The Hidden Links Between Childhood Trauma, Chronic Pain, Fibromyalgia

For many people living with chronic pain and fibromyalgia, the story is deeply frustrating and painfully familiar. Years of doctors’ visits, medications, scans, and specialists with little relief and even fewer answers. Countless test results come back “normal.” Symptoms are minimized by doctors and loved ones who might even accuse you of making it up. The lingering impacts of hysteria and many chronic pain conditions remain in the medical world even in 2025. Fibromyalgia specifically has a history of doctors invalidating its existence due to their inabilities to treat or diagnose. It was not until 2017 that this condition was finally assigned an ICD diagnostic code for billing which has many implications in the western medicine. "Most essential of all, it sets the word “fibromyalgia” into the approved health care lexicon, and the doctors can no more say that fibromyalgia doesn’t exist." All the while you've spent thousands on treatments that didn't create lasting pain relief. The pain might go away for minutes or hours but you feel no measured lasting change over time. These unclassified misunderstood chronic pain conditions are often invisible and isolating from community support when people can't see the pain or understand why is it there.

What I learned painfully is that western medicine and other realms I tested for over a decade failed to look at childhood trauma, and traumatic experiences that had shaped my nervous system in a way that it was never wired healthily from the start. Many are born into households that are unsafe, by mothers who were experiencing abuse before, during and after their pregnancies. Babies and children with no safe place to grow into adults who've never lived in a safe home. Doctors simply look at the biomechanical factors in your body instead of looking at what your body has lived through. This approach will never treat the root.

Over the past two decades, research has increasingly shown a strong link between fibromyalgia, chronic pain syndromes, and high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores. The ACE study, conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, revealed that early life stress — including emotional neglect, abuse, household instability, and chronic fear — is directly correlated with increased risk of chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, depression, and long-term pain in adulthood. This isn’t coincidence. It’s physiology. This is not yet conventional wisdom with providers who long denied the existence of a condition and despite this research being available before my condition started it took me years of study to discover and implement change based on this data.

When a child grows up in an environment where they do not feel safe, protected, or emotionally supported, their nervous system adapts. Cortisol stays elevated. Muscles remain guarded. The body learns to brace. Over time, that constant state of vigilance can dysregulate pain processing, immune response, and inflammation. Emotional safety directly impacts inflammation, immune function, and pain perception. The field of psychoneuroimmunology has shown that chronic stress alters immune response and increases inflammatory markers.

Fibromyalgia is now understood by many researchers not as a mystery illness, but as a condition involving central nervous system sensitization — essentially, a nervous system that has learned to stay on high alert. Studies published in journals such as Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology and Pain Research & Management have consistently found higher rates of childhood trauma, emotional neglect, and early adversity in people with fibromyalgia compared to the general population. The body, it seems, remembers what the psyche was not allowed to process.

This understanding changes everything. It reframes chronic pain not as a failure of the body, but as an intelligent response to overwhelming experience. When you view pain through this lens, it becomes clear why stress worsens symptoms, why unsafe environments trigger flare-ups, and why emotional suppression often leads to physical intensity. The body does not separate emotional experience from physical reality. It screams in the body messages that we were never allowed to speak in words.

Lifestyle choices matters so profoundly for people with trauma-linked pain. Not in a superficial “self-care” way, but in a nervous-system way. A body shaped by early adversity needs cues of safety. Predictability. Gentleness. Regulation. It needs to know it is no longer in danger. This is something I learned personally after more than a decade of living in chronic pain with no meaningful relief from conventional medicine. I did everything I was told. I waited. I complied. I hoped. And nothing changed. It wasn’t until I began shifting how I lived that my body began to respond with lasting pain relief. Removing alcohol. Walking daily. Practicing gentle yoga. Learning mindfulness. Changing the way I spoke to myself. Limiting harmful media. Nourishing my body with naturally based foods. Leaving relationships and environments that kept my nervous system in survival. None of this was easy and healing like this can't be rushed.

Lifestyle changes are the most impactful ways to create lasting change but research does indicate that many people with fibromyalgia are deficient in magnesium, vitamin D, and B vitamins, all of which are essential for muscle relaxation, nerve function, and energy production. No supplement can replace safety. No herb can override an unsafe nervous system. And no protocol can heal a body that is still in toxic, abusive, or harmful environments and relationships.

This is why trauma work, emotional honesty, and nervous system regulation are not optional for people seeking to live with less pain living with fibromyalgia and chronic pain. They are foundational. Healing is not about forcing the body to behave. It is about creating the conditions where the body no longer has to protect.

For many, the shift begins not with a pill, but with a curious mind:

• Who invalidated my feelings growing up?

• What happened when I reported abuse or feeling unsafe as a child?

• How was I silences and minimized?

• Where did I learn to ignore my own needs to support emotionally immature parents, or unstable and unsafe adults around me?

• How did I adapt to be strong in dangerous situations?

• How was I forced to stay in environments that were harmful?

When those questions are met with compassion instead of judgment, something changes. The body begins to trust. The guard begins to lower. The pain, often, begins to change.

Fibromyalgia is not imaginary. Chronic pain is not weakness. And your body is not betraying you. It is communicating. It always has been.

And when you finally learn its language, healing becomes not just possible — but coherent.

Each of our retreat participants goes through a protocol evaluating lifestyle habits and committing to making changes between 1-3 months before their retreat experience. During our retreats we expand upon this by introducing a range of embodied practices like hot/cold contrast therapies, nature immersion, therapeutic art play, eating nourishing non-processed meals, guided healing workshops, sunrises, sunsets, and a profound level of safety.

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