Healing Through Change: Pain Recovery, Emotional Eating, and Nervous System Support in Grantham, New Hampshire

I’ve been a little quiet lately, and for a really good reason.

My family and I just bought a house. And not just any house… the house I’ve been seeing in my dreams for years. The one on the lake. The one that feels like home in every cell of my body.

But getting there? Whew. It was a whirlwind.

We did a 30-day close (which I truly don’t recommend unless you enjoy chaos and overwhelm). Those 30 days were filled with inspections, paperwork, phone calls, emails, packing, moving, more packing, driving to Ohio to clean out our storage unit, lots of cleaning, and settling our family into this new space.

Now we’re here, in a beautiful, peaceful home in New Hampshire, where we can walk 100 yards from the back door and be at the edge of the pond. The boys are obsessed and keep telling me they can't wait to go home now. And Sherman the labradoodle is too, but perhaps a little too excited if you ask our new neighbors.

But here’s the part of all of this that surprised me, and what I'm learning as I move through another big transition after pain recovery.

With achieving this dream came a lot of fear.

Even though this home is everything we wanted- great schools, rural but with a strong sense of community, a place where we finally feel we belong- I could feel something inside me quietly bracing.

A part of me was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

A part of me was expecting something to go wrong.

A part of me that didn’t trust the good. I wasn't able to receive it.

If you’ve ever been through chronic pain, trauma, burnout, or long-term stress, this probably feels familiar.

That subtle “bracing” is one of the most common nervous system responses I see in my pain recovery clients. And I see it just as often in women working through emotional eating and weight struggles.

When you’ve spent years in survival mode, your body learns to scan for danger, even when life is finally going well. You're always preparing for something to go wrong, spinning in negative thought loops that predict the worst.

The old me would’ve missed this.

I would’ve pushed through.

I would’ve ignored the fear.

And  I would’ve paid for it with pain or cravings.

I've moved several times, and it has always triggered intense back pain for me. It's been drilled in that bending and moving boxes is hard on your back.

But this time, at 38, I moved without any back pain. That has never happened before.

Nothing physically changed about my body. In fact, I can admit I exercise less now than the last several times we moved.

What changed was my relationship with fear.

My ability to notice the bracing, to soothe it, and to remind myself that feeling safe is allowed.

Even more, that joy is allowed, and that I don’t have to wait for something bad to happen.

This is the power of pain science and nervous system work. This is what I teach my clients every day.

And it doesn’t stop with pain…

Fear and cravings are deeply connected.

If this had happened a few years ago, I would’ve eaten my way through the entire process, especially because all of this chaos happened around Halloween, my old nemesis.

Halloween candy used to be a guarantee. I would eat it, I would obsess about my weight, I would judge myself for not having control over my cravings, then I’d enter the spiral of “what’s wrong with me” thoughts.

But this year? We still have Halloween chocolate sitting in the house, and I don’t want it.

And it's not because I’m being “good," not because I have more willpower. It's because I’m not using food to soothe that repressed feeling of fear anymore.

I’m not bracing in the same way, so my nervous system isn’t sounding alarms the way it used to. Without the internal alarm, there’s nothing to numb.

That’s the shift I want every woman to experience:

When the fear softens, the pain softens.

When the fear softens, the cravings soften.

When the fear softens, everything becomes easier: health, habits, weight, energy, and life.

We can’t control life.

But you can learn to stop spiraling in worry and bracing for something to go wrong.

This move reminded me how deeply our inner world shapes our physical world, and that life rarely goes according to our carefully crafted plans.

It reminded me that even when something good happens, our bodies sometimes need help trusting that goodness.

And it reminded me how powerful the tools of mindfulness, pain reprocessing therapy, and nervous system regulation really are.

They helped me move homes without back pain.

They helped me navigate fear without spiraling into anxiety or burnout.

They helped me stay grounded, healthy, and present through one of the biggest transitions of my life.

If you’re reading this, bracing for something in your own life, whether it's pain, weight loss, or the anxiety that comes with change, I want you to know that you can learn this too.

You can create safety inside your body, even when life is chaotic. You can change the patterns that feel unchangeable.

Healing isn’t about eliminating fear; it’s about learning to move through it so you can still move toward the life you want.