Pain and Fascia

Pain and fascial restrictions create a self-perpetuating cycle. When you experience pain, your organism automatically generates protective responses - muscle guarding, altered posture, restricted movement - that limit fascial mobility throughout connected regions. These protective patterns serve an important initial purpose, but when they persist beyond tissue healing, the restricted fascia can become a source of new, erroneous threat signals. Fascial tissues that lose their mobility can't transmit normal mechanical information clearly through the shared interoceptive infrastructure. Instead of communicating "all is well" through smooth gliding and fluid pressure changes, restricted fascia sends signals that get interpreted as threat or discomfort, even when there's no ongoing tissue damage. This creates a negative feedback loop: pain triggers protective restriction, restriction disrupts normal fascial communication, disrupted communication generates more threat signaling, and threat signaling reinforces the protective patterns. The problem becomes fundamentally about communication breakdown - when the fascial network can't relay accurate information about tissue status and movement capacity, the organism defaults to maintaining protective patterns that no longer serve healing and that perpetuate the damaging cycle. The protective patterns become part of the problem.