Pain can be the result of many factors. It can be acute pain from recent trauma – a broken bone, a torn ligament, a cut or bruise. It can be referred pain from an inflamed or otherwise dysfunctional organ. But frequently, chronic physical pain is at its basis a failure to adequately stabilize your body.

 

Its origin is cumulative, the result of countless incidents, major and minor, that have occurred throughout your life, and the adaptive responses that your organism has configured incrementally to deal with them, mundane event by mundane event.

 

All complications are complicated

Our injuries and adversities can be significant or can be so minor that we perceive them as small annoyances if we even notice them at all. An acute pain can go away and still leave a complication, a kind of “behavioral scar” that can be imperceptible but that over time can add to an accumulation of neurologic confusion. Much of this happens without our awareness.

 

When our function is compromised by physical challenges or injury, our organism automatically configures an adaptive behavior that attempts to replicate the compromised function, usually less elegantly.

 

This alternative behavior frequently becomes habituated and can persist long after the injury has seemingly healed. In addition, muscles and ligaments do not always return to their precise former states. They can be almost imperceptibly lax, leaving them less competent in their role as stabilizers. Even a small change in neurologic resting tone can make a significant difference in your stability.

 

Each muscle provides both mobility and stability. This is called “agonist” and “antagonist” function. Muscles continually switch from mobilizer to stabilizer as we move, lift, and throw, with microsecond timing. Muscles are all in constant communication with each other. The word coordination means “ordering together,” or cooperating smoothly. 

 

When we change the way we move, we also reconfigure the way we stabilize. The loss of efficient stabilization becomes increasingly complex over time and can eventually fail, long after the original events. In many cases this can appear as a new injury, and indeed it is. But it might have existed for a long time as a vulnerability. The new injury can have its basis, and its solution, in our previous injury history.