How Counterstrain Changed My Life
The physical medicine modality that relieved my chronic pain, restored my function and mobility, and gave me a new lease on my health and life.
By Theora Moench, Executive Director
One summer, about 10 years ago, I was helping my uncle extract a rotting float from a lake on his property. It had come dislodged from its moorings during a winter storm the year prior and quietly traveled back and forth from one end of the lake to the other as the breeze willed it.
It was an uncharacteristically cool, August afternoon when I swam into the murky water to collect the wayward dock made out of old scrap wood and styrofoam chunks foraged from the beach. I remember smiling at the exoskeletons of dragonflies that seemed to have chosen it as a safe haven for molting. As I was dragging it towards the shore behind me, I kicked under water and felt my shin come into contact with something sharp.
It was a proper “oh s***!!” moment. My heart dropped, like an elevator in free fall.
Have you ever had one of those moments? Where time slows and you don’t know exactly what’s happened but you know it’s going to turn out really bad?
My leg throbbing with an awful stabbing sensation, I managed to pull the raft to the bank and climb out. When I looked down I saw two, bloody holes in my shin where the rusty nails had punctured my skin and driven between the bones. I looked out at the brown, bacteria-filled pond, and a mounting sense of dread took hold in my chest.
That day, I struggled to put weight on my leg. That night I lost all feeling in my foot. I ended up in urgent care, where they started me on aggressive antibiotics to address the infection that had caused the swelling. Fortunately, it hadn’t reached the bones. Unfortunately, it put a stop to my running and marathon training for good.
Over the next year, my leg collapsed under me anywhere from 5–9 times a day. And up to twelve times or more the days after I worked out.
I had been an athlete in high school and college, and until then had really trusted the strength and resiliency of my body. Even a head and multiple back injuries hadn’t slowed me down much. But this leg injury impacted my mobility and quietly allowed an insidious fear to take root in my relationship with my body. And since it was worse after I exercised, I began to feel not just hesitant but hopeless when I thought about training.
If you’ve ever had movement stolen from your life, you know the impact it has on your health — mental and physical. You lose access to your healthy ways of blowing off steam. The negative stuff starts to build up because it has nowhere to go. You begin to feel less connected and confident in your body because you are no longer experiencing it as strong and capable. You begin to feel less connected and confident in the world around you because your sense of self is frayed inside. The scale of your life shrinks, which impacts your attitude, your relationship with your family and loved ones, and it diminishes your outlook on life.
When your future looks smaller because of never ending pain or reduced agency, it turns into an insidious kind of despair. In almost all the countable ways.
My dad tried to get me to see Tim Hodges, a Counterstrain practitioner who had just opened up a clinic in Portland, Oregon but I scoffed, telling him I didn’t think “his massage guy” was going to be able to help. It’s humbling to reflect on those moments when you were young and you were so confident that you know better than a parent.
My dad had to trick me into going.
About 6 months after injuring my leg my father had an appointment and asked me to give him a ride. Afterwards he’d treat me to lunch, he said.
When we got there, he introduced me to Tim and said, “Get on the table” with a grin and a tone of command that brooked no argument. So I did, internally rolling my eyes so hard that I put my 14-year-old self to shame.
Tim worked on my leg, explaining to me that the lymph nodes behind my knee had probably swollen and not drained properly while trying to fight off the infection from the puncture wounds. They were so large and overloaded that they had been pushing against and putting pressure on the nerve and muscular system of my leg. This caused one of the larger muscles in my upper leg to disengage and that’s why my leg was collapsing underneath me.
(At least this is the gist of what I remember him saying. I’m sure the explanation was a bit more precise but what mattered at the time was that he was able to explain it in a way that made sense to me.)
None of the medical providers I had consulted with previously could explain what was happening with my leg. None of the strength exercises I had been doing had made a difference. The only thing that worked was doing less, and that was corroding my spirit.
At just 25 years old I thought I was done.
Done with athleticism.
Done with exercise.
Done with movement.
And I was deeply concerned about the toll this was going to take on my physical (and mental) well being in the decades to come.
As Tim worked on me, I FELT the lymph nodes draining in my leg. Like a rush of cool water flowing inside the back of my leg. I looked up at him wide-eyed and with astonishment asked “What the?!”.
As my dad and I drove home, he asked me if I was going to schedule more sessions when I got back to Portland.
I told him I couldn’t afford to keep going because I was between jobs and it wasn’t covered by my insurance.
My dad looked at me and said, “How can you afford not to? How can you afford not to run ever again? How can you afford to be in pain every day?”
I didn’t have a smart-ass retort to that.
Touché Papa Moench. Touché.
I ended up going to 6 more sessions and my leg hasn’t collapsed since. Counterstrain also went on to alleviate the chronic pain I had experienced in my lower back for over a decade from a back injury I’d gotten riding (and falling off of) steers in rodeos in Idaho. I was also able to address a severe head injury I’d sustained when I was 11 and flew over the handlebars of my bike landng head first and sustaining a scary concussion that wiped 48 hours of memory from my hard drive.
I’ve enjoyed countless Counterstrain sessions at this point. It is my go-to bodywork because it delivers results every time.
As it addressed more and more issues that I thought I would have to live with for the long term, my physical wellness improved in unanticipated ways.
I stopped experiencing chronic pain. My leg never collapsed again. The throbbing pain in my legs that kept me up at night faded away. I stopped throwing out my back multiple times a year, I stopped re-injuring my neck, and I saw an incredible improvement in my digestion.
On the afternoon of my 5th or 6th appointment, I grilled Tim for almost 2 hours about how he was going to scale access to this crazy-effective, therapeutic physical medicine. That night I emailed and asked him to hire me as his office manager, and he did.
I oversaw the administration of his clinic for a couple years and then became the Program Coordinator of the Counterstrain Academy when it launched.
That was 2013. Now I’m back in the fold, working with the Bridge Back Project as their Executive Director, and I couldn’t be more excited.
- The research they are pioneering is insanely interesting to the science nerd in me.
- Their commitment to subsidizing tuition costs for underrepresented practitioners so that a more diverse generation of providers can emerge bring needed care to underserved communities impacted by trauma is compelling to both my imagination and heart.
- And the ambition of their bold goals and dedication to scaling access to treatment tickles my entrepreneurial spirit. I love a bold, audacious vision. It gets my blood flowing.
From Counterstrain patient, to office manager, to program coordinator, to executive director of the only Counterstrain non-profit on the planet — from intense skeptic to insistent enthusiast — I’m on my hero’s journey.
Counterstrain changed my life and supports me time and time again each time my body sustains a new injury or illness.
I am a firm believer that it is the next frontier of physical — and mental — wellness and health and I hope my story inspires you to give it a try.
Maybe go see “a massage guy”. Who knows what improvements await?
To learn more about our programs or get involved, visit our website.
