Chronic Pain Recovery: Why Doing Less Can Help You Heal

Days after giving birth to her first child, Joanne Lee Smith lay on her own sofa while a midwife examined the stitched tear from the delivery. The midwife made a remark that Smith still couldn't shake, and the comment seemed to open a door. What followed, by her own account, was a long stretch of itching, burning and pelvic pain that would shape the next sixteen years of her life. Smith is a qualified nurse, professional coach and mentor, and in conversation with Laura Haraka on the Beyond the Pelvis podcast she traces how that pain sat alongside neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines and a relentless habit of pushing through: work, motherhood and, eventually, ultra-marathon running. Her recovery came through the mind-body connection, the Three Principles approach and the work of Dr. John Sarno, and through a deceptively simple practice of writing down what she was feeling. This article unpacks that arc, and why the lesson she draws is less about finding the perfect treatment than about how exhausting the search for one can become.

Where does a chronic pain story actually begin?

Smith is clear that her story didn't start with the birth. Looking back, she describes a childhood of recurring symptoms that came and went rather than settling in. She had growing pains bad enough that she would put cold flannels on her legs at night. Her father, an Olympic gymnast, had a firm position on the subject (Beyond the Pelvis, 2:31 in the episode): "there's no such thing as growing pains." She remembers stomach pains severe enough that her mother would call an ambulance, episodes that doctors usually attributed to constipation. She had asthma attacks that sometimes kept her in hospital for up to a week on nebulizers and steroids. And from around age eleven she developed migraines with visual aura, a flicker in the middle of a lesson that would become a headache.

None of this, on its own, looks like the portrait of a chronic condition. That is part of the point. Symptoms that arrive in episodes, get treated and then recede are easy to file away as separate events. Smith only began to see them as a pattern much later, when she started learning about what she calls "neuroplastic symptoms" and looked back across her life.

What happened in the year after the birth?

The timeline Smith lays out is a dense one. Her grandparents both died within about ten weeks of each other. Her grandmother, with whom she was very close, had been living with cancer throughout her pregnancy and died the week before Smith's son was born. "I didn't even realize any of that," she says of the period. "I was just getting on with it." Her anxiety was, in her words, naturally high.

The tear from the delivery had healed well, and she describes it as low down and not a big deal. The symptoms that followed were not confined to the healed area. She developed intense itching and burning in the same region, and then a pubic pain that she came to see as the main thread running through the next decade. Her son is now nineteen. The pain did not announce itself as a crisis that demanded a single explanation; it accumulated, and the lives around it kept moving.

This is the detail that many readers with pelvic pain will recognize: the sense that a physical event becomes a story the body keeps telling long after the original injury has healed. Smith's account doesn't insist on a single cause. It describes a sequence of stress, grief, a new role and a body that, as she tells it, never got a real chance to settle.

Why did pushing harder never fix the pain?

One of the most useful threads in the conversation is the cost of effort itself. Smith kept working in health care, moved into specialist public health nursing with families of young children, and in 2018 took on coaching as part of her role. By then, she says, she had already spent roughly a decade deep in chronic symptoms. She describes a body that she could not sit down with comfortably, and a schedule that never allowed her to stop.

"I did not know there were going to be a way out for at that point." (Joanne Lee Smith, Beyond the Pelvis, 36:04)

That sentence captures the hopelessness that tends to accompany long-term pain: the belief that the next treatment must be the one that works, and that if it doesn't, the fault lies in insufficient effort. The episode's own outline names this directly as a theme, "why pushing yourself harder and constantly trying to fix your symptoms can become exhausting." For many people in pain, the search itself becomes a second job, layered on top of the first.

What is the "page of rage," and why did it matter?

The turning point Smith describes is strikingly low-tech. She began scribbling her thoughts on paper, a practice she called her "page of rage." The show's description presents it as an unexpected turning point, and in the conversation it sits alongside the discovery of the connection between thoughts, feelings and physical symptoms. There is no equipment, no protocol and no expert in the room. There is a page, a pen and whatever is true in that moment.

The value of this kind of journaling, as the episode frames it, is that it gives emotion somewhere to go besides the body. It is also a way of noticing patterns. When you write down the frustration, the fear and the anger that accompany a flare, you start to see what sits next to the symptom. The episode lists journaling, self-compassion and experimentation as the supports that carried Smith's recovery, and the page of rage is the most concrete of the three.

What did the Three Principles and mind-body work change?

Smith describes discovering the mind-body connection, the Three Principles approach and the writing of Dr. John Sarno as the point where her understanding of pain changed. Laura Haraka introduces her as a specialist in the Three Principles and as someone who now helps others move beyond chronic pain, fear and limiting beliefs. The conversation focuses on how Smith came to understand her own experience of pain differently, rather than on mechanics.

What is most useful for a reader is the shift in question. Instead of asking "what treatment will fix this part of my body," the approach invites a person to ask what their thoughts and feelings are doing alongside their symptoms, and whether the pressure to keep going is part of the picture. Smith's account suggests that this reframing is not a denial of pain. It is a change in where attention goes, and it opened room for her to try different approaches without treating each one as a verdict.

Readers should note the limits of what can be said from the material. The episode is a conversation, not a clinical trial, and this article does not claim that the Three Principles or any particular approach will work for every person. What Smith describes is her own recovery, told in her own words.

Can doing less be part of healing?

The episode closes on a point that cuts against much of the wellness culture around chronic illness. Healing, Smith and Haraka suggest, should not become another full-time job. The conversation's outline frames doing less as something that can be part of moving forward, not a retreat from it. Smith says she has moved away from many of the coping strategies that once dominated her life, and has found more freedom in how she lives.

Early in the episode, Smith describes her own habit of doing a great deal in pursuit of relief, including special stretches and routines she maintained for years. Near the end she reflects on how she thought she was going to fix herself by doing more. The arc from there is not from effort to none, but from effort aimed at eliminating symptoms to attention that allows the body and the mind to be heard.

For a reader who is exhausted from the search, that may be the most practical takeaway. Smith's story suggests that the question worth asking is not only "what is the next treatment," but "what am I doing to myself in the name of getting better, and can some of it stop?"

Where to go from here

If this conversation resonates, the full episode of Beyond the Pelvis runs about an hour and five minutes and goes deeper into Smith's childhood, the birth, the years of symptoms and the shift in her understanding. Smith also works as a coach and mentor, and her website is seraphicactive.com. Those who want to explore the mind-body approach further can look into the Three Principles and into Dr. John Sarno's writing directly, and read his work in its own words rather than through summary. Above all, Smith's story points to a simple starting place: a page, a pen, and honest notes about what is actually happening inside you.