The Owww! My Pain Series
The Owww! My Pain sessions specifically address chronic pain, focusing on the areas of the body involved in your pain experience.
A session for your pain.
For hip & low back pain, difficulty walking or sitting. Session focus on the low back & connections to the sacrum, hips, legs, back & abdomen. $100
For neck pain, stiffness, restricted range of motion, headache. Sessions focus on the neck & connections to the head, shoulders & spine. $100
For pain in the shoulder & scapula, frozen shoulder injury, difficulty raising arm. Sessions focus on the shoulder & connections to the neck, back & upper chest. $100
For pain around the jaw, difficulty opening mouth or chewing, headaches, TMJ disorder. Sessions focus on the jaw & connections to the head, neck & shoulders. $100
When your pain doesn’t fit one of the other sessions, I’ll work with you to customize a session to address what’s going on. $100
Focus on your pain.
In an Owww! My Pain session, we work together to identify what muscles and other soft tissues (tendon, ligaments, fascia) are involved in triggering your chronic pain, and find techniques that can relieve it.
The session is more interactive and conversational than a classic massage for relaxation. There is more attention to functional anatomy and pain physiology. We’ll be talking throughout the session about how each technique feels, if it triggers your familiar pain experience, and whether it feels relieving or helpful.
Besides the muscles, other soft tissues like tendons, ligaments, and fascia can play into your chronic pain. Part of the first session is mapping out what parts of the body seem to be involved. Knowing what can trigger the pain experience you typically feel, we can then find techniques to work on those areas to starting alleviating the pain.
Although the goal is on pain relief rather than relaxation, people usually do leave the session feeling pretty relaxed, and with less pain.
No tortuous pain.
All of the Owww! My Pain sessions are about relieving chronic pain with deliberately gentle techniques, applied thoughtfully and with knowledge of the underlying anatomy and the physiology of pain.
I won’t ask you to endure or breathe through excruciating pain. You can achieve effective relief from chronic pain without being beaten up or worked over.
You may feel the kind of therapeutic pain that hurts a little but also feels good. That’s the only kind of pain we’ll allow in these sessions. If anything causes you extreme discomfort, I’ll stop it immediately, and either try another technique or move to a different area.
If you prefer someone to dig in and really work out those knots, this is not the session you’re looking for.
Will massage work for you?
Everybody responds differently to massage, but you may be surprised at how quickly you can get out of pain and get back to moving and doing the things you want to be doing.
You may get a lot of relief just from the first session. Often, your body will just begin to respond with pain relief, and will need a few sessions to build up and reinforce the changes we’re making.
If your chronic pain developed over time, you can expect that it may take some time to go away. Typically, you will know within two or three visits if the Owww! My Pain massage will be effective for you.
Retraining the brain.
My approach to massage for chronic pain is to find ways to engage your nervous system and help your brain learn a different way of interacting with the area that hurts.
It’s normal for the brain to signal pain in a location of injury or trauma. Once the injury heals, though, those pain signals should go away. Sometimes they don’t, and that’s one way that chronic pain comes into being.
In first Owww! My Pain session, we explore your specific pain experience and map out what things seems to be involved in making it happen. With later sessions, we reinforce the pain-relieving changes that your brain is learning, using the techniques that you found to be relieving.
Ultimately, you can reset how your brain processes the area of the body affected with chronic pain. As we get the related muscles and soft tissues to consistently relax, we coax your the brain to stop signaling pain when it doesn’t need to.
Every body is different, but within three sessions, you should see a reduction in your experience of chronic pain.