93. Radical Acceptance and Chronic Pain: How to Stop Fighting Your Body

Have you ever felt like your body is working against you no matter how hard you try to heal?

In this episode, I’m diving deep into what it really means to live with chronic pain. We’ll talk about what’s going on in your nervous system when your body refuses to relax, why the pain isn’t your fault, and how to start creating a sense of safety from the inside out. You’ll hear how radical acceptance can help you stop fighting your body, find compassion for yourself, and start building real strength in the process.

You might want to listen if:

• You feel like your body keeps betraying you.
• You’ve tried everything to feel better but still feel stuck in pain.
• You catch yourself feeling guilty for not being able to push through.
• You want to understand how your mind and body can work together to heal.
• You’re ready to stop fighting your body and start trusting it again.

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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes from ...

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Chronic Pain And Fear
• 0:50 Community Invitation For Support
• 1:20 Listener Story And Core Question
• 2:34 Jen’s History With PCOS And Fibromyalgia
• 4:06 Pain Is Not Your Fault
• 4:33 Central Sensitization Explained
• 6:30 From Shame To Compassion
• 6:43 Radical Acceptance Defined
• 8:45 Mindfulness And Compassion In Practice
• 10:20 Becoming Bigger Than The Pain
• 10:47 Finding Purpose Inside Pain
• 13:38 Strength Reimagined: Present Over Pretend
• 16:05 A Canceled Dinner And A New Lesson

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I am Jen Noble, your go-to relationship coach, and on today's podcast, we are talking about something that doesn't get enough attention, and that is chronic pain. You know that feeling when your body just won't let you rest? When no matter how much you try to stretch or breathe or just relax, something deep inside of you stays tense. Chronic pain isn't just physical, it's also emotional and mental, and it's exhausting. And for so many women, this becomes a vicious cycle. The pain shows up, you tense up, fear kicks in, and then your nervous system goes straight into survival mode. So you start to wonder if your body is working against you or if you'll ever feel safe in it again. But before we get started, if this is something you've been struggling with and you want a community of women who truly get it, then I would love for you to join our free Facebook community. You can go to Facebook and just search up Speak Honest, Secure Attachment, and Confident Communication for Women, or you can just click on the link in the show notes. An insider community, you'll find so much love and support for anything you're going through. This is where you can ask your own questions about your life or relationship, and I can dive into it right here with you on the podcast. So as you're listening to today's episode, I want you to think about this. Have you noticed that the harder you try to control or fight your pain, the worse it gets? Do you find yourself living in constant anticipation of the next flare-up? And have you ever blamed yourself for not being able to just think positive or push through it? If any of those sound familiar, then I want you to stay with me because we're about to unpack what's really going on in your body, why chronic pain keeps looping back, and how to begin breaking that cycle gently and compassionately. A listener reached out recently with a question that I know so many of you can relate to, so I wanted to take some time to unpack it in a full episode. And she's been living with chronic pain for years, and she said she feels completely trapped inside of her body. She's done therapy and she's tried everything she can think of, but nothing seems to help. She wrote in and asked me, Jen, how do you start to feel safe in your body again when you deal with chronic pain every day? Like, how am I supposed to feel okay with this? I'm not okay with it. I hate the pain. How do I love my body if I also hate it? First, I just want to send lots of soft, gentle hugs to this listener because I know this feeling oh so well. Because I've had my own struggles with chronic pain and disease. It's something I've dealt with since being diagnosed with PCOS back in my early 20s and later on with fibromyalgia, and I remember spending years trying to do everything I could to heal the pain. Every diet, every supplement, every medicine, every mindset shift, all because I believed something inside of me was broken and needed to be fixed. So I knew I wanted to spend some extra special time on this topic today, during the podcast, to speak directly to anyone who's out there and feeling that same tug, where you want to love your body, but you're also ridiculously frustrated with it. That push and pull can be exhausting, and I want you to know that you are not alone in this. It messes with your mind and your confidence and your relationships and your sense of just who you are. It's this constant back and forth between wanting to love your body and feeling like it's betrayed you. And that's such a mind game, right? You want to show yourself compassion, but the frustration is so loud that some days you just want to scream. So today I want to break this down into three parts. First, why the pain isn't your fault. Then I want to talk about how to radically accept your pain without giving up. And finally, how to find purpose in your pain. Because if we're going to live with it, we might as well make it mean something powerful, right? But before we talk about anything else, we have to start here. The pain is not your fault. And I know you've probably told yourself it is at some point in time. Maybe you've wondered if it's something you did wrong, if it's because you're stressed out, or because you didn't meditate enough, or you didn't eat clean enough, or walk enough, or stay positive enough. Listen, I used to think that too. But your body is not punishing you, it's protecting you. When pain lasts for months or years at a time, the nervous system itself can actually change. Researchers call this central sensitization, a process basically where your brain and spinal cord become hypersensitive to pain and other sensations. The Mayo Clinic describes it as a structural, chemical, and functional rewiring in the nervous system that makes it react to even mild inputs as if they were dangerous. In this state, your body amplifies pain signals and can even create new pain where there's no ongoing injury. Isn't that mind-blowing? Think about that for a second. Your body is not inventing pain, it's learned it. Neuroscientists have this saying I talk about all the time, right? Neurons that fire together wire together. So the more often the brain has to respond to pain or threat, the stronger those neural pathways become. Over time, your body gets really good at protecting you. A little bit too good, though, and it sometimes forgets to stand down. It's like an overprotective parent. It means well, but it's not doing exactly what you need it to do. But that's your body doing what it was designed to do. And yeah, it's really frustrating when you're in pain every day. It can feel like your body's turned against you, but what's really happening is your nervous system has forgotten what safety feels like. When we stop blaming ourselves for the pain, something shifts. Shame keeps the body tense. Compassion helps it soften. So the next time you catch yourself spiraling, instead of asking yourself, what's wrong with me? I want you to try asking yourself instead, what does my body need right now? That one question changes everything. It tells your nervous system you're listening instead of fighting. Because your body isn't broken. It's freaking brilliant. It's doing exactly what it was built to do, keep you alive. It just needs a little help remembering that it is safe to relax again. All right, now that we understand the pain isn't our fault, the next step is learning how to live with it. Not as our identity, but as our reality. And this is where radical acceptance comes in. I first learned about this idea of radical acceptance from Tara Brock. She's a psychologist and meditation teacher who wrote the book of the same name, and it absolutely shook my entire world. She defines radical acceptance as recognizing what's happening and allowing life to be just as it is. And I'll be very honest, that the first time I heard that, I rolled my eyes. I thought, yeah, sure, fine. I'll just accept being in pain every day. Sure, that sounds great. But the more I lived with chronic pain, the more I realized she might actually be on to something here. Radical acceptance isn't about liking what's happening. It's not pretending the pain is fine or even that it's great. It's about telling the truth. This is what's here right now. And then meeting that truth with compassion instead of resistance. Because when you fight the pain, you're actually feeding it. The nervous system hears that inner war going on and it stays alert. But when you soften, when you take a breath, and you say, Okay, this hurts. And I can still hold myself gently through it. You're teaching your body in that moment that it is safe in real time. You're showing your system that the threat isn't as big as it actually thinks it is. And Tara Brock talks about the two wings of radical acceptance, and those are mindfulness and compassion. Mindfulness is clear seeing, naming what's here without judgment. Compassion is the tender holding, offering kindness to what hurts. And both wings are necessary for healing. So let's make this practical. The next time your pain flares up, which will probably be tomorrow for most of us, maybe even right now, instead of bracing or rushing to fix it or get rid of it, I want you to pause for a moment. Notice what's happening. You might say to yourself, Okay, pain is here. That's the mindfulness. And then I want you to ask, what does my pain need right now? That is the compassion. Sometimes what it needs is movement. Sometimes it's rest. Sometimes it's just acknowledgement. Sometimes it's a pint of ice cream. It doesn't matter what it is. You can even place a hand on the area that hurts and just say quietly, I know this is hard, and I'm here with you. I know it sounds small, but these are the micro moments that retrain your nervous system that you are safe. And here's the thing radical acceptance doesn't make the pain disappear. What it does is make you bigger than the pain. It creates space between the pain and your identity. So instead of I'm broken, it becomes, hmm, I'm a person who's experiencing pain right now. And that subtle shift is everything. Alright, so we've talked about how the pain isn't your fault. We've talked about how fighting it just keeps the body stuck in survival mode, so we want to accept it. Now I want to go a little bit deeper and talk about what happens when you stop trying to fix it and start asking what it's trying to teach you. Once you stop blaming your body and start meeting it with compassion, things do truly start to shift, I promise you. Now, the pain doesn't vanish, right? We have to be real about that. It still fucking hurts. But it starts to mean something different. It's no longer this random punishment from the universe that's happening to you. Instead, it becomes feedback, information, a clue. And listen, I'm not here to sprinkle glitter on your pain and tell you to find the silver lining of it. Some things in life just suck. There's no neat reason, no spiritual lesson tied up in a bow. But what I've learned, both in my body and from coaching hundreds of women, is that even when pain doesn't have a reason, it can still have a purpose. And for me, chronic pain forced me to stop performing and to start living. I used to think that being strong meant pushing through everything, pretending I was fine, staying productive, smiling through the pain, all of that. But strength isn't pretending you're fine. It's staying present when everything in you wants to run. It's saying, I hate this, and I'm still here. The pain stripped me of all the fake strength I was hiding behind. It made me face myself in ways I never had to before, and what I found underneath was softer, more human, and more honest. There's a quote that I love that says, When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. And that line hits harder when you've lived inside of a body that won't stop hurting you. Because you can't always control what's happening, even in your own body. But you can control how you show up in it. And you can let the pain harden you, or you can let it wake you up. Maybe that's the purpose. Maybe your pain isn't here to destroy you. Maybe it's here to call you back to yourself, to slow you down, to remind you you are not a machine. Maybe your purpose isn't to get over it. Maybe your purpose is to feel it fully. Let it change you into someone who feels more deeply, someone who loves more honestly and rests without guilt. Maybe your purpose is to stop apologizing for what hurts and start honoring it. Listen, the pain will change you. That part is just not optional. But what is optional is who you become because of it. You get to decide if it makes you bitter or if it makes you bold. You get to decide if it closes you off or cracks you open. When you start seeing pain as a messenger instead of a monster, that is when healing starts to feel possible again. And for me, learning to live inside of a body that doesn't always cooperate has been messy as hell. It's confusing, it's unfair, and sometimes it feels like it's trying to ruin everything I care about. A few months ago I had this dinner planned for about 30 women, and it's something I had been excited about for weeks. In the morning of, I woke up in so much pain I couldn't move. It just felt like my body had been hit by a truck, and yet again it was betraying me. And I'll be honest, the old me would not have handled this well at all. In fact, the old me hasn't in the past. She would have fallen apart. She would have cried for days, maybe even weeks or months. She would have made it mean something awful about herself, that she was broken, that she wasn't reliable, that she didn't deserve good things, that she could never lead anyone or anything because she couldn't even trust in her own body, so why should anyone trust her? But I've learned a few things since then, thankfully. The first is that my pain isn't my fault. My body isn't punishing me, it's protecting me. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do, and it's sending me messages when something's off. My body is not the enemy. It was just tired of being ignored. The second thing I learned is how to radically accept my pain. That doesn't mean I like it. That doesn't mean I'm okay with it. It means I stop fighting what's already here. I can look it in the eye and say, okay, pain is here. I don't love it. But I can be kind to myself through it. Because resisting it, shaming it, pretending it's not there, that only keeps me stuck. And the third thing is the one that still surprises me. When pain doesn't have a reason, it can still have a purpose. Maybe that purpose is to slow me down. Maybe it's to make me softer. Maybe it's to help me find compassion for myself and for every other woman who's ever hated her body for it not being perfect. That night when I had to cancel dinner, maybe I even taught those women something. Maybe I showed them that rest is not weakness. That saying no doesn't make you unreliable, that honoring your body is one of the most powerful forms of leadership there is. I used to think that strength meant showing up no matter what. Now I know the opposite. Strength is canceling the thing you worked so hard on because your body said no. Strength is planning a walking tour through a city, knowing your back might give out halfway through, but trusting that if it does, you'll be okay. Strength is learning that you can't always change what's happening, but you can choose to meet it with compassion. All right, that's it for today, my friends. This episode was such an important one because it's not just about chronic pain, it's about what happens when life doesn't go the way we planned and how we keep showing up anyway. We talked about why the pain isn't your fault and how to radically accept it without giving up and how to start finding meaning and purpose inside of it. We talked about what real strength actually looks like. Not pushing through, not pretending you're fine, but learning how to listen to your body and lead from truth instead of perfection. And if this episode hits home for you, I want you to know that you don't have to navigate this alone. Come join us inside of our free Facebook community. Speak honest, secure attachment, and confident communication for women. You can find us on Facebook or you can click the link in the show notes. It's where we talk about these hard, beautiful, real moments, the kind that don't make it onto Instagram, but the ones that shape who we are. I'd love to hear what resonated most with you from this episode. Just come say hi in the group, share your takeaways, ask any questions you want answered on the podcast, and connect with other women who are learning to build stronger relationships with themselves and the people they love. All right, everyone. I will speak with you all next week. Take care.