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Neuroplastic Pain and the Body's Safety System: How SMR Brings Old Injuries Back Online

  • colinliggett
  • 3 minutes ago
  • 6 min read

If you've ever wondered why a knee you hurt years ago still aches, why a surgical scar that healed cleanly still feels "off," or why pain keeps moving around and outlasting every scan that says you're fine, then this post is for you. The answer often comes down to a single question your nervous system never stops asking: am I safe?


In a previous post I wrote about neuroplastic pain and Dr. Howard Schubiner's Unlearn Your Pain model, the idea that much chronic pain is a learned circuit in the brain rather than a sign of ongoing tissue damage. That work focuses mostly on the nervous system assessing memory for prior threats. Here I want to talk about the other half of the safety equation, the part I work on every day in clinic: the motor-control compensations that old injuries and surgeries leave behind, and why resolving them is one of the most direct ways to tell the brain it's safe again.


Key Points:


  1. Neuroplastic pain is produced by the brain as a danger signal, not a damage meter, and the brain decides "danger" partly by reading the body itself.


  1. Old injuries and surgeries install protective motor patterns (guarding, muscle inhibition, compensation) that are useful while you heal but often never switch off.


  1. A body that is still guarding and compensating quietly signals "we're not safe yet," which helps keep the brain's pain alarm switched on.


  1. This is a bottom-up driver of neuroplastic pain, and it's exactly what SMR is built to find and resolve.


  1. By restoring normal motor function, SMR removes a piece of the brain's "proof of danger," helping the whole system stand down and stop outputting pain signals.




A quick recap: what is neuroplastic pain?


Pain is fundamentally an alarm. Its job is to protect you, not to report tissue damage. The brain is constantly scanning, through your senses, your memories, your emotions, and the state of your body, asking whether you're under threat. When it concludes you are, it can sound the alarm, and you feel that alarm as pain.


The trouble is that this alarm can get learned in. After an injury, an illness, a surgery, or a stretch of high stress, the brain can build a pain circuit and then keep running it as a habit, long after the original cause is gone. That's why the pain is genuinely real, yet your imaging looks normal for your age. The good news baked into this is that anything learned can be unlearned, because the same neuroplasticity that wired the pain in can wire it back out.


Most neuroplastic pain programs approach this from the top down, through knowledge, emotional processing, and meditation. That's all very valuable work, but it can be assisted with bottom up learning.



Your brain reads your body for safety


Your nervous system doesn't just review your memories for threats. It is flooded, every second, with information from the body: where your joints are, how your muscles are firing, how evenly you're loading, whether anything feels braced or unstable. This stream of proprioceptive and internal data is one of the main ways the brain answers its "am I safe?" question.


Here's the key insight: the brain treats your movement patterns as evidence. A body that moves freely, fires cleanly, and loads evenly sends a steady "all clear." A body that is still guarding, compensating, and leaving certain muscles switched off sends the opposite message: something is still wrong here. And a brain that's receiving "something is still wrong" is a brain that keeps the danger alarm, the pain itself, running.



Where do these "safety compensations" come from?


They come from doing exactly what your brain is supposed to do. Picture falling off your bike and landing hard on the side of your hip. For the next few weeks your brain reorganizes your movement so you can still get around without damaging the injured tissue further. It inhibits some muscles, recruits others, and you limp along. That compensation is intelligent. It's protective. It's safety in action.


The problem is what happens next. Four weeks later the tissue has healed, but the protective software doesn't always switch off. The brain can keep firing the wrong muscles, keep guarding an area that's no longer injured, and keep treating the site as fragile. Now you've got a perfectly healed body running outdated protective code. As I described in Feeling Safe? Chronic Pain, Athletic Performance & Safety, these once-helpful responses become maladaptive: they linger, limit movement, create imbalance, and keep you stuck in a loop.


Common ways this shows up:


  • A knee injury from years ago still changes how your hip fires when you run.

  • A muscle that tests weak no matter how much you strengthen it, because it isn't actually weak; it just isn't getting the signal to fire.

  • Pain that shows up somewhere other than the original injury, because the compensation overloaded a neighbouring area.



Why surgery is a special case

Surgery saves lives and repairs structure, but it is also, from your nervous system's point of view, a significant controlled trauma. The brain often flags the surgical site as unsafe and keeps treating it that way long after the incision has healed and the scans look clean.


A scar can become a source of faulty sensory input, feeding the brain distorted information about that region. Muscles around the site can stay "shut down." Compensation patterns can spread to other parts of the body entirely: the opposite hip, the spine, the breath. In my post-surgery work, it's common to find muscles testing weak or inhibited not just at the surgical site but well away from it. The structure healed; the safety software never updated. That stuck "this area is dangerous" signal is precisely the kind of bottom-up input that can sustain neuroplastic pain.



How SMR brings these compensations back to normal, and why that means safety


This is the heart of what I do. SensoriMotor Repatterning works on the bottom-up side of the safety equation. Where a program like Unlearn Your Pain helps the brain feel safe through thoughts and emotions, SMR helps the brain feel safe through movement and motor control.


Using manual muscle testing, a neuro-functional assessment, and acupoint stimulation via Somato–Autonomic Reflexes, I locate the specific muscles and patterns where your nervous system is still behaving as though the body is under threat: the inhibited muscles, the guarding, the leftover compensations from old injuries and surgeries. Then I provide the corrective input that lets the brain update its map of the body, so it recognizes that the threat is gone, the tissue is healed, and normal firing is safe again.


When that happens, two things follow. First, the mechanical problem improves. The right muscles fire, loading evens out, movement gets more efficient, and the local pain a compensation was causing tends to ease. Second, and just as importantly, you've changed the message the body is sending upstream. Instead of streaming "something's still wrong" to the brain, the body starts streaming "all clear." For a nervous system caught in a neuroplastic pain loop, that shift from threat to safety is exactly the input that helps the whole alarm system stand down.


In short: SMR doesn't chase the pain. It removes one of the reasons the brain still thinks it needs to produce it.



Top-down and bottom-up, working together


I don't see these as competing approaches. They're two hands doing the same job. The emotional and cognitive work (Schubiner's program, counselling, meditation) calms the danger alarm from above. SMR calms it from below by clearing the physical evidence of threat the brain keeps referencing. For a lot of people, addressing only one half explains why they've felt "almost better" for years without ever closing the gap. Many people I meet have never addressed either half. For some, using SMR can be enough to resolve pain, for others the two need to be combined.


A note on my role


I want to be clear about what SMR is and isn't. It is not psychotherapy, and I don't treat trauma or stress directly. What I do is find and resolve the faulty, protective motor-control patterns your nervous system is holding onto, the bottom-up software side of the problem. For the emotional side, I'm a big believer in pairing SMR with the right support: Unlearn Your Pain is an excellent self-guided tool, and I keep a list of skilled Registered Clinical Counsellors and psychologists I'm glad to recommend.


Nobody chooses chronic pain. But when much of it is your nervous system running outdated safety code, a lot of it can be re-coded. Helping your brain discover that your body is safe again, through movement it can finally trust, is what this work is all about.


Curious whether old injuries or a past surgery could still be driving your pain? Read some client success stories, visit VanSMR.ca, or book a session here.


Resources / References


Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Howard Schubiner https://unlearnyourpain.com/unlearn-your-pain-book/


The Mind-Body Connection in Chronic Pain (my overview of the neuroplastic pain model) https://www.vansmr.ca/post/the-mind-body-connection-to-chronic-pain-and-other-physical-symptoms


Feeling Safe? Chronic Pain, Athletic Performance & Safety  https://www.vansmr.ca/post/feeling-safe-chronic-pain-athletic-performance-safety-1


Beyond the Scar: How SMR Therapy Supports Recovery After Surgery  https://www.vansmr.ca/post/beyond-the-scar-how-smr-therapy-supports-recovery-after-surgery



 
 
 

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