Sessions are available in person in Vancouver, with online options available across BC.
Healing or integrating trauma can be an important part of counselling for chronic pain.
People living with chronic pain are far more likely to have experienced trauma, including early life adversity, medical trauma, or prolonged stress. In some cases, persistent pain can be understood as a legacy of a nervous system that learned it had to stay on high alert.
Trauma does not mean that pain is imagined. It means that the body learned, for good reasons, to prioritize protection over ease.
Chronic pain counselling that works at the intersection of pain and trauma focuses on understanding how the nervous system learned to perceive threat—and how it can gradually learn to experience more
safety.
Therapy for chronic pain can involve several overlapping areas of work. Not everyone needs all
1. Supporting the Emotional Impact of Living with Pain
Living with ongoing pain often involves grief, fear, anger, frustration, isolation, and sometimes depression or despair. These emotional experiences are not side issues—they are part of the pain
experience itself.
Therapy provides space to process the emotional reality of pain, without rushing to fix it or minimize it. Many people find that attending to this layer with care and compassion can itself reduce suffering—and sometimes pain intensity.
2. Learning Supportive Tools and Strategies
Some therapy work is practical and skills-based. This can include:
These tools are not about forcing the body to do more, but about working with your system rather than against it.
3. Exploring Predisposing and Maintaining Factors
Persistent pain is multifactorial. There is rarely a single “cause.”
Therapy can help identify patterns that may have increased vulnerability to pain or helped it persist—such as perfectionism, people-pleasing, anxiety, emotional suppression, hypervigilance, fear-avoidance, self-criticism, difficulty with boundaries, or disconnection from internal cues.
These patterns often developed as adaptive responses to earlier experiences. Therapy approaches them with curiosity rather than judgment.
4. Training the Nervous System to Experience More Safety
Because pain is a protective alarm, meaningful change often involves helping the nervous system learn that it is safer than it currently believes.
This work may include:
Rather than pushing through pain, this approach focuses on creating the conditions in which the body no longer needs to protect in the same way.
When pain is understood only as a structural problem, the path forward is narrow: find the problem and fix it. When pain is understood as a protective process shaped by many influences, new possibilities open up.
For many years, pain care focused primarily on management—helping people cope while assuming pain would always remain. Today, there is a growing shift toward recovery oriented approaches that recognize the nervous system’s capacity for change.
While no human life is entirely free of pain, many people experience meaningful reduction in symptoms, increased freedom, and a restored sense of agency through this kind of work.
Chronic pain counselling is not about convincing you that your pain isn’t real. It’s about understanding why it’s there and helping your system find safer, more sustainable ways forward.
Location: Vancouver. 407, Granville St.
In-person and Virtual sessions.
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
If you’re coping with chronic pain, you’ve likely already shown a lot of strength. You also deserve support that doesn’t require you to carry it all alone.
If you’re interested in chronic pain counselling, or you’re unsure where to begin, we’re here to help you take the next step.
After reading our therapist’s bios, perhaps you are drawn to one or two, but you want to double-check. No problem!
You’re ready to get going and know who you want to work with.
All pain is real. At the same time, pain is influenced by many factors that affect the nervous system. A poor night’s sleep, illness, hormonal shifts, emotional stress, or feeling overwhelmed can all make pain feel more intense. When pain persists, the nervous system can also become more sensitive and protective. Therapy may include understanding how pain works in the body, learning ways to regulate the nervous system, rebuilding trust in movement, and addressing stressors that can amplify symptoms. We can’t always know what will help ahead of time, but exploring new approaches can sometimes open new possibilities.
It’s understandable to feel discouraged if you’ve been told there are no further medical treatments to try. Often this reflects the limits of structural interventions like medication, injections, or surgery. But pain is shaped by many factors beyond tissue damage. Therapy can help address the nervous system patterns, stress responses, and learned protections that often develop with persistent pain.
With persistent pain, it’s often more helpful to ask what may be contributing rather than looking for a single cause. Chronic pain is usually shaped by many interacting factors. Stress and trauma—especially earlier in life—can make the nervous system more alert to threat. Because pain is one of the body’s protection signals, a more vigilant system may experience it more easily. Exploring these influences can sometimes open new pathways for easing pain.
Trauma and chronic pain often overlap. Research shows higher rates of chronic pain among people who have experienced trauma. One reason may be that trauma can leave the nervous system more vigilant and protective, scanning for potential threats. Because pain is one of the body’s protection signals, this heightened alertness can make pain easier to trigger and harder for the system to settle. Therapy can help gently work with these patterns to support greater safety and regulation.
Sometimes it can at first. If we’ve learned that certain emotions aren’t safe to feel, the nervous system may increase its protective alarm when they arise. In therapy, we move at a pace that feels safe and collaborative—you will never be pushed to talk about or feel something you’re not ready for. Over time, the goal is to build confidence and steadiness in relating to your inner experiences, including emotions, in ways that can reduce the nervous system’s need to amplify pain.
Yes. Research on chronic pain is evolving, and outcomes are improving as our understanding of pain becomes more sophisticated. We now know that persistent pain often involves changes in the nervous system that can also be influenced and retrained. As treatment has expanded beyond purely structural approaches to include psychological and nervous system–focused therapies, many people are experiencing meaningful improvements—even after years of living with pain.
Both. Acceptance is a present-moment practice. We can’t accept the future—it’s uncertain—but we can practice allowing what is here right now, which often reduces the struggle that can make pain feel worse. From that steadier place, we can also work toward change. Therapy supports shifts in the nervous system, activity patterns, and how we relate to pain. The goal is not only to change pain, but more broadly to help you live well—whether symptoms are present or not.