We all carry a mental image of our bodies. It’s called proprioception. It lets you know where you are in space. When you have chronic pain, it can mess with your proprioception. Essentially, your body’s map of itself in space gets it wrong. This is how “phantom limb” pain happens, pain that a person senses in a limb that has been amputated.
This is called “neural smudging.” When I got my head around the fact that chronic pain could re-map my understanding of my how I move through the world, I began to wonder what chronically painful work environments do to us.
What gets erased, smudged? What becomes inaccessible? What is overworked instead?
LIsten to learn more.
