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Topic: Chronic Pain & Symptoms

My Juicy Insights from the Mind-Body Conference

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If you've ever wondered whether mind-body healing is real or just something people say when the tests come back clear, this one's for you. I just got back from the ATNS conference, and I'm sharing what I learned, what I felt, and what it was like to walk on stage for the first time.

Two years ago I sat in that same audience with neck and shoulder pain, feeling like a total fraud. A therapist who teaches this work and still hurts? I was sure everyone could tell. I also remember watching the speakers and thinking, "I want to be up there one day." This year, Callie Krajcir and I presented on food fear and food intolerances. When I asked the room who had clients with a list of foods they can't eat, almost every hand went up.

We get into why stress and pushed-down emotions create real physical symptoms, and why that idea is way older than modern medicine. I share what I took away from Vanessa Blackstone's talk on safety as a privilege, and from a session on people living with both structural and neuroplastic conditions like cancer, ALS, and Parkinson's.

Then I get a little direct about language. The words you use about food, your body, your shoes, your posture, and the people around you are teaching your brain what's dangerous. If you're constantly judging the world, you're judging yourself too. You'll hear the simple practice I use to start shifting it.

If you've been on the fence about how much of your symptoms are physical and how much are stress, this episode gives you a clearer answer. And if you're still having symptoms and feel like you're failing, I want you to hear my story. You're not.

Resources mentioned

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The Missing Piece of Nervous System Healing

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If you've been breathing, grounding, and regulating your way through every day and still feel stuck, this one's for you.

Nervous system education has gotten loud lately, and that's a beautiful thing. But somewhere along the way, "nervous system healing" started to mean "stay calm at all costs." In this solo episode, I'm widening the lens. Because we're complex beings, and healing chronic pain and illness usually happens on more than one level at once: brain, body, emotions, relationships, beliefs, and the way we respond to our own experiences.

I also share a piece of my own story, the year-plus I spent eating only 10 to 15 foods, and what finally shifted when I realized it was never really about the food.

In this episode, you'll explore:
✨ How your brain makes predictions and why sensitization can keep real symptoms going long after an injury or illness has passed
✨ Why physical, functional, and nervous system support don't have to be either/or
✨ The difference between regulating to feel better and regulating to build capacity
✨ Body awareness vs. body monitoring, and why more awareness isn't always the answer
✨ How protective patterns like suppressed anger, people-pleasing, and perfectionism can show up in the body
✨ What progress really looks like (hint: it's not always fewer symptoms)
✨ Why the goal was never to spend your life healing. It was to get back to living.

If you've felt overwhelmed by all the approaches out there, this episode will help you see how the pieces fit together.

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🌿 Ready to go deeper? Join the Mind Body Healing Method, my small-group program for healing chronic pain and illness through four phases: Recognize, Regulate, Rewire, and Reclaim.
👉 Learn more and join: https://programs.healwithgrace.co/mbhm

#HealWithGrace #NervousSystemHealing #ChronicPainRecovery #NeuroplasticPain #MindBodyHealing

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People Pleasing and Chronic Pain: Breaking the Good Girl Pattern

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Are you the one who says "I'm happy to help" before you've even checked your calendar? People pleasing and chronic illness are more connected than most of us realize, and in this episode I'm walking you through the overlap.

I call it the good girl pattern. Be nice. Be kind. Don't be too much. Don't have too many feelings. Nobody wrote these rules down for us. We soaked them up from TV, school, church, and family life. And for a lot of us, they stopped being a habit and became an identity.

BUT that pattern is not who you are. It's something you learned to stay accepted. Your nervous system is wired for belonging, so of course it worked. It kept you loved and included. It's also costing you more than you realize.

Every time you override a need, your body notices. Saying yes when you mean no. Smiling through irritation. Scanning the room to make sure everyone else is okay before you even sit down. Each one is a small stress hit, and they stack up over years. Eventually, when you don't say no, your body says it for you → through a migraine, fatigue, gut issues, or pain.

In this episode, I'm sharing how the good girl pattern shows up at work, in relationships, with friends, and around the holidays. I'm also getting honest about my own "I'm fine" era and what changed once I realized I'm a pretty particular introvert who needs a lot of downtime.

You'll also get a few simple practices to start this week. Noticing how often you say sorry. Pausing before your automatic yes. And asking at the end of each day, did that drain me or fill me?

This isn't about blaming your parents or where you grew up. It's about seeing the pattern clearly so your body doesn't have to keep protecting you this way.

Resources mentioned

The "nice, good girl" rules that made so many of us sick
Mind Body Healing Method

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How To Heal Food Sensitivities

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If you've been cutting out food after food trying to heal your food sensitivities, and your safe list keeps getting shorter, this episode is for you. I'm recording from Austin, the city where I was once down to 10 to 15 foods for a year and a half.

I remember sitting at the food tasting for my own wedding and not being able to eat any of it. Just sitting there watching. So when I say I get it, I really get it.

Here's what I want you to hear. Your reactions are real. The bloating, the pain, the headaches after you eat, none of that is in your head. But reacting to food is not the root cause of your symptoms. When your brain learns that bread or dairy or tomatoes are dangerous, it does its job and protects you. It sends a symptom. And every time you cut out another food, the fear gets a little louder.

I also share something I don't talk about much. My eating disorder actually started with a restrictive anti-inflammatory paleo diet from a practitioner I trusted. I was just trying to help my body. We talk about why so many people with chronic symptoms end up in the same food-fear loop, and the patterns I see over and over: perfectionism, self-criticism, control. And why flexibility is one of the best things you can give yourself.

Then I walk you through what actually helped me feel safe with food again. Telling my brain before and after every meal that food is safe. Visualizing my body digesting it well, whether it was a Reese's peanut butter cup or chicken broth. Looking honestly at the stress in my life. It wasn't overnight. It was a practice, every single day.

If you're a therapist, coach, or health practitioner, stick around. I share the one language shift I want you to make with your clients starting today.

And if you have a true allergy like celiac or a nut allergy, this isn't about that. This is about the sensitivities and intolerances that showed up later in life and built up over time.

Resources mentioned:

Mind Body Healing Method, my small group nervous system program

How to work with Grace:

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What I’ve Learned About Treating Neuroplastic Symptoms

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Most people never think to ask whether their symptoms have a nervous system root cause. They get the gut issues, the migraines, the fatigue, the pain, and they go looking for the structural answer. More testing. More protocols. More specialists.

In this episode Grace goes back to her early days of switching her niche from eating disorders to chronic pain and illness, and shares the things she got wrong before she got solid.

The first one is safety. She used to move faster than her clients' nervous systems were ready for. Sending the podcast, sending the book, trying to convince someone that the thing they had been fighting for twenty years was actually a danger response. What she learned is that belief is not the entry point. Safety is. You do not need someone to agree with you on day one. You need them to feel safe enough to get curious.

The second one is the both/and. She spent a long time being wobbly about structural findings. The bulged disc. The SIBO. The autoimmune diagnosis. The cervical spine finding. She would back off and refer out, which left people stranded. Now she says it plainly. Structural things are real. They are also often not the reason the symptoms keep persisting. Holding both at once without flattening either one is a clinical skill, not a belief system, and it is learnable.

She also gets into the nuance she did not used to assess for, including neurodivergence, and why a framework that makes you less curious about the person in front of you is being used wrong.

Then there is the one that took the longest. You do not have to be certain to do this work. Not as a client, not as a practitioner. The 3am searching on WebMD and in the AI chats feels productive, but it is the nervous system demanding certainty before it is willing to stand down. Bodies do not hand you certainty. They hand you information. The work is building enough safety to keep moving while it is still unclear.

Resources mentioned:

Nervous System Screener questionnaire

Mind-Body Integration Method Practitioner Training, first cohort starts October 2026. Early bird pricing ends September 17, doors close October 2

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The Training That Catapulted My Own Healing

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If you have been circling the idea of mind-body practitioner training, this one is for you. Not the version where you collect a certificate. The version where the training changes you while you are learning it.

Before I took my first pain reprocessing therapy training, I had already done a lot of my own work. I had let go of most of the chronic pain. The food intolerances, the histamine reactions, the fatigue, all of it had come way down. And I had plateaued. Better, not free. There was still this low hum of managing my body instead of trusting it.

Then I went into the training and applied every single thing to myself. Light bulbs, over and over. That is the part nobody warns you about. When you learn how to guide someone else's nervous system, you are also signing up for the next chapter of your own.

I also say the thing I wish somebody had said to me five years ago. You do not have to be fully healed to help other people heal. I talk about the crash that had me lying on the couch wondering if everything I had learned was a fraud. The antidepressants I quit in college because I had decided, all on my own, that a therapist could not be on them. The imposter syndrome that has followed me my whole career. And the day my body ran an actual fever right before a three-day professional retreat, because walking into a room full of other clinicians felt that unsafe to my system.

I share what I did instead of staying in bed. It is the clearest example I have of teaching your body that you can be uncomfortable and still be safe.

If you have been quietly wondering whether you are meant to share this work with other people, the part about curiosity being the only real prerequisite is for you.

Resources mentioned

Mind Body Integration Training, my six-week live practitioner training. Founding cohort is application-based. Early bird pricing through September 17th; doors close October 2nd, first live session October 22nd.

Bring a colleague, and you each get $100 off.
https://programs.healwithgrace.co/mbimt

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Your Chronic Pain Is 100% Real and Here’s Why Your Nervous System Is Still Behind It

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If you've ever had someone tell you your pain is real and then in the same breath tell you there's nothing wrong; this episode is for you.

Here's the thing the medical model never made room for: both can be true at the same time. Your chronic pain and illness are real. Completely, 100% real. And your nervous system is still driving it. That is not a contradiction. That is how pain actually works.

Symptoms are not a damage meter. They’re a danger signal. Your brain's best guess about how much threat your body is under. Which means two people can have the identical MRI findings and one of them is in agony and one of them is fine. And a person with completely clean scans can be in the worst pain of their life. The finding does not predict the feeling. That's not a flaw in the system; that's the system doing exactly what it was built to do.

Grace breaks this down in this episode with two groups: people whose testing comes back clean (negative testing is not the end of the road — for a lot of you, it's the beginning of the real answer), and people who do have real positive findings. Both have nervous system involvement. The nervous system is the volume dial on pain, and it decides how loud the signal gets turned up — regardless of what the scan shows.

There's also a sharp test in here worth knowing: pain that moves around from your shoulders to your hip to your jaw is not structural. Tissue damage doesn't travel. A dysregulated nervous system does. And pain that eases on vacation — if a beach touches it, it's nervous system.

Save this one for when you’re flaring and need to hear it again.

Resources mentioned:

– Dr. Schechter — mind-body physician [GEL: link to his previous HWG episode]

– PRT practitioner listserv 

– Practitioner masterclass 

– Mind-Body Healing Method program for nervous system healing 

How to work with Grace:

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Nervous System 101: How to Know If It’s Behind Your Chronic Pain or Illness

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There's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from understanding everything and still not changing. You've read the books. You've listened to the podcasts. You can explain neuroplastic symptoms. You might even be fully bought in. And you're still sitting in your body going — so why isn't this working?

That's what this episode is about.

Here's the thing most people in this space haven't heard yet: insight and regulation are two completely different skills. They happen in different parts of your brain. You can have a life-changing realization about why your body does what it does, and your nervous system can sit there completely unmoved by it. Because it doesn't speak the language of insight. It speaks the language of experience.

If a symptom has been in your body for more than six months — the pain, the fatigue, the gut stuff, the dizziness — your nervous system is involved. That's true no matter what your labs say. No matter what specialists have or haven't found. No matter how many times someone has told you they're not sure what's wrong. Your nervous system and chronic pain or illness are connected in ways the old medical model just never had room for.

Grace shares from her own journey in this one — including a stretch where she went deep into the physical route, got caught in protocol after protocol, and realized she wasn't working with what actually mattered: the emotional state, the belief patterns, the stuff her body had been holding. The shift that changed everything for her wasn't more understanding. It was structure. A repeatable, sequenced framework for actually practicing regulation — not just knowing about it.

This episode is for you if you're somewhere between knowing and doing. If you've absorbed all the education and your body still hasn't caught up. If you're wondering whether the nervous system piece is really what's going on for you.

The map doesn't move you. The road does.

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How Andrea Reclaimed Health Anxiety and Bladder Symptoms

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If you've been told your interstitial cystitis is something you just learn to manage — this episode is for you.

Andrea spent two years cycling through doctors, prescriptions, the IC diet, and specialists. Her symptoms started as IC, then added vulvodynia, then joint pain. Different labels, same pattern: her nervous system running on constant high alert.

What finally shifted things wasn't a new protocol. It was the moment she fully, 100% believed her mind was driving her symptoms. Not a little bit. Not "maybe." All the way.

She talks about what that actually looked like in practice — stopping the elimination diets (which were making her more hypervigilant, not better), cancelling a specialist appointment, quitting the IC Facebook groups, never going back to medical Reddit. Not from giving up. From finally understanding what was causing her symptoms.

There's a moment in this conversation where Andrea describes going from counting the minutes between bathroom trips — giving herself gold stars for every three hours — to just… not. Not tracking it. Not thinking about it. That quiet shift in mental focus was the first real sign something was changing.

She also talks about the tools that helped. Heart coherence meditations. Channeling the feeling of vacation. The Eras Tour. Music. Not because they're magic, but because they showed her nervous system what safety actually feels like — and it turns out, you can practice that.

One of the things she said that stuck with me: "This was never just about the symptoms. I needed to change the way I approach life."

That's what this episode is really about.

Resources mentioned:

Andrea's Instagram: @instinctualmothering and @socialboob 

How to work with Grace:

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