By Abi Beri | Integrative Somatic Therapist | Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & Online
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know what it’s like to live in a body that doesn’t cooperate. The chronic pain that flares without warning. The fatigue that sleep doesn’t touch. The autoimmune symptoms that wax and wane according to some mysterious internal logic you can’t quite crack.
You’ve probably been to specialists. Tried medications, supplements, elimination diets. Maybe you’ve even heard the devastating words: “Your labs look normal. I’m not sure what else to tell you.”
But what if there’s a piece of the puzzle that conventional medicine often misses? What if your chronic pain, fibromyalgia, or autoimmune condition isn’t just a mechanical malfunction — but a message from your nervous system?
As an integrative somatic therapist working in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and online worldwide, I’ve had the privilege of sitting with hundreds of people whose bodies seemed to be working against them. And I’ve witnessed, again and again, how somatic therapy for chronic pain can create shifts that talk therapy and medication alone couldn’t touch.
This isn’t about dismissing your symptoms as “psychosomatic” or suggesting you can “think your way” out of fibromyalgia. It’s about understanding the profound intelligence of your body — and learning to work with it, rather than against it.
The Body Keeps the Score: Understanding the Trauma-Pain Connection
When Bessel van der Kolk titled his groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score, he wasn’t being metaphorical. Decades of research now confirm what somatic practitioners have long understood: traumatic experiences don’t just live in our memories — they become encoded in our physiology.
Your body isn’t just a container for your mind. It’s a living record of everything you’ve experienced — every moment of safety and every moment of threat, every time you were soothed and every time you had to cope alone.
This isn’t abstract theory. In 2025, research published in Nature found epigenetic changes — alterations in how genes are expressed — across three generations of Syrian refugee families. The original trauma wasn’t just psychological; it was physically changing the biology of children and grandchildren.
Similar patterns have been documented in Holocaust survivor offspring, showing changes in stress hormone regulation that persist across generations. This is the science of intergenerational trauma — and it helps explain why chronic conditions often have roots that extend far beyond an individual’s own life experiences.
What Is Autonomic Dysregulation (And Why Does It Matter)?
Many chronic pain conditions, fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, and autoimmune disorders share a common thread: autonomic nervous system dysregulation.
Your autonomic nervous system has two main branches. The sympathetic branch is your accelerator — the fight-or-flight response that mobilizes you for action. The parasympathetic branch is your brake — the rest-and-digest mode that allows recovery and repair.
In a healthy system, these work together like a beautiful dance. You activate when needed, then settle back into calm. But when there’s been chronic stress, early trauma, or ongoing threat, something goes wrong.
The system gets stuck.
Maybe it’s stuck in chronic activation — always scanning for danger, always producing stress hormones, never fully resting. This presents as anxiety, hypervigilance, insomnia, chronic inflammation, and muscle tension that never releases.
Or perhaps it’s stuck in chronic shutdown — what polyvagal theory calls the dorsal vagal state. This is the freeze response, the collapse, and it shows up as fatigue, brain fog, numbness, dissociation, and that heavy feeling of being unable to engage with life.
Many people with chronic conditions oscillate between both — wired but tired, exhausted but unable to sleep, moments of panic followed by complete collapse. This is the push-crash cycle that anyone with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue knows intimately.
Conditions Often Linked to Nervous System Dysregulation
While I want to be clear that every individual’s experience is unique, research and clinical observation have identified patterns connecting nervous system dysregulation with various conditions, including fibromyalgia and widespread chronic pain, ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic migraines and tension headaches, POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), certain autoimmune conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and lupus, as well as complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS).
What these conditions often share is HPA axis dysregulation — a disruption in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system that governs stress hormones. Research increasingly points to early life stress and attachment difficulties as contributing factors to this dysregulation.
Why “Pushing Through” Often Makes Chronic Pain Worse
If you’ve lived with chronic pain or an autoimmune condition, you’ve probably been told to exercise more, think positive, and push through. And while these suggestions are well-meaning, they often backfire spectacularly.
Here’s why: your nervous system is already convinced it’s under threat. When you override its signals — forcing yourself through pain, ignoring fatigue, dismissing your body’s warnings — you’re essentially confirming to your system that you’re in a hostile environment where survival requires ignoring your own needs.
And what does a nervous system do when it believes survival is at stake? It doubles down on protection. More inflammation. More pain signals. More fatigue. The volume goes up, not down.
This is why the push-crash cycle is so pernicious. You have a good day, you do all the things you’ve been missing, and then you’re flattened for a week. Not because you’re weak — because your nervous system is trying to protect you the only way it knows how.
How Somatic Therapy for Chronic Pain Actually Works
Somatic therapy takes a fundamentally different approach than traditional treatments. Rather than trying to override your body’s signals, we learn to listen to them. Rather than fighting your symptoms, we befriend them.
Titration: The Art of Going Slow
In somatic work, we practice titration — working with small, manageable pieces rather than flooding the system. Instead of diving into trauma memories or pushing through pain, we approach gently, one tiny step at a time. This allows your nervous system to process without becoming overwhelmed.
Pendulation: Building Capacity
Pendulation involves moving attention back and forth between areas of distress and areas of resource in the body. By touching the edges of discomfort, then returning to places of relative ease, your system learns that it can experience activation and return to safety. This gradually expands your window of tolerance.
Resourcing: Finding Islands of Safety
Rather than immediately addressing what’s painful, somatic therapy often begins by helping you find and strengthen internal resources — places in your body that feel relatively okay, memories of safety, supportive relationships. These become anchors that allow deeper work to happen without overwhelm.
Interoception: Learning Your Body’s Language
Many people with chronic conditions have become disconnected from their bodies — understandably, since the body feels like a source of suffering. Somatic therapy helps rebuild interoceptive awareness: the ability to sense and interpret your body’s internal signals. This reconnection is often a crucial piece of healing.
What Your Symptoms Might Be Trying to Tell You
I want to offer something here that you can take or leave. It’s not prescriptive — it’s an invitation to wonder.
Sometimes, when we get curious about our symptoms — not in a “figure it out” way, but in a gentle “what might you be trying to communicate?” way — interesting things emerge.
In my practice, I’ve worked with people whose chronic back pain seemed connected to carrying too much, never asking for support. People whose digestive issues flared when they had to “digest” emotionally difficult truths. People whose autoimmune conditions — where the body attacks itself — emerged after years of self-abandonment.
This isn’t about blaming yourself for your illness. Bodies are complex, and there are always multiple factors involved. But sometimes, symptoms become doorways into parts of ourselves that have been waiting to be seen.
What to Expect from Somatic Therapy Sessions
If you’re considering somatic therapy for chronic pain or autoimmune conditions, you might be wondering what sessions actually involve. Unlike traditional talk therapy, somatic work includes attention to physical sensations, breath, posture, and movement.
A typical session might include initial discussion of what’s present for you physically and emotionally, guided body awareness exercises, gentle breathwork or movement, exploration of sensations connected to emotions or memories, and nervous system regulation techniques you can use at home.
The pace is slow — often slower than clients expect. This is intentional. We’re not trying to have dramatic breakthroughs; we’re trying to teach your nervous system, gradually, that it’s safe to settle.
Ready to Begin?
If something in this article resonated with you — if you’ve felt a small “yes” in your body — I invite you to explore further.
I offer somatic therapy sessions in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, as well as online worldwide. Whether you’re dealing with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions, or simply a body that feels like an unreliable narrator, there is another way.
Your body isn’t your enemy. Your symptoms aren’t punishments. You’re not broken. You’re a nervous system that learned to protect itself — and now, with gentleness and support, you can learn new ways.
Book a session at blissfulevolution.com
