11/21/2025
Every injury holds two realities.
There’s the objective body—the one we can test, scan, measure.
And there’s the lived body—the one that feels, fears, and makes sense of what’s happening.
Pain lives at the meeting point of those two.
To truly understand an injury, we have to understand the story surrounding it—how the person’s body and meaning-making intertwine.
That’s where embodiment comes in.
Through the lens of the Common Sense Wellness framework, each client’s story unfolds through five dimensions:
Identity (What is it?): How they define the injury or pain—what they believe is happening in their body.
Cause (What led to it?): What they think triggered it—an accident, overuse, stress, imbalance, or “just bad luck.”
Consequences (What does it mean for them?): How pain reshapes their daily life—the activities paused, the roles challenged, the parts of self that feel lost.
Timeline (How long will this last?): Whether they see it as temporary, chronic, or part of a longer story of struggle.
Agency (What can I do about it?): Their sense of control—whether they feel capable of influencing their recovery or helpless within it.
When we listen for these layers, we begin to treat more than a diagnosis.
We treat the person living inside it.
Because healing isn’t just about resolving pain—
it’s about restoring coherence between what’s happening in the body,
and what it means to the person living in it.
That’s the art of understanding a client’s story:
seeing pain not just as a symptom, but as a language the whole self is speaking.
