Why I Celebrate Flare-Ups... Yes, Really.

A client of mine, a woman in her early forties who runs a small retail business, spent two full days in bed last month. Her back went out hard enough that it hurt to breathe. She'd been doing the work with me for a while by then, building a pressure release valve, journaling, learning to notice tension before it built up, and she called me almost apologetic about it, like the flare-up meant she'd failed somehow.

I told her the opposite. I told her we should celebrate it.

That's usually the moment people look at me sideways, so let me walk through why.

The nervous system doesn't talk. It performs.

Here's what was actually going on with her. She and her husband were about to sign a lease on a big expansion for the business worth millions of dollars. This is the kind of decision that sits in your stomach for weeks. On top of that it was their slow season, payroll was tight, and she'd been doing some deeper journaling that had stirred up old stuff from her childhood and from a divorce twenty years earlier, back when a back injury had put her in bed for months.

Stack all of that up and her body had a lot to process, so it did what bodies do when there's more going on than the conscious mind has caught up to. It found a symptom to alert her to the potential danger. In her case, it was the familiar back pain and shallow, guarded breathing.

Your nervous system can't sit you down and say "hey, this building decision is freaking you out more than you're admitting." It doesn't have words. What it does have is symptoms and volume, so it turns something up, usually something physical, until you're forced to pay attention.

The old pattern

Twenty years ago, when this same woman was a single mom under real financial and emotional strain, a back flare put her in bed for months. So this time, lying there again, the fear showed up right on schedule: is this going to be like last time?

Except it wasn't and the reason it wasn't had nothing to do with the pain itself.

She caught the fear instead of feeding it. She reminded herself, mid-flare, that she has support now, that the stress is nowhere near what it was back then, that the decision she and her husband are making is a well-thought-out one, not a rash one. She talked to her fear almost like it was a person in the room. Like, "I see you. I know why you're here. You're trying to protect me. I'm okay."

That's the process of understanding her symptoms. It's not about eliminating the fear or powering through the pain. We just worked to hand the nervous system more evidence that something is actually right, instead of wrong.

Here's the thing about a nervous system in protective mode: if you meet a flare-up with panic, you're basically confirming its worst suspicion. "Yeah, you're right, this is bad." This approach turns the alarm up further. If you meet it with steadiness, however, even while the pain is genuinely there, you're giving it a different message. "I hear you, and I'm still okay." Over time, that message is what teaches the alarm to stop shouting so loud.

What this actually looks like day to day

This work isn't about ignoring pain or pretending it away, it's about what you do in the minutes after it shows up. Do you spiral into "here we go again," or do you get curious about what's actually going on in your life right now that your body might be responding to?

For her, the flare wasn't random and it lined up with a genuinely stressful, high-stakes week. The practice of noticing that connection, out loud, calmly, is most of the work. It's not about fixing the fear or forcing the pain to leave faster, but naming what's happening and letting that be enough for the moment.

This client is back to her life now. The back is fine, and physically, she's doing everything she was doing previously. The next time something flares, and something probably will, she's got a different relationship with it than she had twenty years ago.

If this sounds like a pattern you recognize, let's have a conversation about how this could work for you.