People like Ogres Like Onions: The Moving Pain Phenomenon

People are like ogres are like onions. This is something I've started saying to describe a particular aspect of pain recovery through bodywork: pain that moves.

Moving pain can be scary, frustrating, or make you feel a bit crazy. After all, pain is supposed to be a signal that something is wrong, right? So if it starts to roam around, we can start to imagine that we are jacked up beyond repair or that multiple malfunctions are occurring at the same time. (Or that we've become that dude with the scarab in The Mummy if we're into catastrophizing.) In the context of massage and bodywork however, moving pain is actually an amazing sign of progress.

Everything in the body works together, nothing in isolation. This means most musculoskeletal injury, whether the initial injury or the compensation patterns that arise to support recovery, will involve several different tissues. (Here is a more detailed example.) When the pain starts to travel then, typically disappearing from one place and popping up somewhere new as opposed to simply spreading, during or after a therapeutic massage, it is a sign that the issue is resolving and the body is communicating where to work next.

Now you might be wondering, but why would I get new pain if the body is healing? Well, you didn't. That pain was already there underneath the one for which you originally sought help. We just had to work through the people/ogre/onion layers to reveal it. The Gateway Theory of pain hypothesizes that we can only experience one high sensation at a time. That is why we instinctually rub our foot or clench our first when we stub a toe; we are trying to override the painful signal with a pleasant or more immediate one. Applying that logic to unwinding complicated compensations and healing chronic pain, it makes sense that we would feel the pain first in the place that is most ready to be addressed. After all, the squeaky wheel may get the grease, but a screaming banshee will make us forget about the cart entirely.

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