The Root Causes of Complex Chronic Illness and Pain—and the Path to Recovery

The following is a summary of what I learned during my two years of recovery from Long COVID and self-study that I engaged in to learn how to heal from chronic illness.

If you've exhausted every medical exam and test, ruled out structural causes of your pain or illness, and still aren't feeling better and your medical team has no plan for you to recover, it’s time to shift your perspective. The path to recovery often lies in understanding the deeper, internal factors that might be part of your suffering.

What Makes Us Prone to Complex Chronic Illness and Pain?

There’s no one cause, but many people with chronic conditions share similar experiences. As communities have known for centuries, our minds and bodies are closely linked, and strong sources of stress—both emotional and physical—can leave a lasting imprint. Here are a few factors that may play a role:

• Daily Life Stress: Work pressures, financial worries, conflicts with family or friends, overwhelming news cycles, masking disabilities, sensory issues, and systemic oppression like the patriarchy and colonialism.
• Childhood Trauma: Early adverse experiences such as neglect, abandonment, abuse, violence, bullying, or conflict can shape how we cope with stress as adults.
• Cultural Conditioning and Protective Coping Mechanisms: as children, our inner selves craved freedom, expression, and joy. But in order to fit in with societal expectations, many of us learned to suppress our emotions and develop coping mechanisms to keep us safe. These can manifest as perfectionism, people-pleasing, hyper-responsibility, co-dependency, or overachievement.

Your body is capable of handling stress in healthy ways, but long-term or intense stress, especially without adequate support, can lead to an internal buildup of pressure and teetering on the brink of exhaustion. This pressure might stay dormant for years until triggered by a virus, medication, injury, or another stressful event—causing an overwhelming stress response. When that happens, your brain (specifically, the amygdala) interprets the distress signals as danger, and your nervous system flips into survival mode: fight, flight, or freeze.

What Happens During a Chronic Stress Response?

When your body enters survival mode, adrenaline kicks in. Your vagus nerve (cranial nerve 10) controls your functions to raise your heart rate, speed up your thoughts, and increase inflammation and pain. Digestion slows down, rest becomes difficult, and you might even experience random symptoms like dry mouth. 

If there are further activations (triggers), your body may enter freeze and shutdown states: decrease in digestion, brain fog and memory issues; and you feel exhausted and true rest feels impossible. You may experience dizziness and an increase in your pain threshold. You may have ringing in your ears and changes to your eyesight. You may feel numb and hopeless. 

You could get stuck feeling like you're constantly on high alert, or in a complete shutdown, disconnected from your emotions and stressors. These physical symptoms are real and often accompanied by chronic pain.

I made a map to help navigate through these confusing experiences. 

There's Nothing Wrong with You—Your Body Is Protecting You

It’s important to understand that there’s nothing “wrong” with your body doing this. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: protecting you in the best way it knows how, in response to a toxic and complex world. Unfortunately, this protection sometimes creates a fear-symptom cycle, where fear fuels symptoms, and symptoms create more fear.

For neurodivergent folks, this cycle may be even more pronounced due to our heightened sensitivity to our environment and our unique safety needs. Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA2S+ communities often experience additional layers of distress, stemming from systemic oppression and the challenges of living in a dominant culture that doesn’t always feel safe for them.

How Can We Heal and Recover?

There are tools and strategies you can use to interrupt the fear-symptom cycle and build a felt sense of safety and flexibility within your nervous system. People who recover from chronic illness often report improvements by focusing on:

• Radical Rest and Pacing: Slowing down, authentically resting, and creating boundaries that protect your energy and values.
• Community and Support: Building a support network that meets your emotional and physical needs is crucial for long-term healing. Learning to accept and ask for help is key. 
• Building Safety in the Body: Practices like present moment awareness, slow nasal breathing, cranial sacral massage, vagus nerve stimulation, yoga nidra, safe and sound listening protocol, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, tapping, and somatic tracking help restore a felt sense of safety and calm. 
• Emotional Expression: Accepting and expressing repressed emotions through expressive techniques like the JournalSpeak method.
• Mindset and Thought Management: Learning to identify unhelpful thoughts and adopting a growth mindset through therapies like CBT and/or DBT (as long as it is neuro-affirming!). Cultivating self-compassion and non-judgment as a way to gently unlearn perfectionistic thinking. 
• Trauma Processing: Working through traumas in a safe and supportive way using modalities like inner child work, EMDR, or IFS (Parts Work).
• Inviting in Joy, Meaning and Purpose: Creating openness to play, meaningful experiences and work, and spiritual connection.

You can also visit my directory of free and paid sources of information! 

Reclaiming Wellness, One Step at a Time

This work is a path to personal and collective liberation. Healing from chronic illness isn’t just about addressing the body—it’s about reclaiming bodily safety, sovereignty, and resiliency. It’s also about unlearning perfectionism, slowing down, and finding joy and meaning.

This journey is as much about personal recovery as it is about collective liberation. True wellness doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it requires systemic change, safety, and inclusion in our communities. It’s also about advocating for anti-oppressive and anti-racist systemic changes that create inclusive and resilient communities—because true wellness requires support beyond the individual.

[Adapted from: The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno; Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg; Anchored by Deb Dana; The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk; The Body Says No by Dr Gabor Maté; The Myth of Normal by Dr Gabor Maté; The Way Out by Alan Gordon; Unlearn Your Pain by Dr Schubiner and consult with Nicole Sachs, LCSW]

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This concept applies to many complex conditions that may be diagnosed, including: chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, post viral syndrome (Long COVID), burnout, anxiety, PTSD, tachycardia, POTS, dysautonomia, hashimotos, vertigo, reynaud’s, psoriasis, chronic allergies, GI disorders, IBS, food sensitivities, multiple chemical sensitivity, endometriosis, tinnitus, Epstein-Barr syndrome, mast cell syndrome, chronic pain including regional pain syndrome, sciatica, back pain (including herniated discs, pinched nerves), TMJ, whiplash, tendonitis, knee pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, repetitive strain injury, myofascial pain syndrome, neuropathy, chronic migraines/headaches, pelvic floor pain and more.

More and more research is being published on these topics, however it usually takes about 10-20 years before it is implemented by clinicians. 

There are various names researchers use to describe these related concepts: tension myositis syndrome, mind body syndrome, neuroplastic pain, hypersensitive nervous system, nervous system disorder, nervous system dysregulation, nervous system dysfunction, vagus nerve dysfunction, cell danger response, psychosomatic disorder, somatoform disorder, psychophysiologic disorder etc. Different practitioners will use various terms to describe similar things from their own perspective. Language is always evolving and we will never all agree what to call it!

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This does not constitute medical advice, and any new approaches or treatments should be discussed with a knowledgable health care practitioner.