that couldn't be dismissed. The pain had been serving her — holding space for a version of herself that had never been allowed to hurt out loud.
The back pain had been serving her all along. Once we found that — once we cleared the beliefs underneath it and gave that younger child what she had actually needed — her body no longer needed to hold it.
