Pain can be changeable

November 2 to 8, 2025, is Pain Awareness Week in Canada—a time to shine a light on chronic pain.

As a therapist, even if you don’t specialize in chronic pain, you likely see clients struggling with it. In fact, at least 1 in 5 adults experiences chronic pain. Many therapists experience it themselves (both of us certainly have), yet it’s often overlooked in discussions of self-care. And worse, chronic pain is often seen as a something simply ‘stress related’, which very much minimizes all of the complex interactions at play.

Here is what is really encouraging however: Multiple lines of research now show that chronic pain isn’t just about tissue damage or stress; it’s about how our brains interpret, and misinterpret, threat. This means that neuroplastic changes can create very real, even debilitating symptoms, without any ongoing tissue damage.

If you’ve ever experienced chronic symptoms—like musculoskeletal pain, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nausea, sensitivities, even long Covid—they are likely neuroplastic in nature. (Please see the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms for more information about these very common symptoms.)

And so the good news is, because neuroplastic symptoms aren’t caused by tissue damage, with the right approach, they can change and even be reversed.

In the clinical side of my (Melissa’s) professional activities, treatment of neuroplastic symptoms is an area that I have been focused on for the past 5 years. It’s truly rewarding work, and more people need to know that better treatment options exist – health professionals and the general public alike. 

To help support wider dissemination of these ideas, I am excited to share that I have created a brand new newsletter, From Pain to Possibility, and an online course, You Are Not Broken.

The free newsletter is for anyone navigating chronic symptoms, while the course is designed especially for health professionals—though much of it will resonate with anyone in pain. 

If nothing else, please remember this: Chronic pain doesn’t need to be a sentence for suffering—it can be an opportunity for all kinds of new possibilities.