Three Types of Rehabilitation Programs That Helped Me Live With Chronic Pain

Over the years, I’ve attended three different types of rehabilitation programs:

• stress rehabilitation

• stress and pain rehabilitation

• specialised pain rehabilitation for people with chronic pain and hypermobility issues

All of them helped me in different ways.

Before that, I didn’t even know this kind of support existed. And knowing what help there is to get is half the battle.

For decades I worked on my own trying to figure out how to best support my body. I took course after course and learned many things that I still use today. But doing it on my own while juggling a full-time job and living in a body that kept screaming for attention — while doctors kept saying nothing was wrong — took energy I didn’t really have.

Eventually, I needed more structured support.

Stress Rehabilitation

I attended stress rehabilitation during a very severe Crohn’s flare, when my body basically stopped working. It felt like everything shut down.

The main focus of the program was Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), led by therapists and psychiatrists. We worked both individually and in groups, learning how to see situations from different perspectives.

When you are ill, exhausted, and feel like the world is against you — like why did this happen to me, it’s so unfair — it becomes very difficult to step outside those thought loops. CBT helped me do that.

At the time, I was consumed by rage. It didn’t matter whether something happened to me or someone else. My reaction was always intense anger, and it took all my energy.

During one session, the course leader explained that anger is often a symptom of something deeper. What I was actually feeling was grief and sadness about my situation and about decades of medical gaslighting. Once I could recognise that, I could finally begin working with it in a different way.

The rehab helped me pause before reacting when something made me angry, so I could explain what I felt in a way that people could actually hear. Because when reactions take over, your message rarely reaches the other person the way you intended.

We also worked with Basic Body Awareness Therapy (BBAT), a gentle physiotherapy method focused on reconnecting with the body through breathing, posture, and small movements.

When you live with burnout, you often lose your connection to your body completely. And when you’ve spent years being told the signals your body is sending aren’t real, it becomes even harder to trust what you feel.

Just because something can’t be seen in blood tests or on an MRI doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

BBAT, together with yin yoga, helped me begin reconnecting with my body again.

Stress and Pain Rehabilitation

Less than a year later, while still in a Crohn’s flare and complete burnout, I knew something else was wrong. I had known it for a very long time, but it had always been brushed off.

Eventually I convinced my GP to refer me to stress and pain rehabilitation, where there was a more multimodal team including therapists, physiotherapists, doctors specialised in long-term pain conditions, and orthopaedic specialists.

The whole process started with a fairly rigorous intake process where I met several different doctors, talked through my history, and went through a physical examination.

This is when I finally got diagnosed with Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder and fibromyalgia, which explained why my body had been hurting since I was a child.

Because this was during the pandemic, it became their first online rehabilitation program. They did the best they could under the circumstances.

We had lectures about pain and what happens in the body. We talked about stress and about pacing your energy by planning how you use your energy throughout the day so that you avoid as much of the push-and-crash cycle as possible.

Tracking my energy and seeing how what I did during the day affected both my energy level and my sleep was an eye-opener to me.

Things I thought were relaxing, like watching television, were in fact stealing energy I could have used on things that mattered more to me.

Learning to make conscious decisions about where I put my energy changed how I structure my days, and helped me understand what my body had been signaling much earlier than I realised.

Another important part of this rehab was self-compassion.

For most of my adult life I believed in myself, my value as a person, and my ability to do things. I thought I had self-awareness. But I realised that constantly pushing myself to fit into the mould of a normal able-bodied person was making me even sicker.

So I started acting kinder towards myself and allowing myself to take breaks. I no longer had to earn the breaks.

We also worked with the Feldenkrais Method, a form of somatic gentle movement that focuses on creating body and self-awareness, improving posture, coordination, and balance to reduce pain.

When you live with constant pain, movement patterns often change without you noticing. Sometimes because certain movements hurt, and sometimes because you expect them to hurt. Over time this can create even more pain.

Techniques like Feldenkrais, Basic Body Awareness Therapy, and certain forms of yoga can help reconnect you with your body and help you move in a more natural way again. Techniques like mindfulness and meditations can also help you stop and be more present, which also helps you better connect to yourself and your body in this moment.

Because there was also an orthopaedic doctor in the rehabilitation team, I got a referral to an orthopaedic technician and was able to try different types of braces to support my body better and reduce pain. I will write another blog post about what types of braces and support exist.

Specialised Pain Rehabilitation

Last year I was referred to a highly specialised pain rehabilitation program where they work with people with hypermobility and long-term pain conditions in a way that many others don’t.

They had a multimodal team including therapists, physiotherapists, doctors specialised in long-term pain conditions, orthopaedic technicians, occupational therapists, and a nurse who acted as our contact person throughout the process.

Getting accepted into this rehabilitation program was a full process in itself and not everyone gets in.

It started with a ten-week evaluation period with multiple digital meetings with different specialists, both to understand my situation and to assess whether I would benefit from their rehabilitation.

Many of the same questions were repeated again and again, which meant telling my story over and over, as if I hadn’t already done that enough before.

Once accepted, the program started with a four-week digital introduction where shorter lectures about pain, stress, and rehabilitation strategies were released each week, followed by meetings with the specialist responsible for that topic.

After those four weeks, participants decided whether to continue into the seven-week on-site program.

In my group, everyone had some form of hypermobility.

During those seven weeks we met one and a half days per week. We attended lectures about pain, hypermobility, assistive devices and very briefly stress and nutrition. We worked with CBT and ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), mindfulness-based exercises, physiotherapy programs, and warm-water training.

We were also able to try different mattresses and pillows to improve sleep, different chairs during lectures, and aids to help reduce strain while sitting.

Normally you don’t get the opportunity to test these kinds of aids long enough to understand what actually works for you. Being able to try them over time made a real difference.

We were also supposed to have a cooking session to try different kitchen adaptations such as adjustable worktops and assistive tools, but unfortunately that session had to be cancelled due to illness.

We also tried TENS machines. I already had two at home that I don’t use because vibrations usually increase my pain and make me more exhausted, but I know many people benefit from them.

Before starting this rehabilitation I already knew I had worked with many of the techniques they offered. But I wanted support in planning how to move forward.

For 50 years I have lived beyond my capacity, even when I didn’t yet have language for what that meant.

So I wanted help exploring whether applying for permanent disability support might be necessary. It’s not something I ever imagined for my life, but I need support if I’m going to create a more balanced and sustainable life.

The rehabilitation team and I had a meeting together with my GP and a representative from the unemployment office to discuss workplace adaptations that could improve my work environment. A representative from the national insurance system was also supposed to attend but didn’t.

More about that process in a future post.

What I Learned From These Programs

Even after three different rehabilitation programs, there were still areas I had to explore on my own.

One thing I learned is that you are rarely receptive to everything at once. But that doesn’t mean the information isn’t useful. Sometimes things you learned years earlier become helpful later.

One of the most important tools I took with me from these programs is pacing.

Learning how different activities affect my energy levels has changed how I make decisions every day. It allows me to make conscious decisions about where I put my energy instead of reacting afterwards when it’s already gone.

Creating that awareness has become a central part of how I live with chronic illness.

Another important lesson is how powerful it is to meet others living with similar conditions.

Following a course on your own can be helpful, especially if you have someone to discuss it with afterwards. But going through a program together in a group adds another level of understanding.

Something that stood out to me was how little focus there was on nutrition in any of these programs. In my experience nutrition can make a big difference in both symptoms and energy levels.

Another thing that was impossible not to notice was that almost all participants were women. More women live with chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, and other long-term illnesses, yet far less research funding is directed towards these conditions.

More needs to be done so everyone has the same opportunity to live a healthy and meaningful life.

This is one of the reasons I continue sharing what I learn.