You know the spot. It’s that spot in your ‘traps’ where your neck meets your shoulders. You probably think it’s tight and painful. You might crave a massage and think you need those ‘knots’ rubbed out. The thing is… everyone is sore there. It’s normal. It starts in kids when they are 2 or 3 years old. It is not weird to have pain and it is not weird to be tender.

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Most people experience pain at some time in their life. Sometimes even dramatically, sharp and very odd pain that doesn’t make sense. Ever step on a stair and have shooting, severe pain in your kneecap? Ever turn your head and feel some sharp pain in your neck? Or have pain in your back that maybe lasts a few minutes or sometimes even a couple days? All of these things are normal. If you are doing more, if you are more stressed at work, if you haven’t been as healthy as you normally are, it’s normal to feel more pain. We should not expect to be pain-free 100% of the time.

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If you feel tight, sore or tense, these can be all normal too.

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What is a problem is how we react to these normal sensitivities. Sometimes we have a little bit of normal pain but then we can be told that some muscle isn’t working, your posture ‘sucks’, you are out of alignment, or you are told that it’s bad to have those normal aches and pains. These secondary things can make our normal aches and pains worse and amplify them. That is how pain persists and that is how pain is multidimensional.

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And when pain persists, it can get weird. You can feel pain spreading, moving around, coming and going, getting worse or better for no apparent reason. Your body can feel shifted or out of place, or things that were once okay are now excruciating. This is the weird part of pain. But we can now explain it. It’s only weird if you think that pain is just related to tissue damage. But since pain is about our tissue sensitivity, our immune system and our nervous system, we can see how ‘weird’ pain feelings can be explained.