Hi! I’m Dr. Redmond, and here’s my story.
Here’s what I believe in when it comes to pain management. Full stop. And I’ve written a journal entry about each and every belief that makes up my pain philosophy.
That words are powerful. (Even just 10 minutes of neutral, rational, carefully chosen education can change everything for a patient with years of chronic pain, and most aren’t getting these words from their providers… but I digress).
But how did I get from a student in psychology in Chicago, IL to an ambitious, passionate, pain psychologist and chronic pain educator with her own chronic pain experience to boot? How did I land on these particular values that are represented in my pain philosophy?
Here’s my story.
I’ve always been the person who is curious about the root of why things are happening, especially on a behavioral and emotional level. I’ve always been a persistent self-improver, striving to be a better person, to understand myself better. I also enjoy interacting with all kinds of people and always told that I belong in “a social field”.
I’ve also always felt that I was sensitive, emotionally and physically, or being told I was sensitive. This is something I view about myself now as an incredible strength and positive attribute. I believe that there’s an important place in the world for highly sensitive people, for empaths - but it took me a long time to like that aspect of myself. All of that is to say, it probably didn’t surprise most of the people close to me when I decided to pursue a degree in psychology.
As life went on, my experiences in early adulthood also gave me data to support the idea that my body was sensitive. At the time, I was often getting headaches, looking for ways to reduce muscle pain, and dealing with fatigue. Doctors have said to me multiple times when I’d ask about a symptom… “well some people are just more sensitive than others”. I was always one of those people. This, combined with a curiosity about the mind-body relationship, fueled my interest in health psychology, and eventually pain psychology.
Once I finished graduate school and received my doctorate in clinical psychology, I sought out experiences that would help me develop an expertise in health psychology, chronic pain management, and I became board certified in biofeedback.
Up until 2019, I worked at a hospital as the director of their interdisciplinary Pain Rehabilitation Program. Alongside a physical and occupational therapist, this program was developed from the ground up and ran in in a completely collaborative, integrated way As part of that role, I spent a considerable amount of time providing education around chronic pain, both for patients and staff at that hospital, on local and national calls, and in the community. This role became a strong foundation for my now over a decade of experience in working with and listening to individuals suffering from long-standing pain and the physical impact of stress on their bodies.
Many women ask me - have you had your own experience with chronic pain?
I have.
I think my encounter with chronic pain was like a lot of people’s experience in some ways - or at least how they start out.
Here’s that story - I went to my primary care doctor, told her I had neck pain for the past 6 months that wouldn’t go away. She ordered x-rays and an MRI. I went to her office for the results, she pulls out the nearest spine model, and explains that I had a bulging disc and what exactly that was. She postulated that, perhaps it was all of that repeated whiplash when I was trying to learn how to snowboard as an adult, or posture at work, certain week muscles in my body, faulty movements, and referred me to a physical therapist. I saw several physicians and a physical therapist.
Luckily, I knew enough about managing chronic pain (hello! Trained pain psychologist here!) to start implementing coping skills on my own. I do anything my doctors tell me to do, I’m a good patient. My personality drove me to feel compelled to heal from that (in a perfectionistic kind of way). Historically, I have always approached challenges with hard work and results have always reliably followed. That didn’t work this time and it felt like nothing was helping.
Starting with medical appointments and physical therapy seemed to make sense at the time. I needed to learn about my diagnosis and fix it! But in hindsight, this wasn’t enough. My experience was entering “chronic” territory and I could feel my body becoming more sensitive. I was already thinking about my pain often, fearing my diagnosis, avoiding my favorite activities.
I want to stop here to make two points:
Point 1: This whole scenario about presenting to our provider’s office, getting all of the diagnostic tests, the “diagnosis”, the mechanical issues, what is happening in the periphery of our body, without acknowledgement of anything else. What’s happening here is that the biomedical or physical model is set in place: we learn that the presence of pain is due to old or ongoing tissue damage and something is wrong, physically. The provider focuses on addressing the “bad disc” and the patient experiences the hope that the treatment, or fix, will make it go away.
As I’ve talked to people with chronic pain, I come to learn that they have spent years of going to appointments, labs, tests, interventions, procedures, surgeries, medicine, physical therapy, with disappointing results. The funny thing is, I knew better. I was a pain psychologist educating patients and providers all over the hospital I worked at that we should not be treating chronic pain from soley a biological or biomedical standpoint. Because pain, especially after having it for years, isn’t just physical. It’s multidimensional. It’s impacted by a number of biological, psychological, and social factors. But I was in a culture where the driving force was find the physical problem and treat it with the physical solution, so I got swept away in that right off the bat.
The second point I want to make aobut my experience and this scenario is that the journey of chronic pain can begin at different times for different people. Whether that’s the onset of an injury, a particularly stressful phase of adulthood, in childhood alongside adverse or traumatic experiences. Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things.
In hindsight, I think a lot of things contributed to my pain. The sensitivity I mentioned earlier. A tendency toward perfectionism and people pleasing, and those characteristics just failing me at the job where I was working when my pain started. While I worked with some of the most wonderful and talented people I’ll probably ever encounter, this was also a job that I found toxic – professionally and interpersonally, and really challenging. In addition, I was working at a hospital at the peak of the opioid and chronic pain epidemics as they were colliding. Providers were identifying patients on high dose opioids and weaning them off, telling them to go see the psychologist, which really pissed people off. We weren’t providing pain psychology in an environment that truly included it in the day to day culture of treating pain. On paper we did, but we had too many minds to change.
My energy in this environment started to get tamped down by the daily stressors of the system I was working in. I started hiding my authentic self by hesitating to share ideas and adopting a passive attitude that just wasn’t me. I was shrinking who I was to maintain the status quo, and I started to forfeit my self-confidence and tenacity.
This job that I was working at was really taking a toll, physically and emotionally, on top of multiple life changes, including getting married and eventually had two babies within 18 months of each other. My pain was interfering with everything I wanted to do. And no one asked me about any of this – about the other things going on in my life. I was experiencing burnout to the max and it showed up everywhere I looked: it impacted my work, my relationships, and my body.
I will say in hindsight, I think maybe there was an injury, who knows, but that these other stressors at that particular point in my life were the roots to my pain becoming chronic. At the time, however, I couldn’t see the link. I thought I was functioning well considering how stressful my job environment was. Still, we know that the nervous system can only stay “turned on” for so long before it gets burned out. This is where we see a cycle of chronic symptoms, particularly pain, set in.
What followed, for me, I think is similar to the experiences of others. Because when I heard those words “bulging disc” from my primary doctor as she’s holding spine model and bringing up my xrays and mri, I was immediately awash in fear and I couldn’t get this image of a faulty tissue in my body out of my mind that would never get better and only get worse with age. I felt myself jumping to the worst case scenarios.
It instilled so much fear in me about my body. And again, I should have known better. But I didn’t, and here’s why. Just like my patients, I looked to the medical system for answers and a medical fix because that’s what we get in the culture of treating chronic pain. But here’s what she didn’t tell me about my neck pain:
Most (80-90%) cases involving bulging or herniated discs will heal within 2-4 months.
Disc bulges are the most common finding seen on imaging, so it really could be just incidental and not the reason for my pain.
Disc bulges are commonly found in people with and without neck pain. Some people who are known to have disc bulges have never experienced neck pain. In fact, 40% of asymptomatic patients my age have disc bulges.
*** Digression…. (What’s even crazier is that, years later, I recently had an appointment at a well-respected hospital to see a pain physician. My goal was to get connected with a physical therapist who could help me reach some of my movement goals (learn how to surf, for example) and get stronger while not flaring up my pain. Before I could even see the doctor, they asked me to go to an x-ray room. They wanted x-rays before knowing anything about my symptoms for her to review when she saw me. The people pleaser in me followed the technician to the room… I processed what was happening, and told them that I would prefer not to get an x-ray (I had no “red flag” symptoms, just stable chronic pain, and didn’t want to know about any more potentially incidental findings). I was surprised at this absolutely outdated practice at this highly regarded institution.
Back to the first doctor I saw about my pain…. There were a lot of things she could have said to assuage (relieve) my fear, but she didn’t. And so I held onto a lot of fear. And then when I tried the fixes offered to me and nothing worked, I had even more fear.
I did everything I knew how professionally and could do personally to manage my pain with poor results. As a result, I was losing faith in the system, the approach, and the very expertise I had spent so much time pursuing to help other people with chronic pain feel better. It became harder and harder to stand behind the work I was doing.
I felt like I was failing my patients, my team, and my own body. And so there was this parallel process that was happening. My pain journey alongside that of my patient’s.
It was at this point that I accepted a new role that expanded what I was learning and teaching. I worked with an occupational therapist, and also a physical therapist that did a lot of pain neuroscience education. The biology behind pain and neuroplasticity were not new concepts to me, but this particular approach to educating patients was the literal missing piece to the puzzle. For my patients, for me, and all of the work I had been doing with patients up to that point.
As I stumbled upon this pain science, I saw both my personal and clinical fear of pain subside.
I immediately started approaching my patients with education and a confidence that there is no need for them to fear their pain either.
I spent time really listening to our patients, the language that they were taught in their treatment appointments and used to describe their pain. Then teaching them to try to shift their perspective. Our patients began viewing pain through a new lens and then reshaping what their lives looked like. I saw the strength of education as a form of medicine.
How?
Because in real time, I was watching them form new connections in their brains, and transform everyday experiences into moments that healed them.
We helped them track their typical days and weeks. We taught them how to reconnect with their values. We taught them how to pace and design a week that wouldn’t lead to a flare-up that ALSO included everything they wanted to do. We saw them managing their energy. We watched them shift from people pleaser and perfectionist to good boundaries and making decisions from their values. We watched them fear pain less by teaching them how to turn the threat level down. We gave them strategies to expose themselves safely and intentionally to movement and activities. We showed them how that retrained the brain away from pain. We watched them talk about their pain less and their lives more. We saw them reconnect with important people in their lives, including their authentic selves.
Fast forward to today - A lot has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I’m a mother to two young children now, we moved to California right before covid. I have since left the hospital for more flexibility- to spend more time at home with my family. And wow, that required a shift, especially with chronic pain. But I found a way to be more present with my family, make decisions that stem from my values, and have a life without the constant noise of flare-ups and pain.
How did I do that? I learned right along with my past patients. Track my day, design my ideal day, identify my values and insert them in my days, learn how to expose myself to movement, learn about chronic pain, reduce the threat, repeat repeat repeat.
It didn’t happen right away, but slowly over a couple of years I also started to think about my pain less, and experience it less. As I often say, it was a process of my life becoming bigger and my pain becoming smaller.
I’ve done the work. I’ve done the learning. I’ve done the training. I have the expertise. And I’m here to share it.
When I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next professionally, I knew I needed to widen my educational reach with the part of my job that I really liked- creating content and education, and providing it in a way that was digestible and that people could understand.
My mission now is to make education about chronic pain and making one’s life bigger than pain more accessible and far reaching than what I could accomplish in a days work in a traditional clinical setting. Because I know that the right words, the right shift, the right education can have a more powerful effect than some of the greatest drugs in the world.
So where do I focus my education? On your values. We first connect with your values. We connect with your story. And then we move through a step-by-step system to redesign your day to match what you really want. If this story resonated with you, let’s hop on a call this month, so that I can connect you with the education that has helped me and so many others find a life that is bigger than pain.
Are you a self-directed learner? Enrollment has now opened for my program “Breaking Free From the Boom-Bust Cycle”, but for a limited time only. Get the details and grab your spot before enrollment ends! For a sample of the education you’ll get in that course, grab your copy of my free video tutorial too!