What Does Long Term Recovery Look Like?

    Laura Seago interviews Susan, Nathan and Fiona

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This interview is from the Like Mind, Like Body podcast. You can listen to the full interview below, on iTunes or Google Podcasts.

How long can relief from chronic pain and symptoms really last? Is any hope of recovery temporary, or can changes in the brain and nervous system last a lifetime? In this episode, we speak to real people who have recovered from chronic pain and symptoms to find out.

It’s hard to believe that the "Like Mind, Like Body" podcast has now been running for almost 5 years now. In that time, it has reached over a million people in pain and produced over 50 episodes.

Each episode has contained a wealth of information for people in pain, but some of the most memorable stories have been the recovery stories.

There’s a real bond that forms when people listen to these stories. It makes us all feel very invested in what happens to these people later on. In fact, it’s quite common for listeners to reach out to us wanting to check in on how their favorite podcast guests are doing.

So today, we are going to do a follow-up and check in on how some of the people we’ve interviewed before are doing several months or even several years after their initial recovery from chronic symptoms began. We speak with:

• Susan, who recovered from chronic migraine 4.5 years ago
• Nathan, who found relief from chronic back pain 6 months ago
• Fiona, who nearly eliminated her chronic fatigue syndrome 2.5 years ago

Where are they now? How are their symptoms doing? What has life been like since they first shared their recovery stories on the show?

Tap the player above to listen to the full episode and find out.

Laura (Host): Like all of us, you have been through I’m sure some stressful life events in the past few years and had to learn to navigate those without allowing your brain to fall back into its past patterns. How have you navigated those stressful events?

Susan: I think there's a two-part answer to that.

The first one is that when I tried Curable and it worked, then I knew on a really deep down level that it could work. Knowing that it's a matter of your nervous system getting stuck in an “on” or alarm/alert position (and that you can correct that) means that when I have gotten into pain, it hasn't turned into a pain spiral. And by pain spiral, I mean when you get scared that you're in pain and that leads into more pain.

That's why I think when you interviewed me before, I explained how I thought that Clara, the little chat bot, had weirdly been the best part of the app for me. She provided instant feedback saying “you're going to be okay.” It helped me to ramp down and get calm again.

So the first answer is: my pain doesn't start as much as it used to, because I'm not afraid of it anymore.

The second thing is I think that I've assimilated a lot of the tools [from the program into my habitual routine]. So if I do start to have pain, my brain automatically goes to the things that I had to consciously learn through the app to do. That could be things that I say to myself, or things that I physically start to do with breathing or realizing what I'm focusing my mind on.