I’m Debbie Murphy. I’m a nationally board certified health and wellness coach, a certified pain management coach, and someone who lived with chronic pain for more than 21 years. I still have some health challenges, but my relationship with pain is dramatically different than it once was. Here are the six lessons that changed everything, because I don’t want you to wait 21 years to learn what I learned.
Lesson 1: Pain Is Not Only About Physical Damage
Pain science has taught us that pain is not based only on physical damage. It’s influenced by many other factors too.
Now, before you hear that and think, “So you’re saying it’s all in my head,” let me be clear. That is not what I mean. Your pain is real. Your suffering is real. Your experience is real.
What I mean is that pain isn’t simply produced by your knee, your back, your shoulder, or your neck. Those parts send signals to the brain, but it’s the brain’s job to interpret those signals. For years I believed pain was just a measure of how much damage I had. More damage, more pain. Less damage, less pain. But pain doesn’t actually work that way.
Have you ever stretched a tight muscle and thought, “Ooh, that hurts so good”? Or had a deep tissue massage that hurt and helped at the same time? Those are small examples of how complex pain really is. The brain weighs many factors when it decides whether pain is needed: past experiences, the stress you’re under, the emotions you’re feeling (especially fear), your memories, your beliefs, and your context.
When I learned that, I actually felt hope. Because if pain is influenced by many things, then there are many opportunities to help my brain interpret those signals differently. And that leads straight to lesson two.
Lesson 2: Pain Can Be Learned, Which Means It Can Be Unlearned
The brain is very good at protecting us from danger. It loves to learn habits and patterns, and it learns to detect what it thinks is dangerous. Sometimes it learns that a little too well.
For years I assumed that if I still felt a lot of pain, something must still be very wrong with my body. Maybe things weren’t healing right, or the doctors hadn’t found the real problem. But eventually I learned that pain, even intense pain, can continue when things are healing well or are even completely healed.
Think about driving to the grocery store. After enough trips, your brain learns the route. You stop consciously thinking about it. Sometimes you arrive and barely remember the drive because it became automatic. Pain can work in a similar way. The brain learns that a movement, a position, or an activity is dangerous, and eventually it produces pain automatically. Not because there’s still a problem, but because your nervous system has learned a protection pattern.
That happened to me all the time. But here’s the most hopeful part: if pain can be learned, it can also be unlearned. That changed everything for me. For the first time, I started seeing myself as someone whose nervous system had become a little overprotective, rather than someone who was never going to get better. Overprotective systems can learn safety again. There are a growing number of research-based approaches that help calm the nervous system, and some of them transformed my life by gently training my brain away from the pain.
Lesson 3: Fear Doesn’t Just React to Pain, It Can Fuel It
For years I thought fear was simply a reaction to my pain. Of course I was afraid. I hurt all the time. I didn’t know what was causing it, whether it would get worse, or if I’d ever get better. Fear felt completely reasonable, and sometimes it was.
But what I didn’t understand was that fear wasn’t only reacting to my pain. It was also helping to fuel it.
Think about it. When you’re afraid, your brain becomes more alert, more watchful, more protective, more focused on potential danger. And remember lesson one: pain is one of the brain’s protection systems. So if your brain believes there’s danger everywhere, it’s more likely to keep that protection turned on, including pain.
I used to ask myself questions like, “What will I do if this gets worse? What if I never get better? What if I can’t handle this today? What if this ruins the rest of my life?” Every one of those thoughts just increased my fear.
One of the most powerful things I learned was to start questioning those thoughts. That didn’t mean pretending everything was fine or forcing myself to be relentlessly positive. It meant asking, “Is this thought actually helping me?” Sometimes I would ask, “If my best friend were struggling like this, would I say to her what I’m saying to myself?” The answer was always no. I would never tell a friend she was doomed and nothing would ever help. So why was I saying it to myself?
I often describe fear as pouring gasoline on a fire. The pain might be real, but fear makes the fire burn hotter. When I started learning ways to calm my fear, I reduced one of the biggest sources of fuel feeding my pain.
Lesson 4: Where You Point Your Attention Matters
There was something else I did every day that kept pain front and center, and addressing it became one of the first tools that helped me move forward. I still use it almost daily.
For years I paid attention to my pain almost constantly. I thought I was being responsible. I was checking it, monitoring it, measuring it, evaluating it. “How bad is it now? Has it gotten worse? What does this mean? What should I do next?” Pain became the center of my attention. And the more attention I gave it, the bigger it seemed to get.
The analogy that helps me most is what I call the flashlight principle. Imagine standing in a dark room holding a flashlight. Whatever you point it toward becomes brighter and more prominent, while the rest of the room fades into the background. For years, I pointed my flashlight almost entirely at my pain, so my pain got brighter, bigger, and louder.
What I didn’t realize was that my life was still full of other things. Relationships, my grandchildren, moments of joy, nature, music, laughter, meaningful conversations. I just wasn’t noticing them, because my flashlight never left my pain.
I’m not saying ignore pain. That doesn’t make sense. I’m saying pain does not deserve every ounce of your attention. One of the first things that helped me was learning to gently move that flashlight, to notice what else was happening. What’s going well right now? What feels safe? What brings me even a little joy? As my attention broadened, my life broadened, and pain no longer filled every corner of my experience. I still teach this principle to my coaching clients today.
Lesson 5: Movement Is Medicine
That eventually led me to something I’d spent years avoiding: movement.
For a long time I believed pain meant damage, and if pain meant damage, then movement felt dangerous. So I became very cautious. I rested a lot, avoided activities, and constantly tried to protect myself. Sometimes that’s appropriate. But over time I became less active, less confident in my body, and less willing to trust it.
What I eventually learned is that avoiding movement wasn’t helping me nearly as much as I thought. Pain does not always equal damage, and soreness does not always equal harm. Think about exercising after being inactive for a while. Soreness is normal, sometimes significant, but it doesn’t mean you’ve injured yourself. Often it just means your body is adapting and getting stronger.
The same can be true in chronic pain recovery. Movement became a way of teaching my nervous system something important: I’m safer than my brain thinks I am. This does not mean pushing through severe pain or ignoring your body’s signals. It means working with your body gently, gradually, and consistently. Over time, movement became one of the pieces that helped me rebuild trust in my body, my nervous system, and myself.
Lesson 6: There Is No Silver Bullet, Only Pieces of the Puzzle
Eventually I learned something bigger that tied all the other lessons together.
For years I searched for the treatment, the procedure, the specialist, the one thing that would finally fix everything. I wanted a silver bullet, a single solution that would make all my pain disappear. And I spent a lot of years disappointed, because there wasn’t one.
What I discovered was something more powerful. Recovery came through pieces of the puzzle. Pain education was a big piece, learning how pain works and understanding how fear was driving it. Changing where I pointed my attention was another. Gentle movement was a piece. So were better sleep, stress management, supportive relationships, self-compassion, building new skills, and growing hope.
None of those things changed my life by themselves. But together, they changed everything. One piece helped a little, then another, and over time the picture became clearer.
That’s actually one of the reasons I created this channel. I don’t believe people living with pain need more shame, more blame, or more impossible promises. They need education that provides hope, practical tools, and encouragement. The same things that helped me.
You Don’t Have to Wait 21 Years
If you’ve been struggling with pain, I want you to hear this. Your pain is real. Your struggle is real. Your frustration is completely understandable. I’ve been there. And while I can’t promise a cure, I can promise you this: there is more hope than I realized for most of my journey.
These six lessons didn’t change my life overnight. But together, they changed its entire direction. They helped me stop seeing myself as broken, understand my pain differently, and begin moving forward. They form the foundation of almost everything I talk about here, and in the posts ahead, we’ll go deeper into each one: how pain works, how fear affects it, how attention shapes it, how movement helps, and how to find the pieces of your own puzzle.
Because I don’t want you to wait 21 years to learn what I learned.
