What If We’ve Been Thinking About Pain All Wrong?

Business Support

By Samantha Parker, contributor to St. George Direct.

I’m training for my second half marathon, and the thing I’m most nervous about isn’t the 13.1 miles.

It’s my back.

I have scoliosis, and earlier this year I went through a stretch of pretty severe back pain. Running stopped. Training stopped. And even when my back started feeling better, something else stuck around.

I was scared I was going to hurt it again.

I’ve already crossed a half marathon finish line. I know I can do hard things. But this time around, every little sensation in my back has had the potential to send my brain straight to, Oh no. Here we go again.

And then I met Kim Nelson.

A different conversation about pain

Kim is the owner of Nervana Pain & Restoration here in Southern Utah. She’s a registered nurse who spent more than 20 years working in emergency and trauma medicine before her own experiences with chronic pain, nervous system dysregulation and burnout changed the way she thought about pain and recovery.

For more than two decades, she helped people survive some of the worst days of their lives. Eventually, she started asking a different question.

What happens after we survive?

That question led her deeper into the science of pain, neuroplasticity and the connection between the brain and the body. Today, her work at Nervana is centered around helping people better understand what they’re experiencing and become active participants in their recovery.

I originally met Kim through my work with local businesses. But the more I listened to her talk about pain, the more I realized she was talking about something I was experiencing myself.

Not just pain.

Fear of pain.

I kept thinking, Why has nobody ever explained it to me like this before?

When Kim came to my house

Eventually, I decided I wanted to experience what Kim does for myself.

And she came to my house.

Which was already very different from what I expected. Nervana offers mobile care, so instead of me going to another clinical setting, Kim showed up at my home with everything she needed.

And yes, I have photos of myself hooked up to what I very professionally refer to as Kim’s electrical thingy.

The actual treatment is targeted electrical nerve stimulation, one part of Kim’s approach to pain and nervous system health.

But the electrical thingy wasn’t what I kept thinking about afterward.

It was our conversation.

Kim wasn’t telling me my scoliosis wasn’t real.

She wasn’t telling me the pain I had experienced wasn’t real.

And she definitely wasn’t telling me to ignore my body and go run through an injury.

She was helping me understand something I hadn’t really considered before: my experience with pain involves more than what is happening structurally in my back.

The nervous system learns, too.

What if pain isn’t always the enemy?

One of the things Kim talks about is becoming curious about pain instead of immediately becoming afraid of it.

That landed differently for me.

Because somewhere between hurting my back and trying to return to running, I had started treating every sensation like a warning.

And when you’re trying to train for 13.1 miles, that is an exhausting conversation to have with yourself.

Kim introduced me to Pain Reprocessing Therapy, which is one of the tools she uses at Nervana. The basic idea is learning to interpret and respond to certain pain signals differently rather than automatically meeting every sensation with fear.

That does not mean pain is imaginary.

It doesn’t mean an injury should be ignored.

And it certainly doesn’t mean every pain is coming from the brain.

It means pain is complicated, and our brains and nervous systems are part of that conversation.

That distinction has been huge for me.

The nurse who wants you to understand

This might be my favorite thing about Kim.

She doesn’t just want to do something to you.

She wants you to understand.

Her approach at Nervana has three pieces that she explains simply:

She uses IV nutritional therapy to support the body, targeted electrical nerve stimulation to calm the nerve, and Pain Reprocessing Therapy as one tool to help retrain how the brain responds to certain signals.

But spend five minutes talking with Kim and you’re probably also going to hear about plants.

She has more than 60 of them.

Kim once compared the nervous system to one of her Monsteras. Sometimes a plant becomes completely tangled. The leaves aren’t necessarily damaged. They’ve simply grown into patterns that aren’t serving the plant anymore.

You don’t get angry at it.

You don’t declare the whole plant broken.

You gently start untangling it.

That’s Kim.

Science, but make it make sense.

My second finish line

I don’t know exactly what my back is going to do between now and my second half marathon. And maybe accepting that uncertainty is part of what I’m learning.

But I’m also trying to stop treating my body like something that’s waiting to betray me.

When I notice something now, I’m practicing curiosity before panic.

What am I feeling?

What does my body need?

Is there something I need to respond to?

Instead of immediately jumping to: Oh no. My back.

Kim has given me a different way to have that conversation with myself.

And maybe that’s part of what this second finish line is going to mean to me.

The first time, I proved to myself that I could run 13.1 miles.

This time, I think I’m learning to trust my body enough to do it again.

And whether you’ve ever run a half marathon or have absolutely zero desire to run 13 feet, I think there’s something in that for all of us.

Sometimes the thing keeping us on the sidelines isn’t only what hurts.

Sometimes it’s how afraid we’ve become that it’s going to hurt again.

Written by Samantha Parker, founder of The Samantha Parker Social Media Company and contributor to St. George Direct.