Soma Rising

What Your Pain is Actually Trying to Tell You (And What to Do About It)

• Tabitha MacDonald • Episode 86

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The pain that drops you to your knees rarely arrives with a dramatic story. It shows up when you’re doing something laughably normal: opening a shower curtain, putting on socks, standing up from the toilet. That’s not proof your body is fragile. It’s often proof your body has been whispering for a long time and finally found a moment you couldn’t ignore.

We walk through how pain actually escalates, why your perception is the only pain scale that matters, and what we can learn by tracking what the pain prevents you from doing. Then we share a powerful Zoom coaching moment: a business-owning mom walks in with 8 out of 10 head pain and leaves at a 2 in about 20 minutes. No touch, no tricks. We unpack the Double Bubble process, rooted in paradoxical intention, and why “choosing the pain” can stop the internal war that keeps the nervous system locked in threat.

We also break down a four-layer framework for chronic pain relief and recurring symptoms: emotional patterns like grief, mental stories and beliefs, energetic or inherited programming (yes, epigenetics comes up), and the physical body. Finally, we explain craniosacral therapy in plain language and why pairing nervous system coaching with skilled bodywork can help changes last, especially when pain flares around certain times of year or meaningful anniversaries.

If you’ve tried everything and the pain keeps coming back, listen with an open mind and a curious body. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s stuck, and leave a review so more people can find a smarter path to real relief.

This is Soma Rising: Conversations for a Conscious Future —where health, wealth, love, and purpose flow together on the Golden Path of alignment.  Learn more at somatribe.org

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Tabitha MacDonald is an Intuitive Coach and Bodyworker committed to helping people overcome pain fast so they can experience the love, success, freedom, and fulfillment they deserve.

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The Socks That Start Pain

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Have you ever noticed that the pain that knocks your socks off is usually when you're taking your socks off? It's so stupid, right? We all expect these grand stories. We expect dramatic injuries, a car accident, a fall. Something that at least makes sense as a reason to be in agony. But the truth is it's almost never that. It's I was getting out of bed. It's I was putting my socks on. It's I was getting up off the toilet and everything just fell apart. The most mundane things cause the biggest injuries. Or do they? Because here's what I know after spending years working with bodies and with pain. That shower curtain moment, and we've all had one, is never actually about the shower curtain. Mine was in my 30s. I reached out to open a shower curtain, and my entire back locked up. Nine months. No solution. And it wasn't the first time. It was just the worst time. Once or twice a year, like cloth work, my back would seize. Always at the worst possible moment. Huge workload, full client schedule, no margin for error, no room, no time to stop. Now, it usually started when I started exercising. That morning, I had done a 20-minute Gillian Michaels workout before I was about to take the kids to the beach for the day because I was tired of being fat and I wanted to get in shape in 20 minutes, and I wanted my body to change with one 20-minute workout immediately and permanently. We can talk about that

Shower Curtain Moment And Back Seizure

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more later. For years, I thought I had a bad back. That was just my body, that was just my life after a certain age, blah, blah, blah. I hear it all the time in the clinic. But here's the thing as a massage therapist, I work on bodies every day. I was going home, sitting on the couch, eating ice cream, and calling that self-care. I was using my body as my primary work tool and giving it nothing back. No healthy movement, no maintenance, no respect. And at some point, my body made a decision. If she won't stop on her own, I'll make her stop. And it worked. Every single year, more than once a year, until I started actually listening. Here's what I want you to sit with before we go any further. Pain doesn't just show up, it whispers first. It whispers and it whispers. A little tightness here, a little fatigue there, a little nudge that says, hey, something needs your attention. And when we ignore those whispers long enough, eventually it stops whispering and it throws a tantrum. And that tantrum is what lands people in my office saying, I don't know what happened. It just came out of nowhere. And it was never out of nowhere, at least not normally. You just got really good at not hearing the quiet version. So today we're going to talk about something that happened recently because it's one of the clearest examples I've seen of this in a long time. I was on a Zoom call with a practice coaching group. It's part of my coaching certification that I did five years

Pain Whispers Before It Screams

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ago. And I've volunteered to like come into practice sessions and help people who are learning the processes and improve their skills. And one of my friends is in this particular little practice group. And we were one of the newer coaches who's new to this process, not necessarily a new coach, but new to Chris Duncan's work, wanted to practice the technique called the double bubble. And with a double bubble, we use a recode with it, which is the most effective way to transform anything. And so my friend, she says, I'm in so much pain today. I can't practice, but I'll receive. And of course, I immediately

Reading Pain Through A Screen

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light up because I'm like, oh, pain. Pain is pain, I know. I'll help. And so she volunteers to be the practice client and so that the other coach can watch how we go through the process. So as we start going through the questioning, I'm looking at everything, right? Even on a Zoom call. I'm not just looking and hearing what she's saying. I'm watching her face, I'm watching her body movement. I can pick up so much information from places people don't even know that I can pick it up from. This is kind of a superpower, but it's also a trained skill that I've had from working with people in pain for over 20 years. So she was dealing with an eight out of 10 head pain. And if you've ever used a pain scale, you know that eight is not a rough day. Eight is an unbearable day, right? Eight is the kind of pain where it's hard to think, hard to focus, hard to be a functional human being. Period. Throw in being a business owner, a wife, and a mom. Now we're talking it, it's a really bad day. And I want to pause here for a second because this matters when we're talking about pain. Your perception of your pain is the only thing that matters. Not what caused it, not what it looks like on a scan, not how it compares to what someone else has been through. If you've had a baby and they were beating on your spine for 12 hours before they came out, you have a very different pain scale than someone who hasn't had that experience. And that's completely fine and normal. We're not comparing, we are always only working with your experience exactly as it is. That is the most accurate pain scale. So her experience is an eight at this point. And so that's what we're working with. She mentioned that her wisdom teeth were coming in, needed to come out, and that's where the pain was. Now, because I can see pain, I knew that's not where the pain was coming from. And wisdom teeth pain is very, very real. I've had it, I know what it feels like, and I'm not dismissing it. But I could hear something else underneath it. The way she was talking, the way she was holding herself, even on screen, where she was pointing to her headache. None of that is wisdom tooth pain. All of that is something deeper. And I've worked with pain long enough that I can usually hear what's underneath the presenting complaint pretty quickly. And what I heard underneath the wisdom teeth was worry, worry about what this pain was going to mean for her life. She has a small child, she couldn't concentrate, couldn't focus, couldn't get things done, and she owns a business. Do you know how hard it is to run a business when you're in pain? It's hard. And it it wasn't even really the pain that was the problem. It was everything she couldn't do because of it. And that is almost always the story with pain. It's I can't do this because of the pain. And here's something I noticed that I don't think was a coincidence at all. And it later revealed that it most definitely wasn't. This was just a couple days after Mother's Day. She had lost her mother when she was very young. And when we got into the session and did the recode, I could see the pattern, these unconscious contracts her inner child had made. Contracts that sounded something like, I won't have health because you didn't. Ways that a young child's mind tries to maintain connection and belonging with a parent who is gone. Not consciously, not on purpose, but very real. And it's running in the background, quietly shaping everything. And I'll come back to that in a different episode in more detail. For right now, just we're just gonna pin it and it'll probably be in the next episode. Because it matters more than it might seem right now, and it deserves its own conversation. But let me explain what the double bubble recode is because it sounds a little unusual. And I want you to understand why it works before I tell you what happened. There's a concept in psychology called paradoxical intention. It was developed by Victor Frankel, a psychiatrist who noticed that when people deliberately leaned into the thing they feared most, the fear started to lose its grip. And instead of fighting the feared outcome, you just choose it intentionally. And something in the nervous system can finally relax because it's no longer fighting on two fronts at once. That's the foundation of the double bubble. And here's how it works in plain language. First, you choose the pain. You literally choose it. You don't try to make it go away, you don't white knuckle through it or pretend it isn't there. You actually decide on purpose that the pain is real, it's there, and you're going to let it be as big as it wants to be.

Double Bubble Meets Paradoxical Intention

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Worst case, full permission, you write it all down. What I'm making this pain mean is I'll probably die alone on a toilet like Elvis. That's the one my brain always usually goes to. My clients always have their own worst case scenario or fear. And then you bring light to it instead of covering it up with affirmations and positive self-talk. Because if the pain's not shifting, it doesn't need an affirmation, it needs a light. And then we go and we define what does the opposite look like? So now we got the worst case scenario. What is the opposite? Now, people in pain, they hate this question. They look at me with daggers coming out of their eyeballs because they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. Because the pain's so loud, sometimes it's hard for them to get there. So if that's you, that's normal. Let's just pretend for a moment we could take all of the pain, put it, put it in a container, set it aside, and you have a whole new body without the pain. And now we're going to step into what it actually feels like to have a body that feels good and healthy, clear, free of pain. Not what you think it should feel like, what it genuinely feels like when you let yourself imagine it. Because remember, the brain doesn't know the difference between what's real or what is what is real or what is imagined. And so imagination plays a huge role in resolving pain and other patterns. It's especially important in the double bubble because we need two opposing points to choose from. Because believe it or not, there are parts of you that actually think the pain is there to serve a greater purpose for you. And what we do is we want to find the part of you that has the highest intelligence, which is your superconscious, and we find the path between worst case scenario and base best case scenario, and we're not forcing resolution, we're simply dissolving the conflict by refusing to pretend only one of those options is allowed to exist. Now, why does this specifically matter for pain? Because a lot of the time we are in a quiet war with our own body. Part of us desperately wants the pain gone. And another part, and this is the part that almost nobody talks about, has some kind of investment in that pain staying. I'm gonna repeat that because it's important. A part of your consciousness has some kind of investment in the pain being there. It's not conscious, it's not on purpose that that part exists. Maybe the pain is the only excuse you have to rest. Maybe it's keeping you from something that feels scary to move forward or toward. Maybe there's a contract somewhere like my friends that says belonging means suffering the same way someone you loved suffered. When you choose both the pain and the absence of it at the same time, you stop feeding that internal war. And the nervous system, which has been burning enormous energy trying to maintain the conflict, it's to exhale. My friend came in at an eight, she left at a two. Guess how long the process took? 20 minutes. No touch, no bodywork, just the process over Zoom. That's how powerful our superconscious recode work is. To get someone from an eight to a two in 20 minutes, that's magic. But is it? Or is it just neuroscience? Now I want to be really clear about something here because this is where I think a lot of people in the wellness space get it wrong. And I don't want to be one of those people. This is not a mind over matter story. This is not me saying your pain is all in your head, and if you just think differently, it will go away. That is not what happened, and that is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that pain has layers, and by the time it shows up in your physical body, it has almost always already moved through the other three. The first layer might be emotional, which is grief, fear, anger, loss, emotions that didn't get processed and get stored somewhere in the body instead. The second layer is mental, the stories, the beliefs, the unconscious programs running in the background. I won't have health because you didn't. Pain is the only way I get to rest. My body cannot be trusted. And then the third layer is energetic. The contracts, the inherited patterns, the things we absorbed from our parents and their parents before them that we don't even know are ours. This is where epigenetics come in, which I'm going to do a whole separate episode on this because the research is fascinating. But the short version is that science has now shown we can inherit our parents' behavioral and emotional patterns at a biological level. The things that happened to them, the fears they carried, the coping strategies they developed,

The Four Layers Of Pain

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some of that gets passed down, not as a story, as a program. And the fourth layer, the one most people focus on exclusively, is the physical body. Structure, alignment, tissue tension, the mechanics of it all. By the time something shows up in layer four, it has usually already moved through layers one, two, and three, which is why treating only the physical body, while important, is often not enough on its own to create lasting change for people. That's not dismissing physical treatment. That's what I do for a living. My friend still followed up and made the appointment to go see the cranial sacral therapist at my office. And that solidified the mental work we had just done. Because in order for the energetic and the psychological work, the coaching to hold, right, it needed the physical, the physical to match what we just did on the other three levels. Because we were working with the upper three levels, the energetic, the mental, and the emotional levels of pain. The physical body still needed to have a shift in the way her cranium was sitting to make more space for her brain. And that's where cranial sacral therapy is amazing and very, very helpful, especially if you're in a lot of pain, because going and getting a very painful massage might not be the best strategy for you when you have an eight out of 10 pain level. So I want to take a moment to explain cranial sacral therapy in plain language because I think it deserves a better explanation than it usually gets. And a lot of people don't even know what it is. But your brain and spinal cord are surrounded by fluid, cerebrospinal fluid, and that fluid has its own rhythm. A slow, quiet pulse that moves through your central nervous system completely separately from your heartbeat and your breathing. About six to twelve cycles a minute, just quietly doing its thing all day, every day. Your body also has a connective tissue system, Bosha, that runs from your skull all the way down to your tailbone, wrapping around your brain and spinal cord like a sleeve. When you go through stress, trauma, physical tension, or even just years of sitting at a desk in a position your body doesn't love to be in, that sleeve can tighten. It can lose its natural rhythm. And when that happens, everything running through it, your nervous system, your ability to regulate, your capacity to recover, it's affected.

Craniosacral Therapy In Plain Language

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Cranial sacral therapy uses an incredibly light touch, sometimes literally the weight of a nickel. Now, I want to throw in here because when people hear that, they go, I went to a massage therapist once and she touched me like a feather and it didn't do anything. That's not the same thing. Cranial sacral has a very specific intention, working with a very specific condition. A light efflage massage is not the same thing. So please separate the two. At specific points on the skull, the spine and the sacrum to listen to the rhythm and help the body find its way back to it. It's not manipulation the way that we do with neuromuscular therapy or deep tissue massage, and it's not force. It's more like holding space for the body to remember what it already knows how to do. If you had asked me five years ago if I thought there was any benefit in this style of bodywork, I would have wholeheartedly left you out of my clinic. Now I embrace it like it's God's gift to pain recovery and concussions because of the effect it has had on my healing and recovery. And I sing Daniel's praises daily to all of my clients because I'm like, this man has literally helped me get my brain back. And he was a student of cranial sacral. He, I was like his first client. And I am so grateful for us getting to learn it together because I still think he saved my life. And he is a man who I just admire because he's always learning. He's he's a man after my own heart. He's been with me for a decade at Soma. And he is just like me, where he's just always learning and growing, even in his 70s. So back to Cranial Sacral, it's what I'm talking about now is that when we combine that with this the coaching aspect of what I do, and that's using things like NLP. We've just renamed it the Soma Recode because we're basically combining, I basically combine a whole bunch of different things that I've studied and put them all together. So the double bubble uses the superconscious recode, NLP parts work, which you might have heard is like family systems. It'll also include like spiritual therapy, working with the energetic plane, and then also working with beliefs and patterns and programs that some part of you created at some part in of your life in order to deal with something that happened at that time. Now, when we finished, we integrated everything using tapping because I believe that we have to take the spiritual, mental, emotional work and ground it into the body for it to actually last. So then we used tapping to integrate it into the nervous system and we tapped our way into new beliefs about our body getting to be feel safe and feel good. And then she went into the integration with the cranial sacral therapy and had a tremendous result. The message, the voice message I got from her almost made me cry a little because I always dismiss the efficacy of my work until I get a message like that, which I literally get every day. But because I always deal with my own, I think humbleness is not even the right word. I think it's just this, it could always be better. And I think that just has to do with my pursuit of excellence in my career, but but I digress. So but it we did full integration. We took someone who literally couldn't function and made them happy and functioning in two hours. But that's that's amazing and a beautiful gift to give to a human being. So the body got support, releasing the physical hold. And that's really the integration process that made it all stick and hold, right? So if you're doing stuff like NLP hypnosis or recodes or whatever it is that you're doing to make a shift in your life that is not changing, you might not be getting to either the root cause or you're not having the physical integration of change. And that sometimes can be done just by taking the action, or sometimes it needs some assistance from a highly skilled practitioner who can guide your body where it needs to go. So I also want to come back to something I mentioned earlier because I don't want to gloss over it. The timing of her pain mattered. It was only a couple days after Mother's Day. A young woman who lost her mother early and a body that was screaming at an eight out of 10. Here's what I've noticed over years of working with people. Pain is not always constant. Sometimes it's seasonal, sometimes it's situational, and sometimes it only shows up in a certain environment or around a certain person or at a certain time of year. And when that's the case, it's almost always worth asking, what does this time of year mean to me? What anniversaries live here? What memories, even the ones I don't consciously remember, might be resurfacing right now. Because the body keeps that record whether you're aware of it or not. And sometimes what looks like a physical problem, wisdom teeth, a bad back, a headache that won't

Seasonal Pain And Grief Signals

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quit, is actually a grief response, an anniversary response, an inner child who is doing the only thing they know how to do to feel close to someone they lost. We don't need to pathologize that. We just need to be willing to look at it and to have the right tools to transform it. So let's go back to where we started. The shower curtain, the socks, the getting up off the toilet. Those moments were never really about the curtain or the socks. They were the moment the cup finally overflowed. The body sang loudly, undeniably, in a way you absolutely could not ignore. I have been whispering to you for a long time and you wouldn't listen. So here we are again. The mundane trigger is never the cause. It's just the moment everything that had already been building finally had somewhere to go. And the reason I actually love working with pain, the reason I've built my whole practice around it is that the body is not trying to destroy you, it is trying to communicate with you. And the moment you stop biting it and start getting genuinely curious about what it's saying, things can shift faster than you would expect. My friend went from an eight to a two on a Zoom call in 20 minutes. Not because the pain was fake, not because she just needed to think positive, but because she stopped fighting it and started listening to it, and because we looked at all layers of the pain, not just the one that was loudest. One more thing before I let you go. I can hold this space for people because I've walked through it myself. My back doesn't go out anymore. Not because I got lucky and not because I found the right physical treatment, though that has helped, but because I did my own work. I looked at my own layers, I got honest about the programs I was running and the contracts I had made without knowing it. You can only take someone as far as you've been willing to go yourself. So if you're someone who has been living with pain that keeps coming back, pain that moves around, pain that flares at certain times of year, pain that doesn't fully respond to treatment no matter what you try, I want to invite you to look at the whole picture. The sessions I offer blend superconscious recode, neurolinguistic programming, hypnosis, and identity level work to get underneath the pain at its root. And when we pair that with skilled body work, structural integration, cranial sacral therapy, we're working all four layers at the same time.

Making Change Stick With Integration

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If that sounds like what's been missing, the link to book a session is in the show notes. Come as you are, bring the pain with you. That's exactly what we'll work with.

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Tabitha MacDonald

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