Therapy for Chronic Pain
If you live with chronic pain, you already know something that most people around you don't: it isn't just about physical sensation. Chronic pain quietly invades your nights, making sleep elusive. It dulls your focus, strains your relationships, and clouds your ability to plan for the future, deeply shaking your sense of self. Often, it brings a particular kind of loneliness—trying to explain an invisible ache to people who can't quite grasp its weight, including healthcare providers.
I work with adults living with chronic pain, and I live with it too. I developed fibromyalgia syndrome in my late twenties and have spent years learning — personally and professionally — what it takes to build a life that chronic pain doesn't dictate. That experience shapes how I work.
Why Therapy for Chronic Pain Is Different
Standard mental health treatment often wasn't designed with chronic pain in mind. The standard fifty-minute format, the emphasis on verbal processing, the assumption that the presenting problem is primarily psychological — none of these map easily onto the reality of living in a body that is persistently sending distress signals.
Therapy for chronic pain starts by recognizing pain as a whole-person experience. The nervous system learns patterns that become self-reinforcing. Healing often means changing your relationship to your body, not fighting it. It's about understanding what pain responds to and finding new ways to work with it.
How Chronic Pain and the Nervous System Interact
Chronic pain is not simply a matter of ongoing tissue damage. In many cases, the nervous system becomes sensitized — primed to generate pain signals in anticipation of movement or threat, even when the original injury has healed. This sensitization can be deepened by stress, trauma, and the cumulative experience of not being believed or effectively treated.
This is not a personal failing. It is the nervous system doing what nervous systems do: trying to protect you. The challenge is that those protective patterns can become obstacles to living.
Understanding this opens up real possibilities for change. When we work together to regulate the nervous system, increase body awareness, and address the emotional layers that can amplify pain signals, many people find they develop a new capacity to manage their experience — not by eliminating pain, but by changing their relationship to it.
Read more about the emerging research on psychedelics and pain management.
What Treatment Looks Like
Sessions are 45 to 85 minutes long and offered via telehealth to adults in Oregon and Washington. My approach integrates several evidence-informed modalities:
Somatic approaches help you develop awareness of physical sensation and release patterns of tension and bracing that contribute to pain. Rather than avoiding body awareness, we work toward it gently and incrementally. Learn what to expect from somatic therapy for chronic pain.
Mindfulness-based approaches build the capacity to observe pain without immediately reacting to it — creating space between sensation and response.
Trauma-informed care addresses the ways that past experiences, including medical trauma, may be influencing your nervous system's current state.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, for those who are interested and appropriate candidates, can provide an opportunity for deeper nervous system reorganization and new perspectives on entrenched pain patterns. Learn more about KAP for chronic pain.
Throughout, I take an active role — not just listening, but offering guidance, psychoeducation, and practical tools you can use between sessions.
What Draws People to This Work
You might find therapy for chronic pain helpful if you:
- Have been managing chronic pain for months or years with limited relief
- Notice that stress, sleep, or emotional state affects your pain
- Have experienced difficulty being heard or believed by medical providers
- Feel like pain has narrowed your life — your activities, relationships, or sense of possibility
- Are curious about approaches that go beyond symptom management
People who do this work often find that they can change their relationship to their pain, communicate more effectively with their healthcare team, handle flare-ups with more confidence, and reconnect with things that matter to them.
Read more about therapy for chronic pain.
A Personal Note
I know how hard it is to advocate for yourself in a healthcare system that often doesn't have good tools for chronic pain. I know the frustration of being told that your pain is "just stress" or that you need to learn to live with it — as if you haven't been trying. And I know that healing, when it happens, often looks less like a cure and more like getting your life back on your own terms.
That's what I'm here to support. If any of this resonates, I'd welcome the chance to talk.
