Episode 36: What they don’t teach you about holding space for pain
Today’s conversation is a little different.
Dr Thea and Vera physiotherapist Paula Hindle take you inside the sauna at the end of a long clinic day – a place where their most honest reflections tend to unfold.
This episode opens a deeper look at what it really means to hold space for suffering in women’s health. Not with a rush to fix, but from a grounded, embodied place where practitioners learn to regulate their own nervous systems while sitting alongside their patients’ pain.
If you’re a practitioner who feels called toward a more heart-centred, embodied, nervous-system-led approach to pelvic pain, this episode is for you.
🎙️ Dr Thea and Paula talk about:
🌿 The art of sitting with discomfort – what happens in us as clinicians when we witness pain without immediately jumping to solutions.
🌿 A powerful patient story – a young woman whose pelvic pain began after sexual assault, and how her healing unfolded when the focus shifted from pathology to nervous system understanding.
🌿 Attunement in practice – how Paula recognised dysregulation the moment the patient walked in, and why she abandoned the “plan” to create space for grief, safety and connection.
🌿 Letting the patient guide the process – the difference between algorithmic care and compassionate, responsive care in pelvic pain.
🌿 Why clinicians must be regulated first – the capacity to hold another’s story is directly linked to the state of our own nervous systems.
The truth is, real healing often begins long before hands-on treatment.
It begins in the pause – the moment we sit with discomfort, listen deeply, and allow a patient’s story to unfold without rushing toward certainty or control.
When practitioners regulate themselves, the whole room changes.
And the patient’s own wisdom becomes a central part of the therapeutic process.
For practitioners: Transformational Medicine – Alchemising Pain into Power
If today’s conversation resonates, you may be feeling the same shift we’re seeing across women’s health – a desire for more embodied, integrative, nervous-system-based care.
In April 2026, Dr Peta Wright, Dr Thea Bowler and Paula Hindle will be hosting a 4-day Immersive Retreat and Practitioner Program designed to help clinicians:
Understand their own nervous system
Experience regulation and embodiment tools firsthand
Learn how to attune to complexity, trauma, and pain in the clinical room
Develop a more grounded, compassionate and effective approach to pelvic pain
You can find all the details here: https://www.verawellness.com.au/practitioner-program-intensive.
Stay connected – the conversation doesn’t end here.
If this episode brought up reflections, questions or stories of your own experience, the Women of the Well team would love to hear from you.
Share your thoughts or topic requests for future episodes via email to marketing@verawellness.com.au.
Episode transcript
E36: Holding space for suffering: What they don’t teach in medical school
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. It's Dr. Thea here. Today's episode is a little different because Vera physiotherapist, Paula Hindle, and I are coming to you straight from the sauna, which is where some of our most honest conversations happen at the end of a long clinic day. We really wanted to bring you into this space with us because we think it's so important for you to see the other side of being a practitioner, the part that isn't in the textbooks.
These are the moments when we're sitting with discomfort, our own and our patients. Truly listening to what important messages our bodies might be telling us. While learning to stay regulated, present, and deeply human in the room. In this sauna Chat, you'll hear us reflect on what it truly means to hold space for suffering without rushing into fix it, and why that's often where the most profound shifts begin.
If you're a practitioner listening to this, and it resonates with you, if you're craving a more embodied, heart-centered, nervous system focused approach to pelvic pain and women's health, Paula, Peta and I are running something really special in 2026. [00:01:00] It's our new practitioner program and immersive retreat Transformational Medicine, which is designed to help clinicians experience for themselves nervous system regulation and embodiment tools so they can bring them into their work with their patients.
You can find all the details via the link in the show notes, but for now, come and join us in the sauna and let's get into the conversation. ––
Welcome to Women of the Well. This is a podcast to help you heal, learn, and feel empowered to take back your body and your healthcare. Hosted by Gynecologists, Dr. Peta Wright, Dr. Thea Bowler, and holistic counselor, Sam Lindsay German. This is for women who want to remember the magic, beauty, and power in their bodies to live a healthy life that's true to themselves.
This podcast is for information and educational purposes only, and is not intended as a substitute for medical advice. Diagnosis or treatment. Before we start today's episode, we would like to acknowledge and show our deep respect to the j Barra [00:02:00] people as the traditional custodians of the beautiful land we are recording this on.
We pay respect to their elders past, present, and across time, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. Now it's time to replenish yourself by the well.
–– Hey everyone, it's Paula and Thea here live from the sauna and we were just gonna have a little bit of a chat 'cause this is where we sit and debrief. That's right. At the end of the day, we love to come and sit in the sauna and just unpack the things that we've dealt with during the day.
Yeah. And also it's because we are using this as a way to regulate ourselves, right? Mm-hmm. Which is kind of what we wanted to talk about today. Absolutely. One of the themes that we thought we wanted to talk about, um, after seeing a few of our shared patients together is, I guess like the importance of being able to sit with [00:03:00] discomfort.
I think as practitioners we are really hearing about and experiencing , our own patients' suffering. And I think that in Western medicine there is always a very strong desire to jump in and fix and take away the suffering and, um, and make it all better. Or to feel a strong sense of discomfort when someone is, um, when someone is explaining their suffering to you.
And I think really there is so much gold in being able to sit with our patient's suffering without trying to fix it, without trying to take it away because. The suffering, whether it's, you know, emotional suffering or physical [00:04:00] suffering, there is often so much to be learned. And I think that is actually above and beyond any of the medical or physical interventions we can do.
Like that is actually where real transformation happens. But it's not easy. It's not easy to sit with discomfort. Yeah, it's not easy and we're not taught that. And even in friendship relationships it's always back and forth. It's very rare that you would have a friend that just completely sits and listens to you for an hour.
So it's not something that we're taught to do. So that's definitely something we practice ourselves. Mm-hmm. Um, so that we can pass that on and. Gift that to our patients as part of their therapy. So we've got one patient in mine that we've been chatting about today and this week. Who came to see Thea, first of all, right?
Yeah. She [00:05:00] was a lovely lady who, um, came to see me a while ago, um, on her background of having, I guess, a family where she perhaps wasn't able to feel her feelings very much growing up. Had been a young woman who actually really loved her periods, like she didn't have any troubles with her periods.
She really enjoyed them. She didn't have pain or anything, um, but had been referred in to see me with painful periods and pelvic pain and. Once we really started talking about, I guess, the timeline of her symptoms and when her pain actually began, um, it became really apparent that it all stemmed from a sexual assault that she had experienced.
Really, it was after that time that she started to have all of these troubles with pain. And not only had she experienced the assault, but she was also then in the process of going through the court case, which as we know, can be often [00:06:00] more traumatizing than the actual assault itself. Um, and so with her, we were, I was able to really talk to her about the fact that, you know, her periods hadn't been problematic for her earlier in life, even two years ago. And that she'd felt really connected to her cycle and there had been this awful thing happened that had interrupted that. And so then, rather than, I suppose, looking at, um, medical therapies and interventions to do, say surgery or, um, to use hormones to switch off her cycle, which previously had been a source of real power for her. We instead really focused on the changes that occur in the nervous system and in our muscles and in those protective responses that, um, and survival responses that our body, um, very wisely exhibits when we experience something traumatic and how [00:07:00] those things can actually lead to amplification of pain and worsening of, um, period symptoms.
And so then she was starting to kind of understand that. But still having, you know, relatively frequent, quite severe pain flares with her periods. And so then she went to see Paula, our wonderful physio. Yeah. And it's so topical that we're talking about discomfort, because you were a, remember Thea when she first came, you happened to be there as she arrived, and she'd also arrived at a time where she'd had another traumatic experience of losing a very close pet of hers.
So my very first introduction to her was literally walking into the clinic, running into the in tears because she'd lost a pet. So of course, as a healthcare provider, you're sort of thinking. I don't even know how I'm gonna start this consultation. I don't know this person. There's already grief, there's already suffering [00:08:00] without even getting to what I already knew from Thea's handover was more trauma. So it just really highlights how important is it is to be able to notice that discomfort in myself of, whew. Where are we gonna start with this? Like I'm going to have to start with. Regulating her so that we can even start the process of education. Mm-hmm. Because we can't teach when someone's in a dysregulated nervous system state as we know.
And then to be able to hold space for what ended up being her, having the space to really talk about the event that led to the trauma, the court case, and even I remember a moment of saying to her. We have time. I have time, and I even actually just flipped my shoes off and just sat back in my chair, turned completely towards her, and you could see just simply from that, she exhaled and she got [00:09:00] comfortable as well because she realized I was there for her.
I was there to just sit. I was gonna listen to it all, catch it, and then start to see what unfolds in the session. And then be able to attune to her to know what the next step was. Whereas so often when we're taught, you know, how do we deal with patients in pain or pelvic pain, there's kind of a, a flow chart of what we might be doing, and we even have ideas of what we're going to do with a patient before they walk in, but it just doesn't work in these situations.
We have to wait and attune to the person in front of us and really allow them to guide us through. What their recovery journey is going to look like. And that has definitely been how it has unfolded since we've been seeing her. Yeah. And I think, you know, 'cause you are so amazing, Paula, at really using a whole variety of, I guess, [00:10:00] physical strategies and tools to help regulate the nervous system.
But like you say, it's almost something that you are uncovering together about what the next right step is. And I think if we approach our consultations in a more algorithmic way Mm. Um, we're often sort of missing those opportunities for the patient to really be the guide. Yes. Um, and I think that's the most important thing.
And again, coming back to that, sitting with the discomfort, like the, the patient can't be the guide if we aren't equipped enough to. Almost sit with curiosity Yes. In the space with them. Yes. You know, I think it's that curiosity about like, well, what does this mean for you? What do you think your body is saying to you?
What do you think these messages might mean? Mm-hmm. Um, where we can start to really help the patient understand the links between, um, you know, what [00:11:00] they have been experiencing emotionally or environmentally and with their pain. And I think that. To go one step further, we can't help patients to do that if we can't do it with ourselves.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we have an amazing practitioner immersive course coming up in April of next year called Alchemizing Pain to Power Transformative Medicine. And a big part of that is we want to offer. So many different tools to you as practitioners, first of all, so that you can experience them to give you a really big, um, tool case of things that you can then offer to patients.
But as Thea said, we can't offer these. Simple tools of nervous system regulation and self-exploration if we haven't experienced it ourselves, because we need to know what it feels like and where these tools deliver us to be able to know [00:12:00] when to choose the tools and how to deliver them to our patients.
And they're such transformative tools that not only. Heal them from pain, but open themselves up to an incredible life. Mm-hmm. And that's what we want for our patients. Totally. Well, I think once we, once a person understands their nervous system, both a clinician or a patient, um, you understand yourself so much more.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And you have that insight into. How you are responding in certain situations. You can feel things in your body that tell you that you might be moving into a dysregulated state. Yeah. You can recognize that. You can act on it. Yeah. Um, and I think really it starts with us, like as clinicians, we can't allow, have the space to allow our patients to be the guide in their own healing journey until we are able to recognize and work with the state of our own nervous system. And I think so many of us are coming from a dysregulated place. You know, [00:13:00] like so many of us are so busy, so burnt out. You know, that sense of like, oh, I can't almost, you feel like you can't hold another person's story. Yeah. And you can see then that if you are, yeah.
Working with a patient in that state there, there's not gonna be the capacity to have that curiosity and to allow the consultation to unfold in in a more gentle way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So send us a comment to let us know if this is landing for you, if this resonates. Yes. Or if it's something you'd like to learn more about it.
Totally. I think really the course is going to be so amazing because it's kind of in two halves. The first half is all about you as the clinician and really doing that in depth exploration of yourself and your own stories and your own nervous system, and. Feeling and experiencing all of these different nervous system regulation tools that Paula, as our beautiful yogi physio [00:14:00] will teach us.
And then the second half is about, you know, really learning to implement all of these things for our patients. Because I think the other thing is, again, like. Being able to walk the talk is, it's all well and good to say to people, you know, you should do some meditation, you should do some yoga. You should, you know, do some breathing or whatever.
But until you've actually really, really felt and experienced that in your own system and felt the incredible shifts that can happen when we, implement all of those kind of body mind strategies. You can't be specific with your patients and , and you can't tailor things to yes, to what's gonna be right for your patients.
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
— Thank you for joining us for this episode of Women of the Well. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe or follow the podcast and leave a glowing review so more women like you can find us and get access to empowering and holistic wellness information. If you'd like to continue the conversation or connect with our online community, [00:15:00] visit@verawellness.com au on Instagram.
For more resources and information, head to our website, verawellness.com.au.
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DISCLAIMER:
This podcast is for information and educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
