Three Years of Back Pain Turned Out to Be My Body Carrying Grief

The back pain started when I was 25, about four months after my long-term relationship ended, and I did not connect these two facts for nearly three years.

The pain was real - not psychosomatic in the dismissive sense of imagined, but genuinely physically present, a persistent ache in my lower back and across my shoulders that varied in intensity but never fully resolved.

I am a physiotherapist by training and I live in Paris, a city with no shortage of excellent specialists, and I had the advantage of access and professional knowledge that most people in the same situation would not. I saw an osteopath, two physiotherapy colleagues, a sports medicine doctor, and eventually a rheumatologist.

I had imaging done. I had treatment plans and exercises and ergonomic adjustments and periods of improvement followed by returns to baseline. Nothing held. By 28 I had accepted, with the weary pragmatism of someone who has tried everything reasonable, that I had a back problem I was managing rather than resolving.

The shift came through an unlikely intersection. I attended a continuing education workshop on somatic approaches to pain - a subject I had previously treated with the mild scepticism of someone with a biomedical training - and the presenter, a researcher from Lyon who had spent twenty years studying the relationship between unprocessed emotional experience and chronic musculoskeletal pain, described a pattern that I found uncomfortably specific.

The persistent mid-back tension combined with shoulder carrying that did not respond to structural intervention and that had onset following a significant relational loss was, she described, one of the most consistently documented presentations of what the field calls somatised grief.

I went to see a psychotherapist the following week for the first time since my relationship had ended three years earlier and discovered, in the first session, that I had not finished grieving that relationship in any meaningful sense.

I had managed the acute phase and returned to functioning and told myself I was over it, which is a completely different thing from having processed it. The therapy was not comfortable. The physical symptoms began improving within six weeks in a way that three years of physical intervention had not produced.

Within four months they had largely resolved. I am a different kind of physiotherapist now - one who asks different questions earlier and who is considerably less sceptical about what the body carries when the mind decides it is time to move on.