Seeing the Whole You: A Better Way to Understand Chronic Pain

Why so many people with chronic pain feel misunderstood

If you live with chronic pain, you may have heard some version of this before:

• “Your scans look normal.”

• “There’s no structural damage to explain this.”

• “Stress or anxiety might be the main driver.”

For many patients, these explanations feel incomplete — or even dismissive. The pain is real. It affects your body, your mood, your work, your relationships, and often your sense of who you are. Yet modern medicine often tries to explain everything using one lens at a time.

That is where many people fall through the cracks.

The problem with a one‑dimensional approach

Modern medicine is excellent at treating acute problems: fractures, infections, torn ligaments, inflamed joints. When there is a clear injury, a clear cause, and a clear fix, the system works beautifully.

Chronic pain is different.

In long‑standing pain:

• The original injury may have healed

• Scans may show changes that are common in people without pain

• Symptoms often fluctuate and spread

• Stress, sleep, fear, workload, and life pressures strongly influence pain

When medicine looks only at scans, pain can be reduced to “nothing is wrong.” When medicine looks only at psychology, pain can feel blamed on the patient.

Both miss the bigger picture.

A more complete way of understanding pain

I work from a framework called multiplexity.

Put simply, it means this:

Pain is one experience, but it shows up across multiple layers of your life — all at the same time.

These layers are not competing explanations. They are co‑existing parts of the same problem.

The layers that matter in chronic pain

1. The physical layer (structure and biology)

This includes:

• Past injuries

• Joint, muscle, tendon, or nerve health

• Inflammation

• Sleep, hormones, nutrition, and recovery

This layer matters — but it is not the whole story.

Importantly, how your body functions often matters more than what a scan shows. Strength, movement quality, load tolerance, and conditioning frequently explain pain better than anatomy alone.

2. The functional layer (how your body moves and copes)

Two people can have the same scan and completely different pain.

Why?

Because function matters:

• How you move

• How your body handles load

• How protected or guarded your movements have become

Pain often reflects capacity, not damage.

3. The psychological layer (threat and meaning)

Pain is shaped by:

• Fear of re‑injury

• Loss of confidence in the body

• Past trauma or negative medical experiences

• Ongoing stress

This does not mean pain is “in your head.”

It means the nervous system is doing its job — protecting you — sometimes too well.

4. The social and life‑context layer

Pain does not exist in a vacuum.

Work pressures, compensation systems, family roles, financial stress, and expectations around productivity all influence how pain is experienced and sustained.

Ignoring this layer leads to frustration and stalled recovery.

5. The deeper personal layer (identity, purpose, and meaning)

Long‑term pain often challenges:

• Your sense of safety

• Your independence

• Your identity

• Your beliefs about your body and future

For some people, pain becomes intertwined with guilt, anger, grief, or loss of meaning.

This layer is rarely acknowledged — yet it is often where recovery truly accelerates once addressed.

Why this approach changes outcomes

When pain is approached from one angle only, treatment becomes narrow:

• More scans

• More injections

• Endless exercises

• Or being told to “manage it”

A multiplex approach allows us to:

• Make sense of pain even when scans are normal

• Validate your experience without blaming you

• Target the right layer with the right intervention

• Combine physical treatment, rehabilitation, education, and inner recalibration

This is how chronic pain becomes treatable again.

What this means for you as a patient

You don’t need someone who only looks at your MRI. You don’t need someone who tells you it’s “just stress.”

You need someone who can:

• See the whole picture

• Understand how all layers interact

• Guide recovery across body, movement, nervous system, and life context

That is what multiplex care is.

And for the right patient, it often becomes the turning point.

In short

Chronic pain is not a single problem with a single cause.

When we stop forcing it into one explanation, and instead treat the whole human experience behind it, recovery becomes possible — even after years of frustration.

If this resonates with you, you’re not broken. You’re complex.

And that complexity deserves proper care.